Mother and I are in New Orleans for a four-day event at the National World War II Museum called “Experience the Victory.” It’s an amazing four days filled with private guided small-group tours of the exhibits, a welcome reception and farewell dinner, a look at some artifacts that are in the vault and not on display, and more. It’s the last day and we are at a buffet lunch that precedes a special musical stage show of music from the WWII era. We are seated across the table from SR that we had spoken with just once before. Now’s our chance to really get to have conversation. He’s a violin player and was in the U.S. Army Band (he also played clarinet when strings weren’t appropriate). He was involved in some of the sub-groups of the Army Band as well and after retirement, was a manager that arranged musical groups to perform for private and corporate functions.
At one point, I tell my story [insert the details of another 5-degree story here and hyperlink] of attending a performance of a U.S. military band at University of North Texas when I was in graduate school. (The bands love to play at UNT, which has a nationally-recognized school of music and is a great recruiting grounds for future band members.) “And as I was looking through the program, I read through the names of all the band members and recognize BB’s name on trombone. BB was an amazing trombone player in my high school band 25 years earlier.” SR patiently lets me finish my story and then says, “I know BB. We weren’t in the band at the same time but I called on him often when I was arranging musicians for private performances.” I then told the part of the story where I send the program to KMO who has two friends in the Army band and she sends them BB’s high school yearbook photo (which they pass around to band members, much to BB’s chagrin). So I text KMO to ask the names of her friends that she knew from a church’s flute choir. I tried to read the names to SR but butcher them. No worries, he kindly corrects my pronunciation because he knows both of them. One of them played in quartets with him.
SR had said that the music world is a very small world and I guess we proved it over lunch and a show.
