Dozens of Vancouver's top jazz musicians are present for the festival in Whistler, and the Yellow Jackets spend hour after hour running through our set of songs for various professionals who have come to adjudicate us. The corridors in the lodge hosting the event are marching bands gone to hell. A zoo of teenagers carries saxophones, trumpets, trombones, guitars, basses, cables, amplifiers and speakers. Mr. McKinnon told us that we don't have to wear our horrible jackets until tonight's concert, thank God, but some students full of school spirit (including Kyle) do anyway. Others just wear normal clothes. Some of the other bands here wear their full uniforms, ranging from blue sweaters and black jeans to full-on tuxedos.
Instead of a theatre we spend most of our time shuttling our instruments between huge convention rooms lined with pink conference chairs and horrible flowered carpeting. Pieces of paper with block capital letters and arrows indicate the names of the rooms. High school-quality jazz comes from every direction as students rehearse, play for adjudicators, or try to start an avalanche.
All Jesse and I have to carry are two music folders and one drumstick case, so we're out of each room and halfway down the hall to the next one before the rest of the band packs up its instruments. Kyle can't keep up with anyone because he insists on putting Isabelle back in her case after each session. Playing a new keyboard every half hour starts to wear thin, but I wouldn't give up the small talk Jesse and I have in the corridors for a Steinway grand. Alex is apparently angry with Jesse for coming to my rescue, and she's punishing him for it by hanging out with Tony.
As I sit down on yet another ugly pink chair set up behind yet another digital piano, Alex walks into the room, asking Mr. McKinnon if she'll be able to sing tonight at the wrap-up concert. It's only then I realize that for Alex, this trip has been a total bust. Most of the adjudicators pick a few bars of a certain song and drill the horn section to sound as if all fifteen instruments are one. We haven't played Over the Rainbow yet, so Alex has done nothing since we got herebut hit her triangle. I look down at the keyboard as our latest adjudicator introduces himself and a horrible thought crosses my mind. A terrible, malicious, decidedly un-Rebecca-Lockhart thought.
As the evening's final concert approaches, the thought grows in my mind throughout the day like a hot air balloon. When the band returns to the bus to fetch our yellow jackets and black jeans, it's all I can think about.
The only question is whether or not to go through with it.