1. Band Kids Don’t Do Things Half Way

I was speaking with a coworker who is a senior at my old high school about how my old classmates had snuck a microwave into the band storage closet for the kids to use. She went to check if it was still in use, and found a crockpot being used to cook a turkey.

2. Breakfast Together Which Is Pretty Awesome

In our school the percussion section snuck a George Foreman grill in band and made pancakes and eggs since band was 1st or second period.

I was a chorus kid not a band kid. But we were all pretty close. The chorus kids were also weird as fuck. They started this trend of bringing beta fish to school. Every Friday a good 10 kids would bring in their beta fish on giant water bottles to school.

3. Ass Blasted Hero

When I was a senior, I asked a freshman guitarist to jump off the second floor of the stage set. I figured common sense and basic human behaviors would dissuade him from listening.

Before I knew what happened, he jumped off and landed on his ass. He cannonballed off the set onto a hardwood floor.

Alex, if you’re out there, know that you’re my mentally deficient, ass blasted hero.

4. Dragonfly Funerals

Our bus was 3 hours late. While we were waiting someone found a dead dragonfly and the whole band decided to have a funeral for it. We dug a hole with sticks and covered it up, and a trumpet player played Taps.

5. A Chaperone’s Perspective

Have you ever taken band kids out of state for a week? I have. It was hell.

I gave you a list of what to pack, provided a scale so you’d know if your bag weighed too much, and gave you dimensions for your bags. Omar packed a bag that successfully weighed over 100 lbs. The limit was 40 lbs. Christina packed a giant, ticking, old-fashioned alarm clock. The TSA thought it was a bomb and she almost missed the plane. On the way home, she did this again. No Zach, your tuba will not fit underneath the seat in front of you. It needed to be checked an hour ago.

Ronny, the band treasurer, brought $100 for food for the week. It was blown on souveniers and liquor (inmediately confiscated) before we even got on the plane. The seniors convinced Mike, the gullible freshman, to sit on the airplane toilet while he flushed. The suction made him walk funny for the next two hours. And again, the plane hasn’t even fucking landed.

The section leaders dropped water balloons from the 14th story of the hotel and hit the hotel manager with one, nearly getting us kicked out on day 1. The saxes threw their smallest member off their balcony and down two floors into the pool. He got a concussion and needed to be saved by a lifeguard. The boys floor threw a loud toga party, which I then had to go break up when hotel security called me at 3am. The drum majors tried to make grilled cheese on an iron in their room and clogged the iron with cheese. And we haven’t even gotten to the second day…

Sarah lost her t-shirt which somehow ended up on a hobo. She did not get it back. The trumpets daisy chained buckets of sand from the beach onto the hotel pool. Their parents got to pay to replace the pool’s filter and it was down for three days. After curfew, the chaperones and I would tape the hotel room doors shut so we’d know if they’d left their rooms. They bribed boys from the other band in the hotel to remove the tape and replace it later. The bribe? Blowjobs.

You guys can stay home next year.

6. “Bonding”

Our drum line would go ‘bonding’.

Before a parade/show they’d all chug an energy drink called cocaine. Then they’d each take a whole travel size gold bond extra strength bottle and dump it on their dick and balls. Then they’d go perform.

7. Drummer Delinquents

The correlation between being on drum line and being an absolute delinquent is dangerously close to 1. Our drum line stole an object from every show we went to, things like traffic cones and road signs. The rest of the band usually didn’t see this until they got off the bus back at our school.

8. Former Band Director

Former band director here.

• Sex in practice rooms.
• Drumline pissing in sousaphones.
• Dildo suctioned to floor and used as soprano sax stand.
• Trombone plunger stuck to a chest and ripped off to make a plunger-sized chest hickey.
• Vodka spray bottles on trombone slides to keep them from freezing.
• Clarinet deep throating.

I’m sure there’s more.

