The 31-Day Blog Challenge, Day Eight: True Colors

Today’s blog challenge writing prompt:

31 DAY BLOG CHALLENGE, DAY 8: An Old Photo of Me

This was me, for the first time wearing a uniform that wasn’t black and orange, the school colors of the Wayland Public Schools. For four years, I’d worn a band uniform consisting of (in various combinations) a black wool suit coat and pants, a white vinyl overlay with a big ol’ W on the front, and either a shako with a white plume or a black-and-white Marine Corps-style hat with a little orange “W” patch on the front.

Now, the school colors I was rooting for … well actually, I wasn’t even wearing those. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s colors are maroon and white, and as you can see, this particular shade of red was much closer to RED!!! than maroon. As a friend and colleague of mine once bellowed sotto voce (you had to be there, but that’s exactly what he did) before a UMass band show, “aaaaand now, the only school in New England that doesn’t wear its school colors!…”

(The slightly weird thing about attending a school whose colors were maroon and white … was that those were the colors of Wayland’s heated-Thanksgiving-football-rival school, the Weston Public Schools. (Hssss!))

I was already excited about the newness, and the fact that I was in a band of 230 people – the equivalent of having my entire graduating high school class [1] in band and [2] excited about being in band. I had this unspecific but definite sense that this was a brave new world I was about to get into.

I had no idea how right I was.

But I knew that for taking pictures, the light was much better … OUTSIDE!

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