Joyful Strains

For several weeks now, The Readers have been preparing to say farewell to Jason The Ridiculously Awesome Drum Major as Jason The Ridiculously Awesome Drum Major.  The annual position tryouts are May 8 on the campus of The Ohio State University, marking an end to a two-year term and a lifetime journey. 

Jason will move on.  I mean this in the most literal possible sense:  He has been accepted to an OSU study abroad program in Sydney, and will spend the summer being Ridiculously Awesome in another hemisphere entirely.  He is not packing his baton.  When the time comes, he will take it up once more as an alumni.

Tomorrow, and the next era of drum majoring of TBDBITL, will belong to the winner.  But you've asked for one last crack at Showing The Love, so for today, here's a selection of emails and posts gathered from... wherever it is you people gather when you're not here, I don't want to know.  Thanks to GoBucks!, LocalArtist, buckette, and the ever-lurking but ever-generous Audette The Reader for compiling these.

"I would consider myself extremely blessed if my own son turned out like Jason Stuckert.  I look up to him and I'm twice his age!"

-Austin's Dad

"I remember very well endlessly refreshing Blonde Champagne a year ago waiting to hear if we would have Our Jason with us for another year.  I never rooted so much for someone I'd never met in an event I never even knew existed until a few months before.  When Mary Beth finally updated with the good news, my whole family started screaming.  We knew it would be a lot of fun to follow Jason and TBDBITL for the season and it was."

-Rosslyn

"I've lived in central OH my whole life but have never been to a Skull Session before a football game, I just didn't want to deal with the traffic etc.  But then when Mary Beth started writing about Jason and this band I just had to go see this guy.  I'm so glad I did.  I took my kids.  We were all amazed.  He is a very special talent and I see what she sees."

-Navon The Reader

"I've been reading Mary Beth Ellis for a very long time.  The second I she began to write about this new topic of hers ("The Drum Major has a name, by the way.  It's Jason.")  it was clear that something truly special was going on.  He has led my very favorite author to new ground and for that I will always be grateful.  Two greats."

-mahalo

"Honestly I never cared about Ohio State all that much, but Jason Stuckert made me care.  His passion and creative joy matches that of our Fair Webmistress and from now on whenever I see that big 'O' logo or hear an Ohio State score on ESPN, I willl think fondly of him and TBDBITL."

-Orion

"April 1 will never be the same for me..."

-GottaZenyatta

"Probably my favorite mighty deed of Our Jason's is strutting to dot the i during Script Ohio on ice.  That's when I knew we we dealing with no mere mortal."

-Viola The Reader

-"I, for one, will deeply miss Blonde Champagne's new and forever twirling overlord."

-Haveros

"Mary Beth didn't go looking for Jason but she found him anyway.  We're all the better for it.  His hard work is a stellar inspiration and actually makes me think that, between him and MB, their generation isn't going to lead America straight down the craphole.  That's pretty much the best compliment I can give to two people I haven't met but think are terrific anyway."

-DaveyFromTexas

"His mama, his band, his University, his state, and Blonde Champagne Nation should be very, very proud of what The Formerly Young One has done.  I can't imagine this joint without him now."

-IoTheReader

"I really can't say how much it meant to The Readers that Jason stopped in every now and then to say hi.  That meant a great deal to us and it was always so exciting that he took time out of his busy life to do that.  I hope he keeps stopping in.  No matter who holds the position next Jason Stuckert will always be our Drum Major."

-langrish

"Like Mary Beth says, this is going to be a book about a marching band which really isn't a book about a marching band.  In the same way Our Jason is so much more than the DM to us.  He and the whole DM family mean a lot to all of us, and I'm honestly a little teary over knowing his time as the man out front is over."

-FlatOut

"The real-life person of Jason Stuckert and all the other people we've come to know and love here on Blonde Champagne has made me think twice before stereotyping or hating on a particular "sports enemy."  That's a lesson I can apply to other parts of life."   

-BelleNation

"What an honor it has been to have that man wearing the emblem of my alma mater that I love so much.  Thank you for representing us all so selflessly and well, Jason!"

