The Folk-y Pokey

...Yeah, I know. Lame title. I was trying to come up with something clever and witty, and I don't think it worked as well as I had wanted it to. But that's okay :)

Anyway, I decided that since I belong to so many folk groups, I would limit myself to talking about the most unique/interesting ones. The first of these is marching band. I was a die hard band geek in high school, and I've never quite outgrown it. My little sister starting marching last year, and I found myself showing up at as many of her performances as I could manage (in more than just a "supportive big sister" position), and teaching her everything I could think of. A major piece of marching band folklore comes from two specific songs that the marching band plays every year, but that have no written notes: "Mambo Time" and "The Tuba Cheer." I honestly have no idea when either of these songs were actually written, but the band has been playing them since before I can remember, and will (I'm sure) continue to play them long after I stop going to the shows.
Another thing significant to band geeks is that we alway unconsciously walk to the rhythm of whatever music we're listening to, even if it's only playing in our heads. It has been drilled into us for several years to march "in time," and for some reason we never managed to get away from that.

I was never brought up to believe in Santa Claus. Unlike the folk group of people who DID believe in Santa Claus (which would be full of stories recounting the day they discovered he's not real), we nonbelievers tell tales of when we heard the most ridiculous Santa story ever. When I was in kindergarten, my best friend Ashley told me that she believed in Santa. I, wanting to spare her the disappointment of finding out she was wrong, tried to tell her he was make-believe. She, of course, did not believe me. I tried to reason with her. I asked her, "If Santa is real, then how could he possibly deliver presents to me? I live in a townhouse. We don't have a chimney." Surely I had won the debate. But no. Ashley assured me that Santa had a laser beam with which to shrink himself down and crawl under my front door.
I had a very difficult time sleeping for the next several nights.

The third and final unique folk group I will discuss is that of the "military brats." Growing up in this area, it's no wonder that so many of my classmates were in this group with me. Most of us had at least one parent who was military and/or worked for the government in some other confidential setting. Our favorite pastime was to sit around and make up stories about what our parents REALLY did at work (because we all knew they didn't just sit around making coffee and sharpening pencils, like they told us). We usually included something about jumping rooftops in Russia or running from mob bosses so they didn't end up "sleeping with the fishes." Sometimes during recess, we would play games in which we WERE our parents, doing all these dangerous and exotic things ourselves. Then, of course, we would go home and tell our parents about our stories and games, and they would laugh and say we were being ridiculous. But it never stopped being fun, and we always managed to come up with some new twist to make it exciting!