Rules Congress in the Books...

Another DCA Rules Congress is in the books and now we can focus on the 2009 season and know exactly what we're working with.

It was an interesting weekend that started with our percussion caption head, Bob Cizmarik, meeting me at my place on Friday evening after work and driving both of us up to Ridgefield Park, NJ where we met up with our director, Jaybo. Jay blew up the engine on his truck pulling our enormous trailer at the open house, so he had a nifty rental...some sort of big Buick thing that had heated seats and lots of room for...nothing, really. Because we're men, we each had one small bag for the weekend and a 12 pack of Miller Lite. :)

We started our trek to the great white north and had lots of great conversation about our corps, other corps, DCI, DCA...and basically anything having to do with the marching arts activity. If there's anything you can say about the three of us it's that we're extremely opinionated and never at a loss for words...so the trip went pretty fast.

Rochester, NY is not close. It was a 5+ hour drive from NJ, and add the hour and a half it took for Bob and I to get up there, and it's just a butt numbing ride with nothing whatsoever to look at.

Rochester, NY is cold. There's plenty of snow on the ground, and it's just a huge, walk in refrigerator. It's cold in Philly, but it's really cold up there. I quickly remembered why I moved out of Upstate NY in 2003. I just couldn't take the weather any more.

We rolled in at 3:30am, had a beer, talked some more, and hit the sheets. We had a 7am wake up call which sucked big time...but we had to be there for roll call, so we made the sacrifice for the good of the DCA. :)

Day 1 started out eventful. We broke into caucuses and began the debate on the language of the sheets, the various captions, combining captions, eliminating captions, etc, etc. We had a great joint caucus with the percussion and things were moving along swimmingly. We ate lunch and everyone was feeling good. Then, after lunch they voted to completely undo everything we had done, and we went back to the drawing board.

An astounded and bewildered brass caucus met again and decided that work still needed to be done on our sheets and a task force was named and I was honored to be picked for it.

I know, I know...I'm being very vague with all this. Details don't matter. These things can always be extremely frustrating, and the rules congress of 08 was no different.

We came back to the super cool museum where we met all day around 6:30 for a reception. Famous Dave's BBQ catered the event, and it was awesome. There was an open bar which was awesome. I got to catch up with my friend Hank Manfra, who I marched with for a bunch of years and is now on the staff of the Buccaneers. That was cool. I also got to hang out with some of my Fusion Core buddies who I have a lot of respect and love for. Good times with good folks.

Later on that night the administrations got back together and voted on some more stuff...mostly rules that don't directly effect the Bushwackers, so I didn't pay too much attention. One rule that did get passed and that we proposed was to do away with the 60 second warm up rule. Now, you have your normal 17 minutes to enter the field, play, and leave the field...same as always. At least 10 minutes of that time must be your judged performance...same as always. Now, you can do whatever you want with the remaining 7 minutes. No more dumb penalties for playing a 62 second warm up. You can enter the field however you want...playing the whole time if you want...setting up your show and getting the crowd ready for whatever it is you're about to deliver. Does this effect our "psychotic circus" show? Absolutely. :)

The next morning was by-laws stuff, so Bob and I didn't bother going into the meeting. For all I know they voted to ban all brass staffers named Chris. I don't think so, though, because I wasn't fired.

There were some interesting side things and some stuff that just makes me laugh and/or shake my head at the absurdity of it all...but I'm not going to write all that now. All I know is that, for the most part, I feel good about where the circuit is and how we're going to be judged this summer. I still firmly believe that we need to combine the ensemble brass and ensemble percussion captions, but whatever. At the end of the day, the corps that's the best should win. I still think our system (when judged correctly) achieves that goal. That's all I can really ask for.

Now it's time to look forward and continue planning our January 3rd and 4th camp. Our location has been determined...the VFW post in Garfield, NJ. It's a nice place...clean...convenient. It doesn't have a ton of space to break into sectionals and that sort of thing, but it doesn't matter. We should have show music at that camp, and there's a ton of other stuff for us to work on. I'm looking forward to it and taking that next step as a drum corps.