Way to Go, Mr. Toscanini...I Mean Mr. Timmons

Marching band was a big part of my life in high school. And not just because it was an easy A. Or that there were always donuts and back issues of Wasting Away in Margaritaville – A Guide to Local Cocktail Lounges in the band director's office. Or that I thought being in band was actually cool and not nerdy. Or that I had no life. Although all those things did play their part.

Our band director, Mr. Sofa, was very laid back and easygoing. He didn't require us to play difficult exercises for grades. Or practice. Or be able to play instruments. Or even show up for class. All he ever asked (and I did not feel this was too much to ask) was that each of us bring him some type of sugary snack food, not interrupt his extended nap time, and not report him to the principal for slacking.

Needless to say, this was a popular class. There were more kids clamoring to get into band than Survey of Bad Sitcoms of the 70s, Co-ed Twister, and Fundamentals of Law for Suing Your Parents all put together. If there had been a class in lying in bed eating Oreos while playing games on an Xbox, we would have given that one a run for its money too. We took the term "happy band campers" to a WHOLE new level.

Little did we know our world was about to crumble into tiny little pieces. Some of you may recall when, on the TV show M*A*S*H, Col. Blake was replaced by Col. Potter. In order for this to happen, Col. Blake had to die. Mr. Sofa met with a much worse fate.

The Independent School District Board sent forth their team of dreaded emissaries to conduct the annual inspection of facilities every spring at the same time. Had Mr. Sofa not been in a Pop Tart-induced coma and preoccupied with the TGI Fridays review in the April issue of Wasting Away in Margaritaville – A Guide to Local Cocktail Lounges and remembered when the inspection was, history would have been very different.

The chief inspector had also led the team of U.N. inspectors looking for WMDs in Iraq and there are those who say he had an axe to grind. When he entered the band room with his team, he went into "search and destroy" mode.

"All right. I know they're here somewhere. Maybe in that tuba. That package of Skittles looks suspicious. Take it to the lab and have each Skittle scanned for nuclear capability. Maybe under the desk. If I was a WMD, WHERE would I be?"

His assistant said: "Get hold of yourself, man. We're not in Iraq anymore. We're just minor characters in a funny Vocal story. Calm down and take a Xanax. It's gonna be all right."

As he was being taken away, his assistant signed the papers to quarantine the band room and institute martial law due to "serious scholastic and health concerns."

Mr. Sofa was the only band director in our state to be transferred to a school in the Aleutian Islands where he, to this very day, teaches elementary music lessons to manatees.

His replacement, Mr. Toscanini, made his M*A*S*H* equivalent, "full bird" Col. Potter, look like a Pinterest embroidery chat room admin.

Mr. Toscanini was a madman who held the wildly radical idea that our band should actually be good.

We band members didn't know what to make of this. Most of us transferred to Survey of Bad Sitcoms of the 70s or Co-ed Twister. The rest spent most of class making elaborate ditching plans. We CERTAINLY didn't have any interest in working hard or trying to be good.

But Mr. Toscanini believed we could do it. Actually be, you know, good. There were several obstacles to this.

We had only one tuba player. His name was Bob and, in terms of sheer bulk weight, he was the equal of any tuba section in the country, including the 60-man Ohio State University Tuba Section of Death which specialized in playing Flight of the Bumblebee at warp speed. Musically, Bob was the equal of Bob. He specialized in whole notes.

I was a bass drummer in the drumline. Our drumline was made up of SSI recipients for rhythmic disability. All the drummer jokes you've heard started because of us.

Why is there a 15-minute intermission at a band concert? If it was any longer, they would have to retrain the percussion. How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? Light bulb, psssh. They can't even change their underwear.

The biggest obstacle to the band becoming good was that, between all of us, we had not one microgram of talent. But Mr. Toscanini believed this would be overcome by one thing: hard work.

Mr. Toscanini was such a disciplinarian that there are those who claim he was forced to resign in shame from his command of an insurgent death camp for being too harsh to the prisoners. Maybe that explained the barbed wire surrounding the practice field, the sharpshooters in towers, the attack dogs outside the barbed wire perimeter, and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier stationed within striking distance.

But you know what? After a few months of spending four hours a day on the practice field, day in and day out, rain or shine, something magical happened. We were transformed. No. We were utterly transmogrified. We went from a rag-tag, untalented, motley crew of pathetic losers to a very tired, rag-tag, untalented, motley crew of pathetic losers.

But we didn't give up. We had only one thing on our minds: the upcoming city band contest and the possibility that we could finally beat our crosstown rival, Awe-Inspiring 7th Fleet-Like Amphibious-Assault-Force-Laughing-At Ten-Foot-Thick-Lead-Wall-Effortlessly-Dissolving This-May-Sound-Hyperbolic-But-It's-Really-Understatement Invincible-Juggernaut High School Band.

When the fateful day arrived, tension was high. The same question was on everyone's mind: "Would the concessions stand run out of corn dogs before we were done?"

The Juggernaut went on first. Their show consisted of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony performed to a drill of dancing DNA molecules which collapsed into a Manet print.

Then it was our turn. We pulled out all the stops to intimidate our rival. Our new uniforms were replicas of Imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars. We conducted underground nuclear testing during our warmup to shake the stadium. Our drum major executed a four-minute salute which would have induced Caribbean island tribes to worship him as a god. And we painted "Santa Clara Vanguard" on all our buses.

Our show consisted of a Spice Girls medley performed to a drill of a quadrilateral which, on a good day, might turn out to be a parallelogram.

The judge's sheet said it all. "Your show of atonal music with a drill of reproducing amoebas has set new standards. First place."

Way to go, Mr. Toscanini.

Obviously, this is wholly fictitious…but inspired by my real-life band director Bill Timmons’ light-hearted sense of fun and odd, unwavering belief that I, a massive dumpster fire of self-doubt, social awkwardness, parental absentee issues, underachievement, depression, and anxiety, could actually be, you know, “good” at this thing called life. Way to go, Mr. Timmons.