When I got home from work yesterday, Brad was watching Drumline. That's how sick he is, people. So sick that he made his way through our DVD collection, past Fight Club and Shaolin Soccer and Say Anything all the way to Drumline. The movie isn't that terrible, I swear, especially to someone who was actually in a drumline (the best drumline EVER, by the way.) We first saw the movie in the theater two years ago, the first week after we officially got together. I remember this vividly, because after the movie that night one of his friends (a girl) mocked the fact that Brad took me to see Drumline, implying that I must be a lame-o girlfriend to suggest the movie in the first place. She was obviously threatened by me, am I right? Her sassy comment will forever be connected to that movie in my brain, and therefore I can't think about the movie without bringing up how much I do not care for this particular person. The only consolation I have for memories like that is to think "Two years, bi-a" in a tone equal in sass to her original comment. Because I'm mature like that.

Speaking of Drumline (Two years, bi-a! TWO YEARS!), Brad bought me the DVD when it came out so that I could skip the lame boy-can't-read-sheet-music drama and flip right to the scenes where the drumlines perform. Watching the movie again reminded me: whatever offspring I produce shall be coached early on that when choosing an instrument to play in band, they will choose the drums over the trumpet, tuba, or god forbid - the clarinet. I can say that without reservation because I played clarinet for six years. Six years is a long time to honk around on an instrument that you can't do anything with once you leave high school. You can't pull out the clarinet and sing John Denver songs around a campfire. You can't burn incense and sit cross-legged and bang on your clarinet in a clarinet circle. It's useless.

When I got to high school it was painfully apparent from the clarinet section that DRUMLINE is the only place to be. The only thing that transcends the geeky-ness of marching on a football field in a crooked diamond formation, in polyester, wearing a feather on your head and weird handkerchiefs on your shoes (spats? who came up with those?), is being a member of the drumline. In the hierarchy of marching band, it is not the drum major who rules the band but the leader of the drumline, with the snares, tenors and bass drum players completing the line of royalty. Emily, my partner in crime, and I were lucky enough to be asked to drop our clarinets and play cymbals our junior year (we did, faster than Brad dropped Jenn). The flutes and piccolos and the rest of the clarinets secretly hated us, but it didn't matter, because we had the time of our lives smashing those big gold things together. We won "Best Cymbal Line, EVER" at some big drum competition that year. We were so good. Oh, man, we were AWESOME.

Nothing compares to the moment a drumline starts a cadence, and it's even more powerful when you are standing in the drumline, two feet away from a line of snares playing perfectly in time, listening to a bass line flow from one bass drum to the next, watching the tenors circle their drums with mallets bouncing at warp speed. As a cymbal player, my involvement was mostly the icing on the cake: (chicka-chicka-chicka) CRASH! (boom boom boom boom) SIZZLE! (boom) CRASH! Back then, nothing was more fun that flipping those cymbals up at the start of a cadence. We had our own magic, that cymbal line - Emily and myself and three other hoodlums, crashing and sizzling and giggling in between sets. I can still picture Emily blowing her bangs out of her face when she played.

Graduating from high school was hard for me, really hard, because I just had so much damn FUN for those three years. From drumline, I had this sense of being a part of something bigger, being an essential part of this bigger thing - the people, the rhythms, the motherfracking uniforms. The last time the drumline played together, I cried, hard, because it was the end of something that I knew I would never feel again. My freshman year in college, I tried out for and made the Tech drumline, Zeta Iota Tau (um, yes, that's ZIT for short). I wanted something to replace the drumline I left behind, something that I was a part of again. I didn't click with that drumline, and the whole experience became more of a drag than something I looked forward to. First of all, the drumline leader (ZIT Czar) had a mullet and wore hammer pants during practice. Second of all, the show the marching band performed that year was made up entirely of Eagles songs - Desperado and Hotel California. Third of all, a few weeks into the football season 95% of the drumline got suspended (for a week) for beating up a dude in a bat costume at the UT/TTU game. How could I be expected to bond under those conditions? Needless to say, I dropped out of the drumline just before the Cotton Bowl - hello, I was on Christmas vacation. No, I did not give up my vacation to go to a silly football game to play Desperado with a guy in hammer pants and the rest of his bat-hating gang.

Well, look at me, I'm getting all nostalgic again. Just for fun, I'll tell you how the movie ended last night: during the very last scene (when Ja Rule steps out on the field and performs with the opposing school's band - yeah, right, like THAT would ever happen), Brad looked at the VCR clock and panicked. "Ohmyga!" he exclaimed (okay, not really, Brad doesn't scream like a little girl so much), "It's time for American Idol!" This is what hydrocodone cough syrup does to a man.

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