My Saved By The Bell Moment

**This is a repost from a year or so ago. My daughter is having some dental work today, please think good thoughts for her!**

I’ve been getting really into facebook lately, and I recently friended someone from high school that was on the drumline with me.

That’s right, I was a bona-fide band geek.

I lived for marching season, and it was straight up the most fun ever. Plus, I was pretty cute in that little green bucket hat.

Okay, now that we all know I was a complete dork. Let me tell you about my Saved By the Bell Bell Moment…

We had this drumline instructor that thought he was one cool cat. He had the long hair, he was always carrying drumsticks around in his back pocket. He’d played drums at a cool college, and now taught drums for Azle’s marching band. At the time, I didn’t realize that was probably NOT what he’d had in mind when he embarked on a career in music, and I thought he was just a hard ass. More realistically, he was probably just pissed his band never took off, and he was stuck doing the one thing he’d feared most–teaching high school band.

One rainy August morning, during band two-a-days (That’s right uber jocks, you weren’t the only ones beat down with two-a-days. We spent the first month before school started out in the blazing heat as well. I actually did it with a freaking bass drum strapped to me, so I don’t want to hear about your stupid pads and how hot they were. It sometimes got so hot in the sun that the metal actually burned me. Okay?) he had us bring our drums inside to practice, and we set up on the stage in the auditorium. He let us put our drums on stands, and that made for a pretty easy day as far as band practice was concerned.

We’d spent most of the morning goofing around and getting in trouble for it, because hey… this was band practice in the middle of our summer vacation, and that’s the sort of thing we did. Apparently we weren’t staying on tempo at all, and since that was basically our only job as a drumline, (okay there were other jobs, but you get the point.) he got the metronome. When we STILL weren’t staying on tempo… he went and got this ridiculous loud speaker and hooked it up to the metronome. It was mind piercingly annoying, and basically just a stupid form of torture, because he was so pissed about his less than rock star life.*

Anyway, after we finished our Taco Bell, and were hanging out on the stage waiting for him to get back from lunch, a few of us (read seniors and a couple of the cooler underclassmen) decided to hide the metronome and super loud speaker thing.

When Mr. Rock-Star-Wanna-Be-But-Never-Made-It came back and discovered his metronome was gone, his reaction was quite simply–priceless.

When I look back on this story. I can actually see the steam shooting out his ears.

He yelled for a while that we better give the stuff, and when we didn’t– he did what any pissed off teacher would do. He decided to torture it out of us. He made us put on our drums and forced us to play until we told him. Well, no one was saying a word. The rest of the drumline had watched us hide it, but they kept their mouth shut. Hiearchy was alive and well in the band hall, and they knew better than to piss us off.

After a good fifteen or so minutes of jamming away while the steam shot out of his ears he yelled for us to stop playing. He then informed us that he was going on a smoke break and when he returned, the metronome better be sitting back in its place.

We totally put the metronome back in its place. He was pissed, and we didn’t really want to see just how far he would go.

Well, that wasn’t good enough for him. He came back, yelled some more, and told us he wanted to know exactly WHO stole his precious metronome. What an ass. He’d promised to be cool if he got his metronome back, but apparently he’d lied.

So he made us put our drums back on and we started up again with his excruciating torture. What he didn’t realize was we were damming the man, and those drums had never felt lighter. He left the room again, this time with instructions that, when he came back, he’d be asking the perp to step up and admit to their actions, or his torture would continue.

Those of us that had actually hid the metronome convinced the rest of the drumline to go along with us, and we’d decided that we would all admit to stealing the metronome. I mean, he couldn’t kick us all off the line, right? It’s not like we were the flute section,** they needed us…

So, we scared the freshmen into siding with us decided as a group that when he asked for the metronome stealer to come forward, we’d all do it.

He came back in the room, still spitting mad, and asked one more time. “Who took the metronome?“

And we started raising our hands. One by one, the entire drumline raised their hands, confessing to our crime. I don’t know if it was the fact that the five or so of us that had actually stolen the metronome weren’t going to have to call our parents or the fact that we stood strong against an asshole teacher, but it was awesome.

He laughed, smiled, and shook his head. We were off the hook. Which was good, because Mr. Belding  surely would have given us some sort of hilariously inappropriate punishment along with months and months of after school detention. But, if Zach Morris happened to be waiting outside the principal’s office, it might have been worth it.

*Sorry, there buddy. When you chose this life, you knew there was only like a .02% chance you’d actually turn out to be a rock star. So get over it.

**Look, flutes are awesome, but they aren’t really a marching band instrument, ya know?