9. Metal Anus

As a trumpet player, there was always that one kid that zoned out and started tonguing their mouthpiece like some kind of metal anus. Nothing like looking over and seeing your buddy pleasuring his trumpet while staring slack-jawed in the distance as the clarinets go over their section for the umpteenth time.

10. Mortal Kombat Except For Real

I never joined my high school band (unfortunately), but my senior year I hung out with them a lot because my best friend was a band kid. Anyways, I walk into the band room during lunch and some guys are playing the Mortal Kombat theme and some people are fighting each other. Like, legit fighting.. but in a playful way? But I’ll never forget the sight of one of the bigger kids picking up a smaller guy, and slamming him onto the ground as hard as he could.

11. Hagrid-esque

We had a kid who played tenor sax who was quite a character. He was this huge, Hagrid-esque, really burly guy with a huge beard… like this man could easily pass for 30 or 35. Anyway, to get people hyped up, he would do this dance (I guess that’s the best term to describe it) where he would put his saxophone above his head, squat down, and run around screaming his own name. It was super weird, but it did get the crowd excited.

12. Porn Re-enactment

After a competition the concession stand was selling food super cheap. Some people in my band decided to buy bags of hotdog and hamburger buns for like 75 cents. When they got to the bus we started throwing them out of our windows to kids from another band that were Parked beside us. That wasn’t the weird part though. About an hour into the ride home someone had the idea to take pictures of use reenacting porn using the buns. We would hold the hotdog buns like dicks and use the hamburger buns like tits and asses, we called it “bunfunking”. Band was fucking weird.

13. “We Know”

When band kids see other band kids on campus…we just give each other “the look”.

Because no one knows.

But we know.

14. Panda Costume

We were all climbing into the buses, heading home after our state competition. We’re all ready to go, but one of the directors realized a kid was missing when they were taking roll. A few minutes later, the missing kid comes flying out of the hotel.

Wearing a panda costume.

15. So Much Theft

My band wasn’t excessively sexual or anything, but we often got in trouble for our shenanigans. Band kids would steal giant character posters from movie theaters and place them around the band room. The band room ceiling and some walls were pegboard (used to be workshop room) and kids would throw pencils into the holes. Pencils were eventually banned because one fell and stabbed a flute’s hand during practice. Along the same line, gummy bears were banned because we’d lick and stick them on everything. I have a picture of one of our beautiful structures we’d always set up. And one student would steal lunch trays and, unfortunately I don’t have a picture but, he wore an armor suit of them for Halloween.

The strangest thing, however, was my senior year Drum Major, Chris. He was close to my boyfriend and dated (recently married!) my best friend so I often heckled him and he’d lift his fist as if to hit me. I started doing it back. Eventually, other students started to raise their fists to him, too. And it began leaking out of the band until the majority of students (and some faculty) casually lifted their fists to Chris’ presence around school. It was a weird cult, he even had students making posters.

Actually, he attended his little brother’s graduation and students Chris doesn’t even know lifted their fists to him. It’s still ongoing.

16. “I Miss Band”

In my high school band, the band kids would have sex in the practice rooms. Which, by the way, had completely transparent glass doors. I’d just be walking by, minding my own business with my mellophone, and see the snare drum lead’s bread-white ass in the air as he pounded some poor flute player next to the piano.

I miss band.

17. Taps Was Played, Poems Read

Some band people won two goldfish at a county fare and we kept them in my locker because I had a big instrument. We took care of them and they lasted two whole months where they perished in a water changing accident. They died on April 20th of course.

We had a funeral for them after school later in the week, we hyped it up and advertised it around and something 40 kids and 3 teachers from all over the school were in attendance. Taps was played and poems were read. We popped bagged air as a 3 gun salute. Occasionally, years later you still find flowers on their graves every so often.

18. Things That Cannot Be Unseen

I have a few. I’ve been marching color guard for 6 years now. Holy shit, have I seen things.

As a disclaimer, I am a straight man.

