Every October, Somerville hosts the Honk Festival, a. series of parades and exhibitions featuring, “activist street bands.” Others have written in MMA that the marching arts were once all about, ”God and country,” and it appears that musical instruments and color guard equipment can also be put in the service of social justice and organic farming. The marching arts, like duct tape, have 1,001 uses.
20,000 B.C. – The Early Man Invitational is held at a site in what is now Ukraine. The Cro-Magnon Cadets are a crowd favorite, playing prehistoric hits on conch shells.
I once went out for beers with a friend named Bob, who served as a U.S. Army military policeman in the Vietnam war. He told me that he joined a V.F.W. post after discharge and that some of the World War II vets at the place made him feel as if he were personally responsible for losing Indochina to the communists. He said that the ribbing became especially intense in 1975 when Saigon fell, and the TV at the post showed images of helicopters lifting off the U.S. embassy roof with desperate refugees hanging on to the landing gear.
On a recent trip to Mars, I dropped in on Jim Wedge. We spoke at Wedge’s suite in the Emperor Bezos Home for Cranky Earthlings.
The picture with this article is from my mother’s 1948 high school yearbook. The resolution is poor, but one can see that the corps uniforms resembled those of Salvation Army ladies and that the girls wore sensible shoes. I don’t know whether they were a competitive unit, or why they were all brunettes. Maybe the actress Jane Russell was big that year.
I’m sure that most MMA readers know that Bob Locke, who marched in the Charlestown Majestic Knights, Somerville Annunciators, and 27th Lancers passed away last year.
He is survived by his wife Roberta; his children Robert, Thomas, Aimee, Renee, and Janeen; his brother William, many cousins, and hundreds of friends.
I, Hyman Roth, an erstwhile flugel player approaching the middle of life’s journey, one day found myself in a parking lot in Revere. In the wall of an edifice bordering the lot was a portal, above which were inscribed these words:
WELCOME TO DRUM CORPS HELL.
DON’T ASK AND WE WON’T TELL.
DUBUQUE, IA – Pork magnate Harry Hamm, Director of the Moon of lowa Drum and Bugle Corps, has announced that his unit will suspend competition for 1997 and will instead take part in a series of unconventional artistic ventures. Hamm, whose corps won the National Championship at last year’s Daughters of the American Revolution convention, believes that the Moon has reached the pinnacle of drum corps excellence and is ready to enter the world of avant-garde entertainment.
We all know that the marching activity has been a valuable means of getting young (and not so young) people off the streets… and into the parking lots. Here are a few tidbits of parking lot history: