Xmas at HHS

Last year, HHS's winter concert was okay. The year before was really sad (even though the band had Juice. LOL). The problem was the band director, an ironically named gentleman who was once arrested at a football game for disobeying the police (who had asked him to quiet the band for a minute). IMO, he was a poor example, and poor disciplinarian: this poverty showed up in the band's performance. He left HHS last year. He was kind to my girls, and so I managed not to hate him, but he was sloppy and immature as a band director.

Mr. B, the new director, isn't perfect. I think he's swung in the extreme opposite direction, thereby sucking the fun out of Band, but the HHS concert band was bigger and better than it was last year. Mr. B. did good.

During the concert, one of the musicians did something bizarre (IMO). A friend of Juice and Goobs plays the French horn (and, really, anything he wants to play, like Juice). He's tall and handsome and well-behaved. (He once told Goobs, "Your mother loves me: she thinks I'm handsome and well behaved." His conversations with his father are peppered with "sirs.") If I were Goobs' age, I'd have a crush on the young man, but when they were both freshmen, he habitually annoyed The Section Leader --and her sister*-- by asking questions before doing what he was told.

Anyway, last night, in the middle of a performance, the child took his horn apart and shook the spit out of it. He's First Horn, so he was on the front, where everybody could see him. No, the French horns weren't playing at the time (it was a percussion passage, in fact), but I got a little nervous about whether he'd get the thang back together in time to play. He did, but after the concert, right after he'd hugged me, I did ask him what in the world he was thinking. A very proper young man, he tried to explain --without using the word spit or slobber-- that what he had done positively affected the sound of the horn. (I helped him out, of course, by offering him those words, and agreeing with my semantics, he said, "Yes, ma'am. I drool a lot.")

The chorus (not Mr. B's purview) sounded really good, too, but I was distracted by a child who apparently did not know or care about how she should behave during a concert. She stood with crossed arms, kept fidgeting and digging at her hair, actually hitting herself on the head sometimes, removed and replaced both earrings, and even carried on a briefly-mouthed conversation with somebody in the audience --during the singing. I was truly hard-pressed not to walk up to the stage and have a word with her. There were a hundred and something kids on the stage, all with proper singing aspects, so how does one child --yes, again in the front-- manage to miss out on The Rules? ARRGH. But they sounded good.

Interesting how much more patient I am with the handsome young men, huh?

Dear Jesus, my brother, help us to love on all of our children.

*I'll give you one guess.