(Honestly, you're lucky to be getting anything at all.)
When I need a good old emotional release and a cathartic cry. Or when I forget and subject myself to it one more time and damn the consequences, I can turn back to the Bluecoats 2022 50th Anniversary Alumni Performance at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
You might wonder why--since I have only ever watched Drum Corp on VHS or live on PBS (yep, I AM that old and that's how I did it when I was in high school) or on YouTube. Or . . . God forbid . . . the few times I'm irrationally given money to FloMarching in August.
But anyway . . . the question remains.
Why should this make me cry. I'm an interested, but removed observer of the sport. I never marched in a Drum Corp. I admittedly only became a dyed in the blue lover of the Bluecoats when I moved up to Ohio and my marching band kids reintroduced me to the group. (Though I've been a committed skeptic of the Blue Devils since the late 80s.) And, I haven't marched in a band since 1990--more precisely, Fall of 1989, unless you count an odd parade or something before June 1990s graduation.
But--as I've said before in this space--those marching band years were deeply special to me. It has been a thread through all of my blogging years. And it has come raging back in the last seven to eight years as I've watched some of my kids go through the sport and forge their own friendships and memories and emotional attachments. And I've been blessed to be allowed on that journey with them, working on the side as a volunteer. So my love of marching band and its emotional weight is strong and reinvigorated in this middle period of my life.
So, watching an alumni corps play the hits and knowing the history behind it--leaving aside the powerful, raw beauty of the music itself--affects me.
So, yeah . . . ugly cry each and every time.
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