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Excerpt from Chapter (?)...
May, 1999.
I think the first thing I remember from when tour started was actually the Memorial Day camp in Wisconsin. I flew up early, and stayed with John Johns (soprano) in his apartment that he acquired earlier, since he was from Washington. It was pretty hot that camp, and we had to bust tail on drill. I remember the 2nd day of camp, we were in hornarc warming up, and this old lady walked toward us while we were playing a warmup. We stop and she yells "When is all this goddamn noise going to stop?" Heh, we were like... what the hell.. so much for a compliment. She started arguing with Tony (brass caption head) continuously saying her entire neighborhood was "tired of our noise." Tony's responses were classic, just thoroughly classic. He said "Well, we'd like to think of it as music, and not noise, ma'am." You could just tell he wanted to start showing his drum corps side and swear her out. And then she started saying "But it's noise! What about the poor little birds in the nests...!" At this point we are just about to lose it, we are already dying already, and she starts about the wildlife and our noise. Tony replies "Well, ma'am, I wasn't aware there were little birds pissed off at us..." My entire section is doubled over at this point, really trying not to laugh but... how can you keep a straight face during this. She finally leaves and we totally lose it. I mean, we are used to people coming and watching us, but this was some disgruntled old lady from a neighborhood nearby, saying when is our noise going to stop and that we're disturbing wildlife. It stayed a continuous joke all through the summer. We progressed as a hornline and got louder and better and sometimes someone would yell "What about the birds!"