-CarmenOhio

#TheOhioStateDrumMajorSTILLMakesMeFeelOld

-ParrotheadPete

This post is sponsored by advancing:

Four Ladies

There are two ships on my mind.  One is famous for being beneath the sea.  The other got as far away from it as human beings possibly can these days.

The retirement of Discovery and the centennial anniversary of the loss of Titanic were borne to me on images from NASA.com and the National Geographic Channel.  There was a bright blue sky and rusted, rotting pieces.  The sight of Discovery was bittersweet:  This was the workhorse of the fleet, the dependable eldest sister who ascended to the position of matriarch once her elder sisters—first Challenger, then Columbia—fell to Earth.  In both cases, when NASA returned to flight, it was Discovery who was first to the launchpad.

What delighted me about the images of Discovery soaring over Washington Monument and White House were the realization that NASA hadn’t done one damn thing to clean her up.  The silica tiles were scorched, the nose was dinged, the coated underbelly was streaked in the direction of flight.  F-you, says Discovery, I am a working woman and I will not alter myself for my closeup. 

Most people are used to seeing the orbiters in faraway shots on the launchpad, the cameras maintaining a respectful distance.  They seem immaculate.  They are not.  The tiles get gouged and the outer skin is worn.  They are scars, hard-earned.  And the parts of the ship that look smooth—these are covered with ridged silica blankets which  protect the upper body from the heat of re-entry.  The texture is what makes these orbiters real.  Like most things in life, what you think will be pristine and shining are, upon closer inspection, battered and worn and tired.  And… real.

Meanwhile, two and a half miles beneath the same Atlantic by which Discovery used to rest, there sits Titanic, which left its port gleaming and smooth and now, to us, unreal.  It has passed out of living memory.  All we know of its existence are the blueprints, the menus at auction, and grainy black and white pictures.  Her remains are dull, crumbling.  The only color available to Titanic are the occasional flashes of paint still clinging to the keel and the waving sea fluff which has attached to her remains, its bright tendrils waving like the feathers on the hats of the ladies who once strode upon her deck.   

I was a very little girl when the wreck of Titanic was found, just months before Challenger was lost a few latitudes to the south.  I remember the loss of one ship, but not the discovery of the other.  I do recall sitting on the floor, poring over the first images of the Titanic when they were published in National Geographic—murky and fuzzed, haunting and most certainly not high-def.  There were tiny graphical maps and the eerie dotted outline of a mystery ship which may have passed between Titanic and Californian, one which could have offered refuge but sailed silently on. 

Challenger, well... there was no blurring there.  And no mystery.  That was full color and real time.  There was no question of where it was and what went wrong.  We knew.  We didn’t learn.

But Challenger, along with Columbia, had something Titanic did not, which I suppose is part of what fascinates us about her.  Although lost on liftoff, she’d had her mission.  That was what Nick The NASA Poobah said about Columbia as I wept against him when we stood on the runway where she was to have returned:  She had her mission. 

They say the thrusters on Columbia burst wildly in her final moments, desperately attempting to correct the gyrations of a ship disintegrating in the awful burning atmosphere.  When Challenger broke apart, the solid rocket boosters sailed on, without ship, without direction.  And I am told that on Titanic, too, the engineers stayed below deck, the icy water creeping up their legs and chests, fighting the gravitational inclinations of the ship to keep it afloat as long as possible so that the passengers might have a chance to reach the lifeboats which were lowered, half-empty, into the icy sea. They fought, all of them, and Discovery honored the fighting of her sisters by leaving and returning beautifully, messily whole.

That’s what made them human, the products of humans; that’s what made them real.  None of these ships will ever rise into their natural elements ever again, but in Discovery, we can at least see the texture, the ridges, the dings.  The reality.

Sousaphone Sugar Mouse

For other posts about the book-in-progress about The Ohio State University Marching Band, go here.

Most of us English majors are created with a certain Anglophilia baked within.  When we formally study the deployment of our own language, we tend to read a great deal from the culture which originated it, and a certain fondness, perhaps bred in self-defense, tends to follow.

So thanks to a near-lifetime of submersion in BritLit, a great deal of Top Gear consumption, and probably eight to twelve hundred too many Mary Poppins viewings in early childhood, I consider myself slightly more tuned in to English culture than your average American, most of whom, thanks to EPCOT, royal wedding media barfage, and the latest explosion in Pride and Prejudice chick-lit spawn, are pretty much under the impression that our progenitors to the East either spend their days strolling terraced estates on the arm of Colin Firth or passing Buckingham Palace on double-decker busses as Simon Cowell shrieks insults over a loudspeaker.  I therefore felt safe in reading Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (the book about soccer, a sport with which I am familiar, not the celluloid horror about Drew Barrymore and Curt Schilling, an abomination with which I wish I were not.)

But apparently there's a bit more to soccer and modern life in England beyond knowing which end is the bonnet and which is the boot and what a "cup-tie" is, and I am left with this book in my hand, staring at these scattered bits of notebook paper which are in the process of becoming a manuscript of my own.  These are my notes at the moment. We need to talk.We have several daily conversations, the ripped-up parts of hotel pads and napkin edges and I, about what they want to say and how I want to say it and where the flugelhorns are supposed to go.  Lately we've had to let Fever Pitch in on the negotiations.

Here's the thing about writers when we read:  We can't enjoy it.  We're always stepped back from the page, shredding it the syllables apart.  Every single word we consume teaches us something, even if that lesson stands as "DO NOT EVER MASH WORDS TOGETHER IN THIS PARTICULAR MANNER."   Even when we supposedly read for fun, it's never fun.  It's work.  It's "What a nightmare of a sentence.  I wish I were dead" and "Oh sweet merciful heavens, adverb fail."  Occasionally it's "That's a damn fine verb choice" or "I hate you so much for making me care about the mating habits of flamingos like this."  When it sucks, we mentally file it away so that we know how not to do it and hurl the book into the library donation barrel abyss; when it's good, we stick it on a shelf and glower jealously for a while, then take it down every now and again for a re-read and deconstruction to figure out how the author figured it out, this tug of war with letter arrangement.

And what has Mr. Hornby taught me in Fever Pitch, after his High Fidelity (again, the original, literary unCusacked version) won a place on my shelf for its brilliant structure, hilarious asides, and brutally honest character development?  He has taught me what it must be like for people who don't know English to gaze upon the English language.

Hornby writes earnestly of "Bert Trautmann playing goal with a broken neck in '56" and "Tottenham's Double team in '61" and adds that "Everyone has a soft spot for Peters and Moore and Hurst and Brooking and the West Ham 'Academy', just as everyone loathes and despises Storey and Talbot and Adams and the whole idea and purpose of Arsenal."  And so on and so forth, for many, many paragraphs.

At one point, while discussing a superstitious ritual he and his friends developed, he mentions biting theSugar mouse in the wild. head off something called a "sugar mouse," then tossing it in the road.  This stopped me cold.  "Sugar mouse?"  WTF?  It was almost surely sort of candy treat, maybe like a Peep, but... these people eat something called "spotted dick," which is a custard.  I ran for the nearest Firefox browser. 

And thus was an otherwise effective chapter on the relationship between rituals and control deflated by the necessity of navigating through the usual Internet horrors one might expect when Googling photos using the word "sugar".

Thanks to context, I understand the larger point here, which is about life and sports and the terrible, glorious, telling intersection between the two, and when that point is clear, this book is a terrific one.  But because Hornby's editor didn't how know to tell him to STFU, in order to reach that point, I must first dig through Peters and Moore and Hurst and Brooking and the West Ham "Academy", and unless you know yooge amounts about European soccer, I pretty much lost you at Bert Trautmann, didn't I?

In grad school we discussed "function of the writing following the style," meaning that since Honrby's book is about a clenched-up obsessive, then it's effective for the writing to be maddeningly littered with stats and facts, names and dates.  It allows the reader to enter the mind of a person whose life is pretty much run by professional soccer, thus innately developing the effectiveness of the piece.  The musical equivalent is "text painting" or "word painting."  But, my people, I ask you:  When I inform you in a first-person piece that I am directionally impaired, do you really want to follow me down Glenway Avenue in Cincinnati, to Lawrence, to Bridgetown, back to Glenway, and over to Boudinot via Queen City before realizing that the mysteriously vanished Hair Cuttery I have in mind is in fact located in Virginia?  (You shan't be at all surprised to learn that yes, this actually happened.)