I saw a straight up 9/10 guard girl running while trying to avoid having coffee shits in her compression shorts one time.

One of my strangest experiences was at an audition camp for Spirit of Atlanta, a drum corps. After a long day of dancing and spinning my dick off, the weekend before finals, no less, I make my way to the showers. We were at Luella High School, a sad, sad little GA school in the middle of fucking nowhere. I walk into the locker room to be greeted by a line of roughly 50 naked dudes waiting for the showers. Just chilling, dicks flopping about in the breeze like a yard full of those fake flamingos. So I avoid eye contact with any of the flesh rockets and move deeper into this tribal cave of dicks and man funk, and catch a glimpse of the showers themselves.

It is permanently stuck in my brain.

There were maybe 10-15 dudes in there. There were maybe 9 showerheads. These guys are all vets, and spent the previous summer bussing around the country doing this shit. And they are so blissful. They are slapping each other’s asses, throwing suds, the whole nine yards. But the detail that sticks out the most? The thing that haunts me through the haze of steam and sexualized cleansing?

They were singing pirate shanties.

I noped out of there and decided to just be dirty and keep my timbers un-shivered.

Oh, and the next summer, marching with Alliance, one kid ate a banana out of someone else’s ass. Drumline. Oh, and some girl drank her own piss.

19. Spoiled Milk

My junior year of High School our drummer put a small pint of milk in the cabinet to grab after practice. (You know, no drinks in the band room.)

Several weeks/months later he discovered it and was offered money to open it, in full awareness/view/knowledge of our band director, which he did. Then more money was hypothetically tossed in the hat to drink it. After smelling it, and that WHOLE HALF OF THE BAND ROOM gagging on the smell alone he took a large swig.

Not 3 seconds later he vomited all over the carpet. Then followed some of the clarinet and flute players vomiting right there in the band room. It was the most horrendous thing ever. It was just a cascade of vomit and horrid smells.

We didn’t practice in there for two weeks while they fumigated and removed the carpet.

20. Pickles

I was in marching band all throughout high school. The color guard at my school always had something odd to do that changed with every competition. One day, we finish up at a competition and get back on the bus. People start smelling something funny, and we all look back. The color guard had bought 7 or 8 jars of pickles, and were just eating tons of pickles. There were only about 12 of them… And they at all of them. That was an odd bus ride.

21. Under The Bleachers

I saw two kids having sex under the bleachers at a football game. While they were going at it, the girl was also sticking her flute in the guy’s tuba bell. Literally.

22. Pentagrams To Scare The Freshmen

Too many things:

Drawing pentagrams on your chest during bus rides to scare freshmen.

Hitting around oranges with a tennis racket during lunch till they explode all over the practice room.

Trowing trash into the ceiling while chanting as a pregame ritual.

Stealing tuba and baritone mouthpieces putting your penis in them and then returning them to their owners to unknowingly play.

Stealing bricks from other highschools. We once stole 12 bricks at a competition and then traded a few of them to the bus beside us for food. This is how we started stealing stuff.

Stealing direction signs a maps from competitions to confuse people.

A kid stole eggs from a birds nest and put them in his vibe before world finals at WGI as a good luck charm.

One time we had a really long third quarter break because a football player was injured. A kid stole a pickle jar from the concession stand and drank all the pickle juice. The band parents spent the rest of the game trying to find out whose band bag it was stached in. (They didn’t find it.)

Taking of all your clothes except underwear on the bus because its hot.

Kids peed in a bottle on the back of the bus because they forgot to use the restroom.

Smoking before big games.

Being the only sousaphone not dancing in a big conglomerate band at a bowl game on national television.

People stripping in the instrument room.

Dropping LSD before sight reading a LGPE.

Getting brand new contras and then claiming as your own by slapping your penis on it.

The drumline initiation involving being pushed into the corner of the drumroom and the one of the dudes droping his nutsack in your forehead.

Peeing in a tuba mute.

Things getting sexual on bus rides.

