A Night to Remember

So this past weekend the Penn Band was in Boston to play at a surprise party for Peter and Carolyn Lynch's 40th wedding anniversary. This black tie affair was not our typical venue, so I thought it might be worth keeping track of what happened. Little did I know how true this would be. The following is an unaltered account of 4:30-7:30 pm, August 9, 2008.

4:30- Call for meeting in the hotel lobby.
4:45- Everyone arrives in the hotel lobby. A few bandos are not wearing pants.
4:50- It's ok, their pants were on the bus, and people finished changing on the way to the ICA.
5:00- Arrived at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), where the event was to be held. We take out our instruments.
5:10- We find out that they do not want us to play "Just a Gigolo," the song we had rehearsed earlier that day to play with the Sultans of Swing, and told everyone to bring.
5:15- Greer and Koosh go to talk with the Sultans, to figure out what other songs we have that they can play with us. Meanwhile the rest of us start to go into the building. However, we are stopped at the door. Apparently we can't go in the main entrance, and we need to go around the side and use the service door.
5:20- Once inside our "holding area" for the evening, stocked with potato chips and Norwegian water, Greer and Koosh return to say we are going to try Carry On. A couple of us go upstairs to play a little of our version for the Sultans. The guy looks at the music, says "Yeah, sure, we can handle it.", and takes the trombone part. ...In traditional Penn Band style, we're gonna wing it...
5:25- Pretty much every instrument has at least one part for Carry On, and the ICA has a copy machine, so we collect the music to make copies.
5:30- We get back the copies. Someone enters our holding room, looks around at us in surprise, asks "Everything ok?", and walks out before we can respond.
5:35- We are told that we'll be going outside in 5-10 minutes.
5:40- We have a lengthy discussion on the actual worth of Peter Lynch. The guesses ranged from "100 million dollars" to "a few billion" to "more money than all of us and all of our families, combined."
5:45- Someone suggests that the company Merril Lynch was actually formed by Koosh's wife and Peter Lynch, 150 years ago.
6:00- We actually go outside (25 minutes from warning). This is a VERY swanky party. Oysters, lox pizza with caviar, and other delights are circulating among the guests. We got chips.
6:05- The guests practice yelling surprise (first time)
6:07- The guests practice yelling surpise (second time)
6:09- We practice playing immediately after the guests practice yelling surpise (third time)
6:15- The guests yell surprise, for real this time. The guests of honor have arrived, and we greet them with that party hit, Fight On Pennsylvania! This is followed by Highball.
6:25- Audible! They want us to sing "Happy Anniversary." Just as we're about to start they apparently realize that we are in fact a band, not an a capella group, and call it off.
6:30- Now smile! It's picture time, and the party-goers are told "Everyone gather around the marching band."
6:35- We are shepherded back inside, and told it will be about half an hour more until "round 2".
6:45- 3 minute warning.
6:48- Heading outside again. I hear from behind me "Angie, put this in your pocketbook please," and see Greer handing over a rubber duck. She responds, "This is why I bring the big bag," and takes it.
6:50- The party planners tell us to start, even though there is already a jazz band outside, in the midst of playing. Needless to say, they looked up in shock (along with all the guests), as we began to play The Final Countdown. It sort of destroyed the atmosphere, but that's how we roll.
7:00- The drummers begin to cadence, and we lead the way into the dining room for dinner/the rest of the party. Unfortunately, it seemed no one told the guests that they were supposed to follow us, so the drummers were just outside cadencing for a while.
7:05- As the first people come in, we are told to start playing Carry On. However, there are a number of issues that needed to be dealt with. 1) The drums are still outside cadencing. 2) Greer is outside with the percussion. 3) The Sultans of Swing only had the trombone part.
7:07- After they bring Greer inside, and I give my chop part to their trumpet player, it seems 2/3 is good enough. With only a drum set (ad-libbing) as percussion, we play Carry On. All things considered, it didn't sound half bad.
7:10- They tell us its time to go. No wait, not yet. Yeah, we were just kidding, go now! We go out through our side door, and make our way back to the bus.
7:15- Instruments away, we get on the bus, and start to pull out of the parking lot. However, we didn't go far. In the lot, there was a large sign for "Harborside," one of those banners that is held up by horizontal poles on top and on the bottom. The bottom pole was slightly lower than it appeared to the driver, and it scrapes against two windows of the bus. It then spiderweb cracks a third, and we hear a loud noise as the pole comes through the fourth. The window (and the one behind it) shattered, and broken glass went into the bus. Luckily, no one was sitting there, so no one was hurt. The driver pulls away from the pole (creating a gash in the side of the bus), and then stops. The cracked window looks ready to pop out of the frame.
7:25- After making a phone call, the driver takes us back to the hotel. We arrive without further incident.

