Okay, I'm awake now. Here we were at the Circulation Desk minding our own business when a whole freaking marching band rushes the front gate all of a sudden and floods into the library's lobby, horns blaring and drums snaring, sending patrons scurrying out from the reading rooms to see what the devil was making all that racket (maybe they thought it was the Rapture!). Apparently this is some sort of tradition - Princeton is in town for a football game against the Crimson today, and their band has been making these surprise forays into Widener for as long as anyone here can remember. Ah, to be young and stupid again, wearing a hideous polyester marching band outfit and blasting away on my tenor saxophone...

Yes folks, it's true - I was a big-time band geek back in high school. For a few years, the Gateway Regional High School marching band was my life, and I proudly wore my blue-and-white uniform that looked like a horrible cross between Wild West and Renaissance fashion; and even though we were hands-down the worst band in the region, we somehow wore that as a badge of honor, that we were losers among losers, and poorly-dressed to boot.

Not only were we bad, but our marching band was tiny as well. Lacking the customary low brass of tuba players or bassoonists, our director - an outrageous yet sad man with a body shaped like a pear and a big, red, pustulous nose that would become an unearthly shade of purple when angry at one of us, which was inevitable - gave us saxophonists the tuba sheet music and hoped for the best. I took advantage of the fact that our music department had a closet full of loaner instruments and traded up my squeaky learner's alto sax for a big honkin' tenor, all weathered and sexy, and perfect for hitting low note after low note. I loved that saxophone, and I loved flooding our mostly-empty stands (our football team wasn't so hot, either) with the bass line to each and every marching band tune, rattling the aluminum of the rafters and the fillings in my teeth.

I probably could have walked off with that tenor sax when I graduated and no one would have been the wiser; for the next two summers I even had the keys to the music department, as I was working for my old high school, painting rooms, receiving packages, and loafing about whenever possible, and Lords knows I wouldn't have been the only person on the summer payroll walking off with school property. But it wouldn't have been right. As much as that saxophone was a part of me during those years, its magic was meant to be shared, and I'd like to think that right now as I'm typing, somewhere in South Jersey a young marching band member is playing it right now during a halftime show.

I only hope the uniforms are a little better now!