I Coulda Been In Stomp (No Not Really)

We took our daughter to see Stomp Thursday night, her Christmas gift from her grandfather.

(Let me just say that there are many pros and cons to having children, but them getting tickets to things that you want to see and then OH DARN SOMEONE NEEDS TO TAKE THEM so you get to go is definitely one of the pros. I’ve wanted to see Stomp for a long time, but no one got ME any Stomp tickets.)

If you aren’t familiar, Stomp is a group of people with brooms and buckets and stuff making music, and if that sounds boring, it’s because you don’t know what Stomp is. There are no words, no dialogue. There is no story. But it’s impressive as all hell, it’s shockingly funny, and if you don’t catch yourself accidentally going “wow” or “ha!” involuntarily at some point during the show, well, that’s a you thing, friend.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today, beyond saying “Hey, go see Stomp if you have the opportunity.”

Because seeing a bunch of just ridiculously good drummers doing ridiculously cool drum things for close to two hours last night reminded me that I could have been one of them.

That is, of course, an enormous lie. If the story I am about to tell had gone differently, the best I was ever likely to get was “I understand how those sounds get made better.” But I never played the drums, and the reason I never played the drums was because I am the biggest dork in the world and always have been.

I have always liked music, and the fact that I have never been good at music does not really factor into that. I used to love country music, and I remember telling my parents that I could do a perfect impression of Alabama singing “I’m In A Hurry (And Don’t Know Why),” and they were like “Okay, go ahead,” and I tried, and then my dad laughed for approximately the next seven years.

But still, music good. Daniel like. I convinced my parents to buy me a handmade wooden xylophone-like thing at an art fair and played it until I think murder was a possibility. (I in fact still have the handmade wooden xylophone-like thing, and it has stayed on shelves at my various homes for about 20 years without ever being played. Want a handmade wooden xylophone-like thing?) When I got to sixth grade, I signed up for band. First few days, it was a “here’s what music is, you dumb kids.” I even brought in the handmade wooden xylophone-like thing and played it for the class like I was some hot stuff. But eventually it became time to divide into instrument groups. Our conductor took stock of the class and had a rough idea of how many students would play each instrument — drums, trumpets, etc. She decided she wanted four kids in percussion. And then when we signed up for our preferred instrument, the number who signed up for percussion was … five.

She shrugged it off. “We’ll have tryouts and work with you all for a bit, and eventually we’ll find another instrument for one of you.” Whatever, fine. Not everyone gets what everyone wants.

Later that day (the next day? Who can say), she was talking about the various instruments, and she got to trombone. And she half-laughed and said, “I don’t know why, but the funniest people and biggest characters I know always end up playing the trombone.”

And let me just tell you, that was either the worst or the best thing to say to young Daniel. I’m not saying I’m brilliantly funny (I probably am not brilliantly funny), but one thing that has always been important to me, often to my detriment, is that people think I am brilliantly funny. You tell me a particular instrument is where the funny people go? Well shoot, that’s where I should be. Just about instantly, I raised my hand and said, “If I don’t make it in percussion, I’ll play trombone!”

I invite you now to guess whether I made it in percussion!

I spent the next three years playing trombone in the middle-school band. I was not terrible — I entered some small group competition and even placed in a couple — but I was also not particularly good. I have cousins who have played trombone (and practically every other instrument, Ben and Brian are incredible) in big traveling bands for all of their lives. I did not get that gene.

This isn’t a picture of me from back then, but, like, it could have been.

Little sidebar to talk about my singing ability again. One of our concerts, we were playing some song where there was a huge section in the middle where all the brass instruments did nothing. So the conductor said we should hum some note during that as some background music. She went person-to-person among the brass with an electronic pitch pipe to get us each to hit whatever note she wanted. All the trumpets hit it. All the French horns and tubas and whatever else. All the trombones. And then she got to me. I hummed. She looked at the pitch pipe. I hummed higher. She looked at the pitch pipe. I hummed lower. She looked at the pitch pipe. And then she looked at me. “You … just don’t sing,” she said.

I was one person out of about 40 humming a low note that was specifically intended to be mostly drowned out by the actual instruments, and I missed the note (after several attempts!) so badly that I was told to sit there quietly and look like I’m humming. That was the final declaration that singing might not be my future.

Oh! Sidebar to the sidebar. My dad had to go to the hospital once (well, lots of times, but once that I’m talking about now). I was with him while we waited (interminably) for updates. I was playing a playlist for him, and Garth Brooks’ cover of “Walking After Midnight” came on. I started singing along, and about halfway through, dad said “Your voice sounds good.” That was, um, when I started actually worrying about his health.

Anyway, instead of spending three years in middle-school band playing a variety of percussion instruments, which I maintain to this day I might have actually been good at, I spent three years in middle-school band playing trombone at an aggressively average-or-slightly-below level, and then when it came time to sign up for high-school band, I decided that soccer and baseball and academic team and yearbook and look, I was involved in a lot of stuff, were more important, and I moved on.

If I had played drums, would I have joined marching band in high school? Would I have been the cool bang-the-big-drum guy, thrown my mallets around all fancy-like, ended up wearing buckets on my feet as an adult and playing in Stomp? I mean, probably not. I was never going to not play soccer and baseball, and fitting band in with those would have been close to impossible. And even if I had done that … I mean, I know me. There was never a version of “me” that would have pulled off what those Stomp folks managed. This isn’t a story about me making the wrong decision and missing out on the coolest job ever.

It's just a story about how I let “oh pleasepleaseplease find me funny” decide what path I was going to take. And that’s why it’s the story of me being maybe the biggest dork in the world.