Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Band Mom


No I'm not selling frozen turkeys and peanut butter cups for uniforms.   Not trying to fund raise with magazine subscriptions for trips to Disney World to perform. The fact is none of my kids were in the High School Band.
My daughters both played Violin in the School Orchestra; they wore their own dressy white shirt with a black skirt or pants. My son was in a garage band (Negative Salute or N/S) for a few years, but they never made it out of the garage.  I am a different kind of Band Mom.
I met my adopted sons when they opened for my favorite band during a road trip in North Carolina. Marty and I were already taking a lot of flack for our second C! trip in a month. We didn't care; we were going to see C! 2 more times, AWESOME . In retrospect, it was the second turning point in my life this year.
Reggae/Rock is hard to explain until you've heard it. Anyone who dances loves Reggae, but think of putting in some riff-rock and a hard edge. Mix it up with some honest, hardworking kids (OK, so they're in their 20's, that = kid to me). Add some real catchy lyrics with a twist. Result??  A Band called Lionize.
Serendipity doesn't come close to describing the star crossed events that intersected to give me 4 more sons. Both fortunate and unfortunate events conspired together.  I'll try to sort them out.
·                     Unfortunate; The vocalist for C! was ill (that was a horrible time for all of us); we couldn't find a hotel room near the second show.
·                     Fortunate; the first show was empty, giving us tons of space to dance. We had to hang out at all day at the venue on the second day.
In Jacksonville NC, we danced our......um.....tushies off to this new sound that we both fell in love with. We brought their CD and played it all the way to Fayetteville, singing along the whole time.  Then in Fayetteville, being the only vehicle in the parking lot besides the bands' transportation, we got invited to hang out with members of all 3 bands (AWESOME< AWESOME)
      
Already in love with the music, we fell in love with the boys.
While C! traveled in their mega tour bus and stayed in hotels, our poor boys traveled in a beat-up van and slept in the back with a generator feeding a jury-rigged Air Conditioner (Yes I know C! started that way too, but that's not my story to tell)
It broke our hearts and we decided we would do anything we could to ease their journey to success. We adopted them.
So what does my brand of band mom do????   Whatever we can do to care for them when we go to see them and whatever we can do to promote them  all the time.
Hopefully, the little things we do will help them get where they want to be a little faster, make things a little easier, and make them happy to have met us and invited us into their world.  

That's all a mom can hope for.