On My Various Disguises

Yesterday I went with the other members of my studio to our teacher's house to eat lunch and have our pictures taken. He has a picture of each trombone and tuba player on the studio wall, so it was our turn as the new students to get our pictures taken. Though Mr. Waters had a great new idea for this round.

He said that he had an extensive collection of hats, which, when we got there, we discovered was no overstatement. The man has quite a few hats. So his idea was that we all wear a different hat in our pictures. We thought that was a little strange, but it could be fun. So we picked out our hats. I wore an old army helmet, which was extraordinarily heavy. After we chose our hats, however, Mr. Waters seemed unsatisfied. He started talking about "props" that we should use, most of which ended up being weapons of some kind, and put different clothes on us. So basically, we were putting on costumes for our pictures. I had the helmet and a big camouflage jacket. Mike, who is Jewish, briefly considered the Nazi helmet, but then decided on a hat not unlike the one worn by the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. He then found a straw to chew on, and Mr. Waters gave him a shotgun to hold. Oh no, it was a real shotgun. I don't think it was loaded. Colin was wearing a sort of rastafarian knit cap, which was mulitcolored and had long black "dreadlocks" hanging off the back. Having nothing to really go with that, Mr. Waters decided to dress him up otherwise like a pirate (at least this was the end result). He wore a puffy shirt and had a large knife between his teeth. I can't seem to remember what kind of hat Mark wore, but he was holding a long knife, which was actually a World War I bayonet (where does he get all this stuff?). Then Mr. Waters himself dressed up in a cowboy hat and shirt, holding a pistol (this time a toy).

It was a fun time, like Halloween all over again, and I'm sure the pictures will be hilarious. What I'm still slightly concerned about, though, is putting them up on the wall of the studio. What will prospective students think? Anyone who walks into that room not knowing us will only see a bunch of guys in silly costumes holding dangerous weapons. I'm not sure what kind of first impression of a school that will be.

Then today I dressed up again, this time to appear in a film on my friend Steve's website. The video should be up sometime next week, so I don't want to give away too many details, but it involved wearing ridiculous amounts of camouflage face paint and running around the woods with our trombones. It's a movie about Thanksgiving. While we were running around the woods, though, we found about 15 of the same huge and scary looking spider on large webs between the trees. They looked something like this. Seriously, these guys were everywhere you turned. Deciding that anything that ugly couldn't possibly not be poisonous, we proceeded with extreme caution. Thankfully, the filming concluded with nobody getting bitten and dying.