#the orange notes

[baylecn]

It's always Vixen this and Vixen that,

What about the Orange Notes?!

The Foxes have their own little campus marching band and NO ONE talks about them????

[jeanmoreaudefensesquad]

I think we should talk about the Orange Notes.

Because, okay, listen--I was a band kid in college. All of us loved band. None of us wanted to be at any sporting event (I mean, that's a bit of hyperbole; I'm a hockey fan so I enjoyed playing at those games).

Which is to say, those kids only nominally signed up for all this. They were like hell yeah play some music maybe get a thousand dollars in scholarship--oh fuck what is happening???

That's not to mention--exy games are Friday nights in the fall. You know what is Saturday days/evenings, depending on the size and importance of the school, also in the fall? Football games. And the Orange Notes are mentioned as being the campus band, which means they're also the football marching band. Do you have any idea how pissed I'd've been in college if I had to give up my Friday evenings and all day Saturday? It was bad enough playing one day a week at sporting events I didn't want to be at.

And this is on top of--if they're also a marching band, like my college band was, they're practicing a few times a week to have that field show down. Field shows take a lot of work, and that's if you're doing the same one every week. I was at a small school (~3000 students total), so we did one show for the whole season. My brother goes to a Big10 school where football game attendees can get up to 100,000+ (the one I went to came in at almost 106,000), and he's in the band there. They do a different show every week. Their rehearsals are insane.

When I was in band, we played at every home football game (except for the one that was the weekend of fall break), the nearby (within 3 hours drive) away football games, hockey games, and basketball games. But we didn't do more than one event a weekend. During football season, that was it. After the season ended we would play at either a hockey game, which was either Friday or Saturday night, or a basketball event on Saturday day (the women's and men's teams played back to back, so we stayed through both, which was a nightmare for a lot of non-sport related reasons).

But--no matter how the band feels about being at a sporting event, they're doing Band Things. They're playing pep songs, they're cheering, they're playing the fight song. The band can be some of a team's biggest fans, and the ones that always stand by them. Even when, say, the starting strikers can't get along. They're still there playing ten-measure stand tunes and cheering for the good things.

And the Orange Notes went to Evermore for the championships! Which, if that had been me when I was in college band, I'd've been a nightmare about. A quick google search shows that it's almost six hours from Columbia SC to Charleston WV, and Palmetto's campus is like 45 minutes south of Columbia, iirc. So the band sat on a bus for like seven hours to play at this game. Do you know how much of an absolute bitch I would have been if that was me in band? Never mind all the other drama that happened, I would have been awful just because of the travel!

So anyway I think the Orange Notes deserve more love because wow do they do a lot for the exy team.

(One final note: I used to think that Orange Notes was such a dumb name, and then I remembered that Penn State's famous marching band is the Blue Band and then it felt less stupid)