At the Penn Band 111th anniversary celebration this past Homecoming Weekend.

I promise that this will return to a craft blog in the near future. Honest.

But in the meantime, I would like to tell you about one of the most fun weekends I have had in a long time. It started Friday at Coldplay. After the concert, I drove to Philly. Not highly recommended but I was riding my emotional high (sans any form of alcohol) and traffic was pretty light. I met up with Bill in the wee hours of the morning. We did get to rest before heading to campus for the football game. Bill and I were in the band (it’s how we met) so we go back and hang out with the band and band alums.

If I may wax nostalgic for a moment, joining the Penn Band was one of the best things I ever did. I played piano for eight years so I could read music but I learned how to play the flute and piccolo and later the bass drum and cymbals. The band didn’t require musical ability, just a desire to “play with others”. During the fall I spent my Saturdays with the football team and weekends in the winter with the basketball team. We’d take the bus to different campuses and because the band had no money, we slept on the floor of the dorms and apartments of the other school’s band. The scary part is how much fun we had on the cold, hard floors (clean fun). The band never turned anyway away. This year they have a violinist and two flag twirler people. If you want to be in the band, you are in the band. The band became my community and it wasn’t until recently that I realized how fortunate I was to have that.

My parents came for every parents weekend. They would meet me at campus around 9am to head to band rehearsal. Then they would walk around campus with us, going to the dorms to wake the students and “encourage” them to go to the football game. We’d play for alumni groups and “march” into the stadium. (We were a scramble band, not a marching band.) At halftime, my parents went on the field with me to perform the halftime show. It was an all day event, and they were involved. We had something “important” to do (if you consider cheering for the football team important). What an experience and what memories.

All of this has been floated around in my head after visiting with my friends and going to Yale on their Parents’ Weekend. I owe a lot to the Penn Band. How else would I have learned how to hold my liquor? Or how would I have met my beloved? We have such great friends from Penn, 98% of them from the band. And almost all my college memories involve a band event, or something I did with people in the band. All of this is a long way of saying that going back for Homecoming has a lot of meaning to me.

Moving on, Bill and I went back to celebrate the 111th anniversary of the band. You would think that we would have celebrated on the 110th anniversary, but the band never does anything on time. In honor of the anniversary, the band held a black tie event. It was fun to get dressed up. Incidentally, the occasion marked my 11th anniversary of being with Bill because we started dating at the 100th anniversary celebration. Bill and I danced for the first time to Clapton’s “You Look Wonderful Tonight.”

The whole day was so much fun. We sat with the band, performed at halftime, and later I held cymbals for my drummers as I did 12 years ago. I caught up with friends, met their children, joked, laughed, danced…and drank a little too.

Do I look nice? My mom made the dress (it’s silk and amazing) and I had a huge debate over which shoes to wear, but I made the right choice. I got many compliments, thought I think they took attention away from my beautiful dress. I made my necklace which is hard to see (made with pink pearls to match the shoes).

I will close this blog post with one of the band’s favorite lines: It’s better to play with a group than to play with yourself.