On Tuesday my brother and I started the day like normal by getting up an hour before everyone was required to be out of bed. We were both determined to be ready to go way before everyone else, a decision we had made purely so we could be first in line for food. The food provided at Summer Music Clinic is above average to say the least. We were served buffet style in one of the university's more modern cafeterias named Gordon Commons, and are allowed to fill our trays to whatever degree with all of kind of sustenance ranging from burgers to salads to chinese. The selection was a bit less exciting at breakfast time though, every American breakfast item you could think of but the variety limited itself to just that.
After Reez and I had both loaded our trays with cereal, chocolate milk, and some fried potatoes, we charged off to fight for a table on the first floor. We actually managed to obtain a decent dining area, right over by the exit and where all us instrumentalists were told to leave our big and heavy music making devices.
"So how was your first day?" I asked Reez as we sat down to eat and wait for our friends to make the nerve wracking journey across the hall to find us.
"Not great," he responded. "Zoe [Reez's girlfriend] has some class with the guy I did my audition for, and he used me as an example for what NOT to do in an audition. He said I could sing really well and act really well but the song I chose was to modern and had to much talking, and that that is why they put me in the lower musical theater group."
"That sucks." I replied, unable to think of a better response. To be honest this news didn't surprise me. Reez had done "Washington On Your Side" from the musical Hamilton, and even though Reez could sing the song fairly well (for a white guy), the likelihood of his group doing a song that had a rap in it was minimal to say the least. Plus Reez himself had said he wanted to the song for fun and not because he thought it would be a good piece to show his strengths in a musical sense. Eh, live and learn.
By now people had started to show up at our table, and since they were mostly Reez and my nerdy friends the conversation drifted to Dungeons and Dragons, a topic I was happy to tune out of to focus wholeheartedly on my cereal.
I had to leave all my meals earlier than everyone else. I didn't have to walk farther than anyone else, and all our classes started at the same time, I had just made the questionable decision to play Double-Bass in on of the Orchestras, and since there was nowhere to store our instruments I had to carry the largest and third heaviest instrument there is, only out done by the poor tubas players and the singular unfortunate harpist.
My first class of the day was concert band. I played percussion for this, and unfortunately there were more than enough percussionists at the camp, causing me to have to share parts with nine other people when the standard is to have four to six percussionists in a band. Because of this we all spent a fair chunk of time hiding in the back of the room sleeping or sitting on our phones. So even though our teacher was very good, band ended up being forgettable.
My next class of the day was orchestra.
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