Ohio (part 3, the musical portion)

Before I get to part 3 I just want to say up front that I have a part 4 planned as well, but it seems that ImageShack is being persnickety and not allowing me to access certain previously uploaded photos. I'm having to delete the ones in question—that appear to be there even though I can't actually access them—and re-upload them. This is extremely frustrating, not to mention time consuming over dialup, of course. This is not the first time I've had weird ImageShack problems. It's enough to make me consider trying PhotoBucket or blogger.com's own image uploading procedure or some other alternative, but that's something to look into at a later date. Anyway, with these current difficulties, I can make no promises as to when part 4 will show up. That being said, here's part 3...
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My final weekend in Ohio was an opportunity to spend a couple days at my cousin's home in Cincinnati just relaxing. Dave & Lana's daughter Erin is the piccolo player in her high school marching band—although she originally played flute before being asked to fill the piccolo opening when the previous player graduated.

Until I visited Ohio, I never truly grasped just exactly how big high school football—and anything related to it—is there. Back home in New Jersey, high school football gets noticed mostly just for the big Thanksgiving homecoming games and that's about it. But in Ohio, every weekend gets significant media coverage across the state. I'm not sure how I feel about that as I think sports at that level should be all about the fun and sportsmanship more so than the actual competition (but I guess that's neither here nor there, as they say—just my opinion).

High school marching band competitions are also a big deal. That saturday there was one across the state border in Indiana. Erin's band's program was entitled "Rings." There were three black shrouded scaffolds which when unveiled revealed the ring symbols of A) a three-ring circus, B) two wedding rings, and C) the five Olympic rings. There was corresponding music to go with all three. The band ended up placing third overall in the competition (out of nine bands), but the general opinion in the stands seemed to be that the winning band was not all that much better (if at all). Regardless, it was a new and enjoyable experience for me.

The first two pics show the initial setup and the band's emergence as the program starts. In the third pic Erin is actually in the very front of the players on the 30-yard line. The rest are just a few more shots in the afternoon performance, plus a couple from the after-dark second performance...