This one is worth the wait

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last blog.

Much has happened since the end of August -- my dad visited us in NYC for the first time, I was on a team that presented recommendations at our corporate retreat, John and I took mini-vacations near Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh.

I'll share some photos soon to catch you up on the high points of events as fall arrived in Manhattan, but ultimately, it's the Columbia band that's lured me back to Blogger.

John and I have been wanting to check out a Columbia football game for a while. When you move to New York from a Big 10 football city, the concept of Ivy League football is curious. We drafted Jim, Courtney and Rick to journey way up to the northernmost tip of Manhattan for Columbia vs. Harvard, and my first observation was that more people filled the stands at my high school football games.

Then came half time. A tiny, rag tag marching band took the field as the announcer narrated a skit. Even as I write that it featured Faust's deal with the devil, characters representing the presidents of all the Ivy League universities, and the phrase "As Faust ponders her bargain with evil, the Band now forms this devil's trident and plays 'Shaft'," I know you won't believe me.

Here are photos (that's Harvard's president/Faust in the red cape, getting tugged on by Satan in the black cape) and the link to the band's script for the halftime show.








http://www.cumb.org/scripts.php?script=50737






At one point during the half time extravaganza, Courtney leaned over and said "I didn't realize I'd dropped acid on the subway up here." Here are our fellow witnesses to the first marching band performance I've ever seen that included a Goethe reference.