I don't need to know who Jimmy Husband is to appreciate this passage about how the emotional downside of fandom is balanced by the automatic common ground it grants:  "If you can walk into a school full of eight hundred boys, most of the older, all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth making."  That's intelligent, accessible writing.  An avalanche of non-essential details on who managed which match on which pitch, however-- you put down the book, gaze upwards, and begin hopefully scanning the skies for large and rapidly approaching meteors.

That is an impulse I do not want to create for my readers when I begin hurling them into this world of sousaphones and baton clinics.  I have an advantage on Hornby with this book of mine on The Ohio State University Marching Band-- I was once in the place of most of my potential readers:  "Well!  A marching band.  That's very nice.  I want pie."  His familiarity, however, has been assimilated and pressed into his being over decades, and he probably can't ever remember not knowing what the referee signal for off-sides is. 

Hornby, knotted in the ecstasy and turmoil of his fandom, can't see past his own Arsenal jersey; he must include clarification about which season yielded which center fielders, because it's so vitally important to him.  But in the process, he often fails to make it about what great literature is always about:  You.  Shakespeare doesn't stand today because people give two craps about what the shipping trade was like in Venice in 1597.  But you stand a good chance of seeing The Merchant of Venice performed somewhere in America in 2012 because everybody everywhere knows what it's like to experience mercy, negotiate cultural clashes, and fight through maddening games with love as the final object.  The Merchant of Venice isn't about Portia and Antonio and Shylock at all, then; it's about you.  You connect with it; you respond to it; and then you want your kids to attend a school which also demands that they read it.

I've already fallen into the same trap Hornby did, speaking the language of those only in my neighborhood to those who live across town, and I did so less than a year after I threw up my hands in one of many attempts to understand the in-culture lingo of OSUMB once I first started researching it without an Obi-Wan to steady my hand on the lightsaber. 

It happened this January, in a Jacksonville hotel after the Gator Bowl.  Two Ohio State fans saw me speaking with some members of the Band in the lobby, flattered me immensely by asking how many years I'd been a member of it, and then, once I issued a hasty correction, wanted to know if women were allowed to dot the i during Script Ohio.  Yes, I said, and had been for quite some time, and in fact some women did so this season.  Well, how does one get to dot the i?  It depends, I said, on seniority, rank, and how many ramps one has marched, and-- 

They stopped me.  "What's 'march a ramp'?"

There:  By lapsing into jargon and closed vocabulary, I'd made a beautiful, important, informing marching band moment just... a marching band moment.  They wanted grand tales of strutting down the field, cap plumes waving and fireworks bursting; I'd tossed the headless body of a sugar mouse into their laps.  I might well have been discussing East Mesopotamian textile production techniques.  I backed up right quick, but the thread of the conversation had frayed.

May that time be the last.  Meanwhile, if anybody needs to know anything about Bert Trautmann, I am... not your girl.

Of the Heart

There are some people in my life who aren't in a romantic relationship and they don't know why.  There are others who are in a romantic relationship and I don't know why.  Others don't have a steady +1, and they don't care.  And a few pay the bills on their own, and they hate it.  Some of them suffer.  Some of them wonder.  All underestimate.  None are alone.

Did you ever thank another human being for doing a job well?  Not just "kthnxby" but one of these:  "I appreciate that, and you, and here's why."  If you did, you stirred the spirits of another human being.  You validated his or her work.  You affirmed a life's calling or you made the day at the cash register shorter.  You made him or her feel useful and competent and clever.  Because of that, you're not alone.

Maybe you've been responsible for placing a hand beneath another's as he carried this wearisome burden of being human, and you did it by brushing that part of the soul which responds to the eternal ethereal nature of art.  Doesn't matter how. You sang, plucked or blew one glorious note, you trailed beauty across the canvas, you spoke life into another's world with a single properly placed adjective, you snapped a photograph that made the subject think "Well, I'm not all that bad, am I?"  Because of that, you're not alone.

