click to enlarge - Glenn Russell
- Mary Bauer and Kim Thompson
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City features the top marching bands from around the country. But this year it will also include one composed of the people who teach band. The Band Directors Marching Band will showcase more than 400 band teachers from around the U.S. — including two from Vermont.
Representing the Green Mountains are Kim Thompson of Richmond, who has taught band at Williston Central School for 29 years, and Mary Bauer of Jericho, the band director at Mount Mansfield Union High School for 20 years. There, Bauer directs Vermont's only field-show marching band — the kind that executes choreographed formations on a field. Weather limits the season to six weeks, giving students only three to learn their music.
Thompson and Bauer, both clarinetists in their early fifties, are also friends who play together in Vermont Symphonic Winds. The two found out about the Band Directors Marching Band through the same Facebook page, but neither realized the other had applied until they both got in.
The Band Directors Marching Band has performed only once before, at the 2022 Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif. It is a project of Saluting America's Band Directors, which is sponsored by the Michael D. Sewell Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit named for a band director who taught for 38 years in Ohio.
Fittingly, the group will perform "Seventy-Six Trombones" from the 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man, as well as a trio medley, while marching south from Central Park. Its members will be dressed in matching black slacks, blazers and ties instead of flashy marching band outfits, to emphasize their role as educators. Once they reach Macy's, they'll perform "Big Apple Medley," a collection of familiar American songs, to choreographed formations in front of the NBC cameras. The group will have just four days to learn the choreography, but Thompson isn't worried.
"We're comfortable with that. It's what we do," she said.
Thompson played in her high school's "really competitive" marching band in Lindenhurst, N.Y., and became its drum major — the student leader who conducts the band while marching backward. She performed with the school in New York City's St. Patrick's Day parade before earning a bachelor's degree in music education at Hofstra University. Bauer played in her high school's marching band in nearby Long Beach, N.Y., and joined its color guard, the flag-twirling set. She earned her music education degree at the Crane School of Music.
Ironically, neither New Yorker ever attended the Macy's parade. With millions in town, Bauer said, "It's the one place you don't want to be if you're local."
For the 97th Macy's parade, the directors have had to practice daily and memorize their music. "We're doing what our kids do all the time," Thompson pointed out. "I like that I'm modeling that for my students."
COVID-19 decimated school band program participation, and numbers are only now starting to return to pre-pandemic levels. It's exciting "to have that many music educators come together [in the parade] and have that camaraderie, especially after such a hard time," Bauer said. "And we're sharing this gift with millions of people" — including their students.
Bauer has performed the pieces for her students, who offered feedback. "They've been following me through this whole process," she said. "I told them, 'If you're able to snap a photo of me, I'll get you a creemee at Palmer Lane.'"