HAPPY BIRTHDAY TON !

Today is my brother Ton's 44th birthday. He's giving a party tomorrow. Here's to you bro!!! Have a good one. Some day I think I should bring him out here too. He used to be crazy about the American drumcorps music. Not so much anymore, but he always talks about it when I get back after a trip, and wants to hear some new repertoires.

And he is a great fan of Michael Jackson's music too,... so here's a little treat for you: The Cadets performing "Thriller" at their encore concert the other night.



We're at the University of Minnesota stadium. What a huge facility. Pretty impressive, knowing this is "only" part of a place where people STUDY. I wish our school system in The Netherlands would include a lot more sports and music in the programmes. I can only dream of that!

This morning we had another massive food order delivered. Man,... I am always surprised where we leave all this stuff on the food truck.



The mail came in too. Some of the members are sent big boxes of goodies. One of the booster club members always sends home`made cookies for the corps. They are GREAT! But spending $45 on postage is a bit outrageaous. We could buy a lot of cookies for that money right on tour. Bey hey... these are homemade, so very special!





Today BD are doing a System Blue clinic here with high school students, who had been ehre since Wednesday. That seems to go very well. After having studied some music with the BD staff/techs the hornline (and woodwinds) got to play together during warmup outside the stadium. The drummers had studied a cadence. Then tonight they got to see the full corps at work in the evening block. I took a seat in the stands too to watch the runthrough.


It's all so much nicer and more impressive when you see this in full uniform! This was a very good run, so they're ready for the big show tomorrow. All world class corps are going to be at the show tomorrow. EXCITING!



After the runthrough we fed the corps and all the System Blue clinic students one of the corps' favourite snacks: ROOT BEER FLOATS! Personally I don't like root beer at all, so I added Sunkist to the vanilla icecream myself.

Enjoy,

HK