Saturday, November 6, 2010
If there's one adjective that describes our band, besides "awesome," it would probably be "way too competitive." You know the guy who is super competitive about everything and gets a little too worked up when playing tiddlywinks? Well, we're like that, but we're a band. In fact, each of us on an individual level is completely reasonable. Get us together, however, and we're super competitive (and not in a cool way).
For example, we heard there was another band playing after us at the last show, and just as we were about to end our set, we challenged them to an impromptu battle of the bands. They declined because they said they were just there to "play during their designated time slot" and that we were "just trying to hog the stage," and that they "didn't want to embarrass us." Well, even though we ignored them and kept playing long after our time slot ended, our competitive nature probably ended up working against us, as we found that when we returned to our van, they had spray-painted the windows black and slashed our tires. But that's not important.
Last week we were placed in an uncomfortable position when our competitive nature was met with an ethics issue. We found out that Jes, our high-school-aged guitar player couldn't make it to a gig because he was moonlighting in another band and their gig was the same day! We were all very upset, confused, frightened and infuriated/nauseous at first, but then we found out that it was his high school marching band, and Jes would be playing the trumpet.
Well, we didn't know what to do. Normally, we would have challenged the rival band to some sort of choreographed dance-off in an alley or a footrace at high noon... but this was different. Obviously we have a moral code in our band (I don't want to get into it, but it's a pretty thorough and strict moral code) that disallows us from competing in any way with a high school marching band. But between you and me, there are also like, 100 people in that band, which makes any sort of physical confrontation out of the question, and choreography is totally their thing.
So long story short, we decided to let Jes play in the marching band and we played the gig without him, though we sent a very unsavory and anonymous note to the band director.
I think in the end, we learned a lesson. Not sure, but I bet we did. Anyway, random thought... if you're like me and your mind can't keep from going back to the earlier comment about tiddlywinks, here's a great resource to answer any of your questions: http://www.tiddlywinks.org/.
