Retrospective on my first football game

I echo Rebecca's sentiments about how awkward it is to start this blog up - I guess once we've all signed up for it and posted a couple of times, it won't seem as strange. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Brooke and I'm a senior in the band - I play flute, piccolo and alto saxophone (I basically play whatever instrument I feel like playing at a particular game).

My last field rehearsal of my undergraduate career is tonight, which means that my last football game is this Saturday. It's bittersweet, I suppose, because on one hand, this really does mean that my time at Penn and in the band is ending soon, but on the other hand, it means I never have to wear band pants again! (I jest - girls just like to kvetch a lot, band pants really aren't all that terrible)

So, while my last game is quickly approaching, I have fond memories of my first home game as a bando. I joined the band late into the first semester freshman year; I'll talk about how I found out about the band and my first rehearsal at some other point in time. My first game at Franklin Field was the last home game of the year, the Penn-Harvard game. We had a field show planned, but for some reason or another (I was an uninformed freshman, I'm still not exactly sure what happened), our usual amount of time was cut to basically just enough time for us to get onto the field and play Red and Blue. The band scrambled into formation, and instead of reading the show as had been planned, the voice did a "human dial tone" for what seemed like an eternity - the human dial tone basically consisted of the voice saying "BEEEEP" for a considerably long amount of time. Since this was my first "real" field show ever (the previous week at Cornell, our show consisted of a game of musical chairs), I was extremely confused, but thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard - like most of the bandos on the field, I was laughing hysterically. If this was indicative of what was to come with the band, I was going to love this organization. A friend of mine was visiting that day and said, "That was one of the strangest, but funniest things I've ever seen... I wish my school had a group like the Penn Band! I would join instantly!"

Tonight's field rehearsal may be my last, but I still have plenty more band activities to look forward to this season and beyond.

Until next time,
Brooke