The senior fifers in my corps at present consist of six front- and second-line musicians. Of these, I am the only girl, and an adult. The others are all fourteen- and thirteen-year-old boys, including my little brother, who fiddle around with the Star Wars theme (on fife) and are very energetic. Our instructor is a sophisticated and very quiet young woman who color-coordinates her dress and jewelery and who, when the entire corps is drilling together, will stand with the other instructors and not comment.
Bit of a strange group? Yeah. But in our defense...we're pretty good musicians.
For the past few weeks, we've had an interesting breakout of a strange behavior - hysterical laughing. It all started with these goats and...never mind. The long and short of it is, we think everything is funny. The instructor will go upstairs and we'll form into a tableaux for when she gets back, or one of the boys will whip out his phone and turn on Lord of the Rings theme and we'll all pretend to be intently playing it, etc. We make fun of the fact that we're still practicing the standpiece we've had for two years, and we make fun of ourselves really thoroughly when we screw it up. We laugh at the fact we're rehearsing Christmas music and of how completely clear our instructor is that she is totally against playing Christmas music in September.
And she has, self-admittedly, just as much enjoyment in our rehearsals as we do, cracking jokes and laughing at statements that aren't really funny, because she knows that the rest of us will also laugh very hard. I know for a fact that she has been having a really bad year. She did, however, describe the rehearsals as the bright spot of her summer. For Monday nights, that's not bad.
We did not get through all the music we were supposed to rehearse last night. But thinking about when one of the boys took his sheet music and exclaimed "Ka-ZAM!" when placing it on the stand, I feel good about the fact that someone's mood is brightened by all this madness.
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