All in all, it was an interesting 3 hours....

The Penn Band wins a Women's Lacrosse game

For those of you that don't know, in addition to playing euphonium in the band, I also cover Penn sports teams for the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student newspaper. I've yet to cover either football or men's basketball, as these sports are normally reserved for juniors and seniors to cover. However, the biggest sport that I've covered over my two years has been the women's lacrosse team.

Now, once the men's basketball season comes to a close, the Penn Band normally goes into hibernation mode. Well not quite. We do a few scattered spring events here and there. And so far this year we've done two women's lacrosse games. Now, I've had to cover both of these games for the DP, so I haven't played with the band. Doing so would constitute a direct conflict of interest, since I'd be rooting for a team (by playing an instrument) and then covering said team for an objective media source.

However, a much iffier issue of conflict of interest occurred after the most recent Penn Band-attended women's lacrosse game. Yesterday, the No. 5 Quakers faced No. 1 Northwestern who was undefeated and on a 36-game winning streak. The Wildcats also had won the last three national championships. It was a huge game, so the band decided to come out and support the team.

Well the Quakers pulled off the stunning upset. (Here are my live game updates of the match; notice the Penn Band references). Anyway, after the game I was waiting to interview some players/coaches. Penn senior captain Rachel Manson, whom I've interviewed several times before and knows me by sight, turns to me completely out of the blue and says, "Because the Penn Band came." Since it seemed sort of off the record I asked her to state it for the record. So she repeated herself, "Because the Penn Band came we won today." I was sort of in shock she said that, but what a quote.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now here's where the conflict of interest comes into play. To give some background, the last time the Penn Band came to a women's lacrosse game was the Wednesday April 2 game against Johns Hopkins. I wrote the preview for that game, and I interviewed Manson for it. Being the idiot that I was, I told her that the Penn Band was coming and then asked her what her thoughts were. She was pretty impressed and said she remembered the band coming the previous year for the Princeton game in which the Quakers clinched the Ivy title and how it made that game really special. After the interview I told her I was in the band and that I'd probably play with them (eventually I didn't since no one else could cover the game for the DP).

I wanted to run her quotes about the Band, but my editors wouldn't let me since they said it was a conflict of interest since I had brought it up myself, and she responded to my theoretically biased question. Now I didn't really argue that too much, and retrospectively it makes sense.

Flash forward to yesterday. Before I even wrote my story I went up to my editor and explained the situation with Manson's most recent pro-Penn Band quote. However, he disallowed it yet again, saying even though she was completely unprompted to mention the band, she still knew that I was in the band and that potentially skewered her quote.

I didn't quite understand this logic since the previous time he had told me it couldn't run because I had brought up the band on my own. But then again, he has the final say, so I declined to write it in.

I also wrote an email on the band's list serve asking the journalists of the band whether they thought there was a conflict of interest. A band alum who works at a national media outlet yet wanted anonymity agreed with my editor that this might appear to be a conflict of interest since I am a member of the band. So if a professional journalist agrees, that's enough for me.

But even if it didn't make it to print, it's still true that at least one women's lacrosse player thinks we're the reason they earned potentially the biggest win in program history.

But it gets even better. At the time Manson said it, I thought maybe she was joking, or just reacting instinctively, something temporal. But last night after I sent her a facebook comment congratulating her on the win, she responded by reiterating her comment about the band: "I'm telling you on the record it is all because of the Penn Band," she wrote.

Moral of the story: The Band, despite all the s*** it can get sometimes from various sources, is still appreciated by athletes. And that's what matters in the end.

NB: Thanks to Brian for catching the mistakes up to the --- line. But I'm sure there's still some out there! Who wants more nickels!