It’s Thursday night in a cramped little room filled to bursting with folding chairs and musicians, and the band’s heartbeat is nowhere to be found.
There’s no BUM, BUM, BUM, BUM, that’s the problem.
“I need you to be going BUM, BUM, BUM, BUM,” says Haywood Community Band Director Stephen Razo. His conductor’s baton, which a few minutes ago he’d pulled from a pouch of identical looking sticks, points toward the back of the room with cheerful menace. “Where were you?”
“Uh,” says the missing drummer with the kind of sheepishness only people in their late teens or early twenties can muster up. “I dropped my mallet.”