[nfbwatlk] Article about a marching band made up of blind students

[Kaye Kipp]

When I went to the Michigan School for the Blind, we marched.  One year we 
even did some fancy formations.  Oh well.  Good for them.

Kaye
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nightingale, Noel" <Noel.Nightingale at ed.gov>
To: <nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2011 9:01 AM
Subject: [nfbwatlk] Article about a marching band made up of blind students


>
> http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/6969144/rick-reilly-blind-marching-band
>
>
> The marching band you see in front of you is like a lot of them in Ohio. 
> They play the 1812 Overture. They form tricky patterns. They even dot the 
> "i" in Ohio.
>
> The only difference is, the "i" they form is in Braille, because this 
> marching band is blind.
>
> They're the Ohio State School for the Blind Marching Panthers and -- as 
> far as I can tell -- they're the only blind marching band in the world.
>
> Brian Rowan is one of the bass drummers. He's 12. He has a tumor behind 
> his eyes that has already taken the sight in his right eye and will soon 
> take his left. Doesn't keep him off the field.
>
> "I don't know why you guys cry so much," he told his parents -- Karl and 
> Shelly -- when he was diagnosed. "I'm still going to do all the things I 
> wanted to do. You watch."
>
> They did. Last Saturday. Standing right next to me at a high school 
> football game in Columbus, Ohio. Didn't help. Mom was still crying.
>
> Which is the exact reaction that OSSB's Carol Alger, the woman who thought 
> of this whole idea six years ago, doesn't want.
>
> "We don't want any 'Awwwwww's' when people see us play," she says. "We 
> want 'Ohhhhhh!'s'. We want people to be entertained. What we're trying to 
> do is show the amazing abilities of the disabled."
>
> They were pretty Ohhhhhhh! Saturday, sighted or non-sighted. (Some are 
> visually impaired, not blind.) Twenty-three members strong, they whirled 
> through four songs in nearly perfect pitch (a third of them have it) and 
> nearly perfect order. Nobody tripped. Nobody smashed into anybody else. 
> Nobody wound up in the parking lot.
>
> How do they keep from running straight into the goalposts, you ask?
>
> They're guided by 19 volunteer "marching assistants." Of course, a lot of 
> the time, the assistant is guided more by the band member than vice versa.
>
> "I had no idea where I was going," said marching assistant Daniel Cook, 
> 17, who plays trumpet in his own Franklin Heights (Ohio) High School 
> marching band. "Brian did most of the work."
>
> OK, so at one point half of them were swinging left on "Sweet Georgia 
> Brown" and the other half were swinging right. Nearly lost a few teeth 
> there. But, overall ...
>
> "Pretty good!" pronounced the band director, Dan Kelley, who's been blind 
> since birth. "We screwed up a couple little things. One group went out too 
> far, but the rest of the band sort of came to them."
>
> I blinked at him for a second or two.
>
> How could you know that?
>
> "Oh, I can hear them," Kelley says. "When they mess up with their feet, it 
> messes up their playing."
>
> Kelley is about as disabled as a road paver. He loves his chain saw. 
> Sometimes, when all the cars are gone from the school parking lot, he 
> likes to drive his buddy's car. With his buddy in it, of course.
>
> He once made it onto the famed Ohio State marching band, sans assistant. 
> "I was fine," says the trumpet-playing Kelley. "Just as long as I stayed 
> right between my two piccolo players."
>
> What was weird Saturday was that Kelley's heroes didn't get much applause 
> from the 200 or so people in the stands. This might be because they played 
> at a game involving two deaf football teams -- the Ohio School for the 
> Deaf vs. the Georgia School for the Deaf. Many of those in attendance were 
> probably deaf themselves.
>
> If you've never seen football played by deaf players, you should. The 
> football is exactly the same (a deaf team invented the huddle) except that 
> every now and then some tailback will go 80 yards because he never heard 
> the whistle. That happened twice Saturday. Also, it is eerily quiet, like 
> you're watching a game on mute. And being in a deaf football team's locker 
> room at halftime is louder than standing next to a 727. They bang on the 
> lockers with their helmets. They shriek. They usually have a big kettle 
> drum that they pound on. They get psyched up for the third quarter by 
> feeling all those vibrations.
>
> It was a very odd afternoon when you thought about it. Here were two deaf 
> football teams playing for a band that couldn't see them. Followed by a 
> band playing instruments for football teams that couldn't hear them.
>
> But the blind kids thrilled at the sounds of the crushing tackles. And the 
> deaf kids could see the snappy blue-and-red OSSB uniforms with the bright 
> red plumes in the hats. They could see the shiny sousaphones and tubas. 
> And of course, they could feel the vibrations of the big bass drums. In 
> the stands, the deaf fans wiggled jazz hands in glee.
>
> If they'd been at the Rose Parade last year in Pasadena, they could've 
> seen them marching in that, too. Six miles worth. A very cool week for 
> these kids, who range from 12 to 20. The day before, they got to touch all 
> the floats. Float builders kept bringing them seeds and sticks and flowers 
> to hold and feel and smell. Who gets to do that?
>
> Hang around this school long enough -- they have track (sprinters hold on 
> to guide wires) and wrestling (grapplers start out touching) and goal ball 
> (a kind of football) -- and you'll be blown away at what they can do.
>
> "I remember when he was born," says Jennifer Brandon, mother of band 
> member Billy, 15. "I thought, 'How will he ever be able to do anything?' 
> Well, this summer, we were both climbing an 8,000-foot mountain in New 
> Mexico. We got about halfway up, and I said, 'Billy, maybe we should 
> stop.' And he said, 'Mom, I can do this!' And I said, 'I know you can do 
> this. I can't do this!' I had to stop there, but he made it all the way."
>
> What do you give a kid who can dance 100 yards while playing a tuba and 
> climb mountains?
>
> Jazz hands.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nfbwatlk mailing list
> nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbwatlk_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nfbwatlk:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbwatlk_nfbnet.org/kkipp123%40msn.com
>