Oh, you're left brained?  Then you're the cake which made that icing of an adjective possible.  You're the grammar producing the understandable sentiment.  You're the marvelously, evenly lined bristles of the brush.  You're the structure, the ladder, the framework, the foundation.  You adjust the insurance policies, complete the boxes of the tax returns, square the corners of the TPS reports, and without you nobody can hear our poetry reading over the mad chaos of bouncing checks.  The rest of us totter about on your shoulders.  Because of that, you're not alone.

Or you're a parent.  This little life was held out to you and you opened your arms.  The little life got a runny nose and an attitude.  You braced your back against the wall at 3 AM and closed your eyes and didn't question, just pushed through.  Tangled hair and scattered heaps of Matchbox cars and vacations days given over to rivers of snot in some pediatrician's waiting room.  Sometimes, for all this, there is the wrenching backhand--far, far worse than any physical blow-- of sullen silence or "I hate you."  But it is the most important job any human being can take on.  And because of that, you are not alone.

Are you lost?  All these job interviews that's always that.  All these classes and nothing, nothing strikes at your heart, makes you fizz inside and say "For the rest of my life... this."  Or you're on a path which you thought was all the fizz, and now you're there and it's just syrupy, room temperature, and flat.  Or it that path is suddenly obscured by brick walls and brambles and not a single soft place to rest.  But this is not a cul de sac.  This is a highway, with exits, and tacky truck stops and the world's largest ball of twine.  And it is within your power to alter the route, or, at the very least, change the radio station to clear tones instead of staticy, muddled dreariness.  You have all you need, your fingertips on the dial, your hand on the wheel.  And because of that, you are not alone.

If you have ever, out of absolutely nowhere, tapped the text icon or clicked the "Message" menu or opened a new email to say something, anything, even just "Hi!" or "We haven't talked in too long" or "That thing... I forgive you, " then... oh, you are not alone.  You are not alone because you have reached across this great void, not just the physical or technical space which ever more separates us, and you have said, "I am saying this with a computer or a smartphone, but the human that is you, that is operating this device, I remember that you exist and I love you, miss you, honor you."  It's not a matter of skywriting or laser lights or the penthouse suite.  One of the dearest gifts my best friend ever gave me was to sit and braid my hair as I lay weak and in exhausted pain in the hospital.  It cost her five minutes, and zero dollars, and it made me well again inside.  One of the most cherished, most rescuing Facebook messages I ever got arrived in the middle of the night, as I baked Christmas cookies far from dawn, missing my father and my innocence.  And this is what it said:  "Hey."  It cost him two seconds, and zero dollars, and as we typed at one another about absolutely nothing it made me smile, touch my cheeks in wonder in the darkness. 

If you are of these, if you pick up that phone and type that name and hold out those arms, you are never, never alone.

Even when all the world is foil-wrapped and awash in thorn-clipped roses and you fear you are.

Vital Conversation

In the previous post, we discovered that improper preparation for the deployment of a marching band results in loss of one of Earth's major elements for the surrounding population. Today we take on the somewhat less vital mater of acute human suffering.

I say this although I gots me a perfectly functional husband who showers regularly, does the laundry, and permits a fair amount of figure skating exhibitions on the DVR.  He is an excellent Valentine.  It doesn't make Valentine's Day any less of a minefield of misery and high-wire angst.

It is the fault of the fake conversation heart.  For the want of a rival candy, Valentine's Day is a wreck of human misery, and such is the case whether you're married, single, or single-but-Facebook-status-yoked.  For in the season, unlike any other, once is presented with the anguish concerning choosing the correct brand of candy hearts for self-consumption.  Choose correctly, and one is rewarded with 60 crunchy calories of vividly tinted, delightfully balanced confection.  Choose unwisely, and the unfortunate soul is doomed to a mouthful of tactically unappealing sugar-mush with the aftertaste of drywall and bitter regret.

Correct

Incorrect

After such a year of intense learning and increased enlightenment on the arts and human nature, I anticipated that my hard-won wisdom would lead to an increased ability to correctly identify the proper form of heart despite new packaging and an increased array of imposters to choose from.  Alas-- I selected a purple heart, and rather than the veritable taste of violets, I instead consumed horror.

You win again, O pastel imposter, O darkness of the soul.