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I have a very nice story about Mr.Cook. This goes back to when Blast was touring. My wife and I were taking a weekend trip to Hershey Park. We saw Blast was playing at the Hershey Theater. Figured, while we were there,it would be great to see it again. Problem was,the performances were sold out. Tried everything to find tickets. Nothing. I sent an email to Mr. Cook's attention at his medical company,explaining the situation and asking if he knew anyway we could buy tickets for Saturday night. Got an email back from him,saying there would be 2 tickets for us at the box office. Called the theater to find out what they would cost. We were told they were V.I.P. seats and that there was no charge. Wrote back to Mr. Cook and told him thank-you and that we would be donating the cost of the tickets to our favorite corps.

I’ve been working from my kitchen table in my robe since March 16. I can’t get LESS comfortable. I wonder if my car will start? P.S. I am wearing pants today though. In case you were wondering. I hear there’s been a bit of a problem in Maryland - people making trips to the mailbox not wearing pants.

some are already selling them

I went to the grocery store today for three items. While I was cleaning my friend’s house yesterday, I let Jim ordered the groceries. He bought wings for Saturday movie night but no chunky blue cheese dressing. So....I brought some disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer and my vogmask and off I went. It was 6:45am and there were probably three customers in the store. There are arrows on the floor for one-way aisles and six-foot markers at the checkouts. I thanked everyone working at the store (from a safe distance) and I was on my way. Be nice to them.

My car has been parked under the same tree for a month. It’s white. Pretty sure it used to be silver.

I am guessing that most of these instructors, as in other corps I’m more familiar with, work 1 week or so in the summer and a couple spring camps and get a stipend that barely covers their transportation costs to show up. Calling them “employees” is quite the stretch. They are contract employees getting 500 bucks to tech for a week...

I was thinking. In retrospect, that Scouts show with oxygen tanks and face masks was way ahead of its time.

Only teeth work my guy did not do was pull the wisdom teeth. I was 41 and when he saw the length of the root it was “you want to be knocked out for this”. Followed by “as long as you’re going to be out, think about getting them all pulled”. The worst was getting a filling redone and hearing “ uh oh”. Went from filling to root canal in 10 seconds. 😫

Endodontists are great. Easiest root canal I ever had.

Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois. DCM championship was in Toledo one year.

I arranged a percussion feature for the GSC corps the King’s Regiment back in 1977 using a short section of a nautical piece Jack Pratt suggested it, and he played it for me from his massive record collection when I was at his home back in late 76. i wrote it for brass quintet and percussion. The younger judges dug it, but some of the older drum judges said it did not count because it had a little brass in it. Jack would go at those judges in critique like crazy! I forget the name of the piece, sad to say. My all time favorite opener is Crown Imperial. I arranged it for my band in 78 as our opener.

Mr. Cook, through the Cook Group, financially supported a lot of drum corps and DCI. He did it quietly, and didn't ask for any recognition.

We don't really have to guess about the budget, their 990 is on Charity Navigator. In 2017 their total revenue was $2,114,011 $210k came from donations/grants $1.2mil came from the corps camp fees, membership fees, and show fees $231k came from Bingo $163k came from fundraising events $333k came from some kind of inventory sale In terms of expenses $84k went towards officers/directors/etc compensation (Almost all of this is the $82k salary of David Glasgow) $177k went towards other salaries/wages with another $55k towards benefits/payroll taxes $705k went towards travel $419k was considered to be "other fees for services" from non-employees, given the low salary number this probably includes show design and instructors? $194k was bucketed under depreciation Their total "program" expenses were $1.7mil with another $300k in administrative/management expenses

My daughter & granddaughter made me a tie-dye face mask. I have seen a Star Wars stormtrooper helmet w/ integral face mask as well.

Misinformation on your part. Asia has been wearing masks going back to probably before your time. Japan for example was mostly due to allergies. Sars had nothing to do with it. https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/why-do-japanese-people-wear-surgical-masks/ https://qz.com/299003/a-quick-history-of-why-asians-wear-surgical-masks-in-public/ The custom of facemask-wearing began in Japan during the early years of the 20th century, when a massive pandemic of influenza killed between 20 and 40 million people around the world—more than died in World War I. There were outbreaks of the disease on every inhabited continent, including Asia (where it devastated India, leading to the deaths of a full 5% of the population). Covering the face with scarves, veils and masks became a prevalent (if ineffective) means of warding off the disease in many parts of the world, until the epidemic finally faded at the end of 1919.

Might have been Canadian Brass? I believe they did a concert series with them as part of their Brass Theater program.

My response is posted. It is not a rebuttal of the entire novel, or even any whole chapter therein. But feel free to let me know what you think. And so do I. Please be mindful of social distancing recommendations. We must stay at least six feet apart, and faces will be partially covered.

