FUNNY STORIES
FROM THE BPMM PROGRAM !
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I have saved the funny things that have happened over the years in our BPMM band program and some day hope to write them down in hard copy form. It will include these stories and many, many more. For now I thought I would share this article with a few of these real life bloopers for you to read here on the internet. They are copyrighted material, though, so please ask should you decided to reprint anything here.

In 1991 the Goins Brothers taught a workshop for our students and did a show for us, and the following year the Warrior River Boys did the same. The regulars in the band at the time were David Davis on mandolin, Mitch Scott on guitar, Charlie Klein was on fiddle, Stan Wileman on upright bass, and Anthony Bailey on banjo.

Mitch had to tell us about one of my students that had totally taken him by surprise during the guitar workshop he had taught. He had asked that each student tell him how long they had played and what songs they knew. After everyone had told him what he had asked one little boy who had never heard of these guys and wasn't really sure if he should be impressed or not looked up at him in dead seriousness and asked " So how long have you been playing? Can you play anything?" I reviewed the tapes of the workshops afterward and on the guitar workshop tape had to chuckle myself as I listened to the question being asked, heard dead silence for about 3 seconds, and then Mitch's booming laughter. Thank goodness Mitch had a sense of humor!

Younger students usually are less selfconscious than the older students. This is true even if as a younger student the older student had been fearless. You can say to a 6 and 7 year old "Now get up close to the mike. Close enough to "eat" it!" and they will do just exactly what you say. They must picture the mike as a lolly pop, or at least something friendly. On the other hand, there is just something about a microphone placed directly in front of a teenager that makes them want to get as far away from it as possible. It is apparently instinctive and the more you tell them to come in closer the farther away they get. You would think it was a hissing snake ready to strike!

One concern young children do have about playing out is "looking good" on stage. Only the other day I had a young student to ask about an upcoming performance "What if we fall off the stage?" I took the question seriously enough to answer " If you are paying attention to what you are doing it isn't likely to happen, but if it does you have two options. If you're hurt let us know. If you're not climb back on stage and go on. Fortunately most of the stages we have played on haven't been very high.

In 1990, however, one of our band members did fall off the stage when our band was playing at the Silver Dollar City . We were standing on bleachers and playing to an audience when all of a sudden I heard a thud and gasps, then laughter from the audience. I turned to face the sound of the commotion and to my surprise saw our young mandolin player climbing back on to the bleachers saying "I'm O-K!" She said later she had gotten a little carried away moving with the music and didn't realize she was so close to edge.

In 1991 our lead fiddler was between 7 and 8 years old. But fiddle wasn't the only instrument she played. Most of our fiddlers also played bass so that they could be playing something while not playing fiddle. She was so small at the time that even with a 3/4 bass she had to stand on a milk carton to reach it. At our show at a bluegrass festival in Neosho we played Bile Dem Cabbage Down as our first song. Missy played that song on the fiddle and then clogged to it at the same time. To solve the problem of who would play bass we decided that my husband, Bob, would play during just that first number and then Missy would take over the bass for the next tune.

Doug Cole was running the sound system at that time and had a microphone that he could talk to us on stage with and the audience could hear what he was saying as well. All proceeded fine to the end of the song and then Doug decided he would tease us a bit. Over the mike we heard "That's sounding really good, but if I were you I'd fire that ugly old bass player!" I couldn't believe my ears. It was just too good to resist.

In all seriousness I said back to him "You know, you're right." and turned to Bob and said "You're fired!" and then back to Missy, "Missy, we need a bass player take over for him, would you?" Missy smiled and jumped up on her box. The crowd went wild and for the first time that we had known him, Doug Cole was speechless. He told us later with a chuckle that that had been the last thing he had expected and even if we had planned it we couldn't have done a better job of setting him up than he had done himself.

One time I sent a tape of bluegrass tunes home with each of the band students to listen to and tell me which tunes they might like to learn. In our next band lesson I had them to write down the names of the songs they had chosen. One student wrote as her choice "I'll Go Step Into."

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