Almost Anything

It seems a safe prediction that the summer of 2008 will be an extraordinary season for Drum Corps International's Dubuque Colts. Calling itself "Marching Music's Major League," DCI's winter auditions typically draw 16-21 year old musician/athletes from all over the globe to fill 150 guard, percussion, and brass positions in each of its twenty-two World Class corps.

The most highly prized of those positions are traditionally with the top ten corps, familiar names like Santa Clara Vanguard, The Phantom Regiment, and last year's champions, the Concord Blue Devils. For that reason, the 2007 Summer Tour was a breakout season for the Dubuque Colts who marched their way into the top ten for the first time since 1995.

But the off-season that followed, which should have been remembered as a banner recruiting season for the Colts, brought unimaginable tragedy as well. As reported on DCI websites and other media across the globe, seventeen year old high school senior and Colts color guard Bianca Laura Jean Vocke was critically injured in a car accident while returning home from the Iowa winter guard championships where she'd competed and won two years earlier.

Air-lifted from the accident scene, she endured multiple surgeries over a ten day period and her struggle to survive was chronicled on the Colts website by corps director Greg Orwoll who was afterward asked by the family to deliver her eulogy. Her funeral fell on the first weekend of the Colts winter tryouts and those who had marched with her the previous two seasons were asked by the family to honor her dedication and love for the corps by attending in uniform.

In the months since, corps members have been encouraged to move forward with a new appreciation for their own lives, relationships, and opportunities, to live their lives as Bianca had lived hers, with genuine warmth, infectious enthusiasm, and unwavering commitment.

As expected, this pre-season has seen the release of some tantalizing hints of what may be ahead in the 2008 Summer Tour. In mid-April, the Colts website announced the premiere, by the senior band at Bianca's high school, of a piece commissioned in her honor entitled "Echoes of Morning." It was not clear whether the piece would also be incorporated into the Colts' 2008 program, "Night and Day."

However, legendary DCI designer Michael Cesario told parents and supporters that there would definitely be some surprises, that by the end of the December camp, "...you'll be amazed at what they've accomplished and by the end of the season they'll have you in tears. I guarantee it." No one who knows Cesario's history with DCI would, even for a moment, consider doubting him.

That season will cover approximately 13,000 miles over a period of about seventy days, on corps-owned buses called the Poseidon, Lusitania, and Titanic, and will end at the DCI championships in Indianapolis, Indiana. Volunteers are told they'll be worked hard, have little time for personal hygiene and less for sleep, and have the opportunity to give 150 hard-working kids the summer of their lives.

I'd give almost anything to be on that bus...