What is it about a marching band?

I’m a recovering band parent.  My daughter graduated from high school and the marching band last year.  However, at the Memorial Day Parade in our small town today, my heart still thrilled to the sound of John Phillip Sousa, played as the band marched crisply down our main street.  Tears still filled my eyes when the trumpeters played “Taps”, even though my daughter is no longer one of the performers. 

Music tugs at some deep part of our hearts and souls.  Every culture has music in some form.  Human beings can’t seem to survive without it.  But why a marching band?

 My theory is that it’s the teamwork.  A diverse group of individuals has to work together in perfect unison to create a marching band.  Maybe it’s because writing is a solitary profession so I find that sort of connection enviable.  Or maybe it’s because I admire the willingness of the individual to merge his identity into the good of the whole.

No matter what the reason, I love a parade.

World’s best prequel: Star Trek

My Mother’s Day gift was a family outing to see the new Star Trek movie.  Since I was a trekkie in my younger years,  I went with a certain amount of fear and trembling.  Telling the story of how my favorite starship crew first met and bonded seemed rife with the potential for disaster.  I mean I’ve known and loved these characters since I was about ten.  Could  a modern casting director really know what they looked like, spoke like and moved like when they were younger versions of themselves?  Could a modern scripwriter postulate how their chemistry had fizzed into being?

The answer is a resounding, “Yes!”  They really got it right!

The references to events we know and love, the interactions between the characters which foreshadow their future relationships, the action sequences where the Enterprise saves the day: it’s all there and all pitch perfect.

I’m going to see it again.

A Nod from Nancy: Seahawk, Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie by Bruce Valley

This book surprised me–in a good way.  A publicist contacted me out of the blue and asked if I would review it.  I was a little nervous because I prefer to write positively about books and I didn’t have any idea what to expect from Seahawk.  Below is an excerpt from my review.  If you’d like to read the full review, it’s on Amazon.

Seahawk is a love story.  It’s about the love of hockey in its purest form: pond hockey, or “shinny” as it was called in Rye, New Hampshire in the 1940s, played outdoors on the most elemental of surfaces: “black ice”.  It’s about how a group of World War II veterans who loved the game gave a small town a sense of pride and identity, starting a hockey team from scratch and turning it into a powerhouse that made it all the way to the Class B championships in Boston Garden.  Finally, it’s about one man’s life-long passion for the game from his days as a fourteen-year-old goalie with the Seahawks to his debate about when it’s time to hang up the pads.

 Although author Bruce Valley is a former test pilot and an aerospace executive, he’s also a poet and it shows in this memoir.  He writes with profound emotion and insight about the hockey-playing war veterans he hero-worshipped when he was young, and admired even more when he grew up to understand the sacrifices they had made.  He paints the depth of devotion required to keep a team going when Mother Nature repeatedly threw her worst at their home-made outdoor “pond”.  He vividly describes the wide-eyed fascination he felt when he saw his first game of “shinny” at age three and how that excitement has never left him.  I often found myself reading with tears in my eyes, not an experience one usually associates with a book on the intense, hard-charging sport of hockey.