So Brass is the brown/red line (soloists are purple), while the green is the Guard. Drums are in the blue box. The tan are the featured Guard performers.

Maybe there is a point being made that instead of hiding in DCP anonymity, you step up with your response directly, without anonymity. I don’t feel the fear being struck as no one could strike that much fear in me, using just words.

I fail to see the threat. There’s no “or else”. And if you do rebut this, I hope you will have the balls to tell me face to face at Finals, if there ever is another Finals.

AFAICT Crown will make it through to next season but there are definitely corps in the top 12 who may not. But that doesn't mean the corps is done for ever and ever. I suspect most/all would be able bounce back after taking the 2021 season off. All that aside - GIVE, GIVE, GIVE! If you love your corps, support them now when they most assuredly need your support.

Standing-O! EDIT: I have retracted the rest of this reply. Upon reflection, I was too aggressive. Apologies all around.

But it's not false or disingenuous at all. It's what would happen if business as usual went on. And yes, some people were advising just that. Herd immunity! I quoted a DCP poster who said that it was ridiculous that all "sporting and entertainment events [were] cancelled, [and] schools [were] closed" in response to COVID19. That person's reasoning? Swine Flu killed 12,000 Americans *over the course of a year* and we didn't do those things. (Though there were some very limited small-scale closures.) And that was before stay-at-home orders were issued in most places. That person wasn't responding to those measures but was complaining that even just shutting down events and schools was too much -- apparently even if they were to save as many as 12,000 lives. Now we've seen COVID19 has killed more than 30,000 Americans in 47 days, and we're on our way to reach twice that number. (The past 24 hours have the most deaths yet. Also, while New York has finally done the right thing and started to record *some* of the large number of people, vastly exceeding the daily average of the past five years, who died at home but were never tested, most jurisdictions still are not doing this, so the real death count still exceeds the official count by a fair bit. And yes, comparisons like that are the way that these things are normally counted. That Swine Flu count was calculated after the fact by comparing to previous years' averages, not by counting each death that had tested positive in real time.) Some hospitals are right at their breaking points. Bodies are piling up in spare rooms. (Seriously. I can provide pictures if necessary.) A fair number of doctors and nurses have fallen ill or died. (Not something that normally happens because of the flu!) They're wearing garbage bags because they ran out of protective equipment. But in the hardest-hit jurisdictions, so far, we seem to have done *just barely enough* to avoid cause health care collapses. One recently discovered fact helped: ventilators are less helpful than had been believed. (They're still needed, just not as much as expected.) People whose blood oxygen levels have dropped so low that all the books and training says they ought to be on ventilators are often better off without, because of the weird way this strange virus acts in the lungs. But again: we're going to have five times as many deaths from this outbreak, in one-fourth the time, as we did for Swine Flu. And those are 60,000 souls *on top of* those who died from the flu this year. The one disease didn't replace the other. And all of that happened even though we imposed extensive social distancing measures. It would be so much worse if we hadn't! This is just baffling: when some people here claimed that COVID19 was being overhyped ("get back to me in two or three weeks", said someone here in the last week of February) because the swine flu was worse, or the regular flu season (in which 60,000 deaths is a bad year) is worse, even though both of those claims have proved to be false, that wasn't worth disputing. But when other people here warned that it was going to be much worse, and then when they noted that subsequent events bore those predictions out, that's somehow misleading. That burgundy line on the chart is what would happen had we done nothing. (Which would lead to somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million Americans dead, by the way. Yes, that's a big uncertain spread, because there's lots we just don't know about this virus yet.) That "efforts start working" point on the chart? If we're lucky, that's where we are right now, in terms of the death toll. Or we may be just a bit to the right, just past that inflection point. What you seem to be proposing is that the efforts taken to this point weren't worthwhile, because once we reached this point, we could now take all the measures that are helping us bend the curve. Or alternatively you seem to believe that people would have taken sufficient steps on their own to match the official policies, and those would have been good enough to get us here. If that's what you mean, I don't think it's true. Had we taken the social distancing steps we did take just *one week earlier*, we probably could have cut the death toll by half. And that obviously didn't happen, whether officially or not. What are those 30,000 American lives worth? We probably ought to decide, because it needs to be a factor in how and when we reopen (and thus ultimately how 2021 plays out for DCI).

I’m covering my roots with some spray-on stuff.

Jim was in Japan in the 80’s in the Marine Corps and he said taxi drivers and bank tellers always wore white gloves. And he saw a lot of masks. He said if someone had a cold, they’d wear a mask. He said they are extremely polite people. He loves Japan.

It is very impressive and that's what Drum Corps should be. These over-produced, Broadway-wannabe, budget-bloated shows are killing the activity except for a select few.

