Sunday, October 27, 2013

Marching Band Party

So there's basically nothing I can tie into video games from English class, so it's time to go off topic. During the beginning of the year, our class read a short story called Birthday Party by Katharine Brush. It was basically portraying how marriages don't always have happy endings and that people drift apart over time. By giving the characters a very vague mien, people are easily able to relate this shorty story to real life. I didn't relate this story to marriage of any sort per se, but rather, I took in a different context and switched marriage to the topic of marching band. I connected Marching Band Competitions( State Marching Band Championships in particular) to be the husband while the people who make up the different marching bands are the wife. The people who march all give in countless amounts of dedication as well as hard work in order to potentially win first place at the State Championship.

 Just like the wife in the story, we try to please the significant other(in my case, the judges of the State Championships) in that we present them a product and hope for the best. This thought didn't really click for me until yesterday. Yesterday was the State Championships for Kentucky and the marching band I felt as though we played that we could have that night. We've worked hard everyday, doing intense work outs as well as going through strenuous weather conditions. Our journey represents the trek that couples go through and the vain attempts in order to please each other. However, the endings to both stories are different this year, or at least, in my perspective they are. In Birthday Party, the wife is left depressed and ashamed with a hint of being shunned by her husband. Although we may have gotten third in the competition, we were not left in some sorry state. I believe that we performed to the best of our abilities and that it doesn't really matter what those judges think. Thus the correlation between both stories end here...However, next year's competition may speak a different story.

1 comment:

  1. Yay Eric! Thinking outside the box to connect marching band to a short story from forever ago. And I agree with it, the band situation really is like the situation from the Birthday Party. But you're right, even if competitions are like the husband and the band is like the wife, the band didn't let the husband pull them down in this case and I feel bad for the wife that she allowed for her husband to pull her down like that

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