Jd83

I'm hoping to go, but it's not looking good right now.

Last weekend, alumni of the 1981 Louisiana Southernaires celebrated the 30th anniversary of our winning the DCI Class A Championship. This is our US Open group pic. And those of us who were able to make the reunion. One of us came from as far as Australia to attend. How the Southernaires formed and won Class in a four month period still amazes me. I wrote about it here. Today in 1981 - The DCI Class A Finals

I'm catching this late, so congrats to Minnesota Brass for winning Prelims and congrats to the Kilties and Tampa Bay Thunder for making Finals!! And of course: Geaux CorpsVets and Alliance!!

I'm no fan of Spirit, but MAN, they have a great show this year. I saw them in Lafayette and Hattiesburg. After both shows, I found myself saying I'd gladly listen to the 2011 Spirit of Atlanta on my mp3 player. Job well done guys!! Good luck tonight!!

Good luck!! Hope this venture is successful!!

Good luck to you!!

The 1979 Bleu Raeders and Stardusters. There was even more talent in those two corps than when they merged in 1981 to form the 1981 DCI Class A Champion Louisiana Southernaires. If they would have merged in '79, they could have done pretty well in Open Class, maybe even crack the Top 20. A lot of those members moved on in later years to the Memphis Blues, Garfield Cadets, Crossmen, and Phantom Regiment.

Good point on the rights issue. That would open a can of worms DCI would not want to deal with.

I'm sure there is some kind of demand for old DCI Prelims and big regional shows. You can include Class A, All Girl, and the other classifications. For example, I was recently asked if I had an audio recording of the 1980 Long Island Kingsmen show. A Ken Kobold recording exists for them that year. There were a lot of good non-DCI Finalist shows, a lot of them not in the top 25. And I'm sure the DCI Fan Network could change the website to accommodate the audio recordings. If Kobold made a recording of it, I would love a recording of our 1982 DCM Runoff performance.

They could digitize the old recordings and sell downloads of them through the DCI Fan Network.

When I was in the Phantom Regiment, we fought dry mouth by biting down on lemon quarters before going on the field. It worked for us.

Other than the Bleu Raeders, since I'm an alum, I miss the Guardsmen and North Star.

My Twitter handle is jd488. I do sports history factoids (Today in...), last place updates for baseball, football, and basketball, and the occasional drum corps entry. Not enought characters to do a "Today in..." entry the way I want to for drum corps, though.

I remember and also remember hoping to make it that far when I was marching in Class A. Unfortunately, it's almost prohibitively expensive to field a junior corps today.

The 2008 show didn't tell the real story like the 1981 and 1982 shows did, so narration was unnecessary. Back then, a couple of staff members wore togas and handed out librettos. Even with two 13 minute shows, more time was needed to tell the story. Regardless of the way the story was told, I loved the 2008 show.