Where do old band geeks go ... to live?

The people in this photo are elementary school teachers, engineers, government contractors, news reporters, retirees, lawyers, nurses, housewives, retail workers, and software engineers ages 24 to 78. Every Wednesday evening they gather in the band room of a high school in a Washington, D.C. suburb, leaving behind for the day their jobs, kids, spouses, and cares, to play music for two hours. When band is over, they head across the street to the local bar for nachos and pitchers of Yuengling and Fat Tire.

Talk about a Hump Day.

Ten years ago Jeff retired after 28 years of teaching at a local middle school, his chops gone, worn out by years of playing in local jazz bands. Forty years before that, a group of high school kids set the stage for community music in his hometown. They were looking for a place to play music in the summers and started showing up to play local gigs. So popular was this band that musicians rarely left. It became more elite and professional, leaving many area musicians with few good options for playing. And so the Main Street Community Band was formed to handle the waiting list. Would he be their director? The new musicians showed up to play two pieces with the regular band, worried about making fools of themselves, and in February 2019, sat for this photo, over 80 musicians strong.

The love of playing music never leaves some people, but in others it shows up in mid-life. Some of the band members found their kids’ saxophones and clarinets sitting mute and abandoned after the kid had grown and moved out. Echoes of the sounds of a clarinet that only memory can hear, missing the child she sat waiting for outside a teacher’s studio for years, and wanting to break that silence drove Mary Ann to find her own teacher and figure out how to make the instrument sing for her now.

The clarinet section waits a few seconds before turning their heads to see whose trumpet is playing, ringing with clarity and soul, and it’s Tom, a wiry 75-year old with a full head of shocking white hair, the former engineer, or Joe, the young personal trainer and software engineer, or the new guy who moved from New Jersey and wanted a musical place to land.

Sometimes the percussion section is depleted. One of the biggest jokes in community band is that they are all looking for percussionists, and then one day the band director receives an email with a YouTube link from Peggy from Taiwan, demoing her master’s degree percussion recital from SUNY Stonybrook. She just moved to D.C. with her husband. Will he take her into the section? Are you kidding? And every week, Cora shows up, either by Uber or by carpooling because once again her truck has broken down. But Sears gives her Wednesday nights off to play the timpani, and she wouldn’t miss it for anything.

One evening a young man with autism shows up with his mom, a retired Navy Colonel battling melanoma from a career in the sun. It’s her fourth attempt to find a band who will take her son. He’s loud, he rocks in his chair, he panics when break doesn’t come at exactly 8:55 pm. But he never loses his place in the music, even as the other clarinetists drift off. He helps them find their way back.

Another mom needs to get away from her worries about her son who struggles in school, away from the bus stop yammering of other parents who worry obsessively about their children getting an A-. But at band, you can’t talk with an instrument in your mouth, and so she tunes in to her musical neighbors, matching pitch, and following their fingering from the corners of her eyes. All in harmony.

A group of widows who lost their husbands in the 10 years since the band was formed meet at 6pm before practice for 90 minutes to order frozen margaritas. The table fills up one musician at a time as they emerge from their Beltway commutes. They know what each other drinks so they order ahead, with salt or without, the shared fish tacos … with cilantro or without.

When the music stops, the chairs get stacked, the percussion rolled into the corner, and the stands packed away. The parking lot empties, as a line of cars rolls across the street to the bar that’s open until midnight.

See you next week. Repeat to measure #1.