I think 2019 Bluecoats (with both endings) was worth every penny.

Fee's do seem very out of control BUT feed, house, transport from sometime in May to Aug. it's cheap. I have friends that spent more to have their kid be a dancing bumble bee in a dance recital . I also have taught in the old days so to speak as well as now, When I started one staff person had to know how to basically do everything. NOT today. Even to have a very small winter program ( size wise ) is nothing like back in the day. I have spent thousands just trying to find a space to practice. Nothing is the way it was. Should it be? ok debatable, Can it be? NO!

todays member.....it is 2020 member ...2021? Back in the day if they told us shut up and sit in the corner....we did If they told us to push the death trap of a bus we rode on...we did it If they fed us dunkin donuts and orange soda and called it breakfast.....we ate it different world these past several decades

Here is another look at what a fine gentleman Mr. Cook was. In the early days of Star, when DCM (Drum Corps Midwest) was in its heyday, there were a number of DCM shows in Kansas. Being a week plus "tour" of contests, the judges panel needed to be switched out a bit to enhance feedback, and inputs to the group of corps. The logistics of moving the panel in and out were beyond the budget of DCM to manage. Mr.Cook "lent" his jet to DCM to fly in "replacement" judges and take the others back to Milwaukee. As far as I know, this was all at his own expense in support of the DCM organization. As one of those judges, I was amazed and awed by the generosity he extended. Is there anyone currently in the activity to match??????

Several lower-division corps based whole shows off that music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The one that sticks in my mind is Lone Star, who made division III finals with it in 1994.

Mine does root canals, but sends me to a root canal specialist for the trickier cases. (I was raised in a home without dental floss and have bad teeth.) Ever hear of the tip of a drill breaking off inside a tooth? That happened to me. Has a corps ever played any Little Shop songs?

Annnd back to 1200+ new cases in last 24 hours..... (27k+ total and fifth highest in country). Please don’t get too comfortable folks..... gonna be a while

Good one! I use my real name to help keep myself under control. The reality is, if any Drum Corps Planet poster finds themself in the Allentown Area, I’ll probably buy their drinks and dinner!

They do wear masks. Goes back for almost who knows how long. I lived there for 4 years. My wife is Japanese. Previous to SARS or swine flue / bird flu - almost all of the mask wearing in Japan was sick people not wanting to spread their germs. Now it is both protective and prevention. The white gloves is for many jobs even for elevator operators that is still a thing in most upscale department stores. Always very pretty women have that job. 🙂

Face masks..... New corps item at sovie tables?

Brass Theater

The Times obit is from 2011. I never met Bill personally, but had taught his son's previous corps. He was quite generous and understood the "big picture" of the activity. When a rival corps to Star that I worked with in the mid-80s ran into transportation difficulties on the road, he stepped in to personally ensure the remainder of their tour.

He sent a CD to me in the 90’s of Star with the brass group whose name escapes me right now. Nice man. Salt of the earth. No pretension from him.

DCP, Hungary, 1241: "Man, we've gotta open the gates." -"We've been through this, Phil. The Mongols are still outside." "But I've gotta harvest my turnips." -"MONGOLS" "Ugh. But we've been in here or WEEKS." -"That's how sieges work, Phil." "But the Mongols have barely killed anyone in days." -"That's because of the walls, Phil." "Are you sure? Maybe the Mongols aren't that dangerous." -"..." "I'm just saying, how bad could it be. They can't kill ALL of us" -"That is literally the thing they do." "But my turnips..." (source) - - - - - - - - - - Back then I probably would have been Phil, though.

Efforts start working line looks like ye olde elevator drill for the drum line....

May not be the right color, but would spray paint work as a substitute? 'Cause I got some...

I thought LOS was gonna crumble on finals night.

The problem with that meme-graph is that the burgundy line is disingenuously false. No society with enough scientific consciousness to draw these curves would EVER just proceed up the exponential course of "business as usual". Some degree of prevention and precautions were inevitable, and they began voluntarily. Social distancing, masks, reduction of non-essential travel, work-at-home, stay-at-home, scaring everyone with misguided estimates... all these efforts were started by individuals and businesses on their own initiative, in reaction to conditions in their communities. The more such fallacious graphs we see, the more we question the wisdom behind them.

and paper towels and Middleswarth chips

Zoom is also becoming popular. then again someone sent me a screenshot tonight where he compared himself to Mandela

Being American is not ethnocentric! There are no ethnic Americans. It's not gross to love one's country or origin over others. In fact, it's the sineu that binds us. It's the reason most people on the planet want to come here.

Hmmmm, let me think about it...NO! Give the age-outs this year another year in DCI assuming there's one to come back to.