A cool video to show your family this winter break

I always had difficulty explaining to my extended family what interested me in becoming part of a scramble band. Surely it had to be the horrendous khakis and preppy sweaters, right?

Like many college band folk, I'd joined band back in elementary school and had never been humiliated enough to leave. I even won the "Best Marcher" award at the end of my freshman year marching band season-- resulting in my aunt collapsing with laughter over Thanksgiving dinner at what a loser I must be.

Most of my family knew that I'd had the opportunity to travel to some cool places, go to a few NCAA tournaments, and have a moderately successful social life (comparative to high school) as a Penn Band member. They could see that I was happy, so they too were happy. Then came the Great Mascot Scandal of '06...

The road trip was Brown/Yale, and we'd just played a Brown team hungry for revenge over the previous year's blowout. We ended up with the W, packed up our instruments, and loaded everything on to the bus...but there were some obvious omissions, most noticeably the Quaker mascot costume. We were staying with the Yale bandos that night, so we had no choice but to leave and drive to New Haven before it got too late.

Thankfully, Athletics had held on to our older Quaker mascot costume from the previous year-- we ended up making it to the NCAA tournament that year and had the old costume at the ready. We all figured that a Brown-affiliated person had to have been behind the stealing, but no progress was made into any kind of investigation...until six months later when a few of us Board members received a strange e-mail from an obviously fake address, which linked to this video (screen shot shown above, can't figure out how to embed videos yet).

Let's just say that this was one of the more bizarre things that we had to deal with as a Board that year. Shortly after that I received an accusatory e-mail from the then President of the Brown Band, stating that we should basically look within our own organization for the source of theft (yeah, right). The e-mail (legitimately) mentioned an amendment to the Brown Band's Wikipedia entry, "The Brown Band also has a long tradition of stealing other schools' valuable items," which I found hilarious (and I KNOW WHO YOU ARE-- but your secret stays with me to the grave). The missing mascot costume was un-mysteriously and anonymously returned after Penn Athletics intervened and officially filed a claim.

Long story short, the video always provides a good deal of amusement in my family, and it's a nice example of how college kids can creatively play pranks on their rivals without having to resort to petty ad hominem attacks (although, let's face it, plenty of that goes on, too).