Looking back I did some messed up stuff but this was in a big 200 person BOA band so its not just small bands that do weird stuff. Also I was the tuba section leader.

23. If You Want Something Done You Go To A Band Kid

My band plays for my high school’s graduation out on the football field. Now during Graduation all students are searched before they can go out the field. Well the band didn’t have to get searched until after one incident…

When a band kid snuck in a blow up sex doll in their instrument case and that graduating class proceeded to bounce it around the crowd.

Suffice to say, the band gets searched now too.

24. Get Em, Dee Dee

When I was a freshman, there was a senior girl that we will call Dee Dee. She was a super loud, obnoxious , massive, ugly as sin, and brash but somehow had this lovable charm that no one could resist. Everyone liked or at least tolerated her. One day some of us were hanging out in the band hall a Friday afternoon before a game, when a mellophone junior who was kind of a clown but not necessarily a bad guy said “I wonder what kissing Dee Dee is like.” Everyone stared in shocked silence as the (wo)man, the myth, the legend herself appears seemingly out of thin air and says something along the lines of “pucker up, white boy” as she fuckin throws him to the ground and straddles him, leaning over to satiate this poor man’s curiosity. Keep in mind the poor kid is like 110 pounds at this point in his life. It’s a bit fuzzy after that, but I remember him being mortified for weeks.

25. Band Busses, It’s Where Fingering Happens

Someone pissed into the sousaphone my sophomore year. That was uncool.

Our bus one broke down once and we played catch in a rest stop area with a road flare from the emergency kit.

There was a lot of touching going on during road trips to games or marching competitions. Parents, if you have band kids there’s a good chance they’ll end up fingering another band kid on a bus.

26. You Be My Pole And I’ll Be Yours

On a band trip, I mentioned how I wish the bus were a party bus so we could dance on the striper pole. This 9/10 girl looked at me and said that she’ll be the pole and I’ll be the stripper. So she stood up and pushed her hands against the roof, and then I danced. We then switched, so she was the stripper and I was the pole, and it was rad. Then a senior percussionist from the back strips on me, and then we switch so I’m the stripper and he’s the pole. And at this point, everyone’s lookin, so I throw my shirt off. Cheers comin from everywhere. So that’s probably the strangest thing.

27. Baby Baritone

The ritual of the Baby Baritone.

At my high school, right before we went on at halftime, the baritone section would kidnap one of us mellophone players without us noticing, would circle around them and chant “BABY BARITONE! BABY BARITONE!” for about thirty seconds while the Mello in the middle just stood there scared and confused (I personally never got kidnapped, it usually happened to younger mellophone a). It was considered a good luck ritual to bring victory to the football team, and for the most part it worked.

28. Something “Big”

Played tenor sax and alto in high school. Had heard rumblings of something “big” going on for our winter concert that night. Girl who played baritone sax that night goes for her solo. Sprays liquid shit all over the clarinet section and herself. Someone had shit in the baritone. An amazing performance.

29. Oh, The Games They Play

I went to this really weird ass band camp when I was 11. We played a lot of fucked up games there but the one that leaps to mind is Huckle Buckle (You have a partner, and you’re supposed to run to them and touch different body parts depending on what the leader calls out). It started off okay and then it got into stuff like “forehead to butt” and eventually “tongue to teeth”.

Either that or the one where they made us stand waist deep in food garbage & mud and ask us questions, which if we got wrong, they would dump the muddy liquid in our hair.

30. Dad Has A Bad Day

A friend of mine got caught blowing her boyfriend on an overnight bus trip. It was the band director that caught them. Her dad was the band director.

31. That’s Enough Internet For Today

One of my drumline buddies took an “upper decker lower plopper” which is when you suspend yourself above the toilet by hanging your arms and legs on the tops of the stall walls, and shit. Your asshole is about 5 feet above the actual toilet so accuracy is critical. We had half the drumline in that little bathroom cheering him on. It was magical.