"Band Hats" Topic

My teenage daughter (who is in her HS band) spent the night at my house a few days ago. She saw a sprue of Napoleonic French infantry that came with a gaming magazine and said, "Who are the guys in the band hats?"

When she was little she pointed to a picture of Napoleonic Austrian cuirassiers and said, "Squirrel hats!"

When my daughter was small, she thought that George Armstrong Custer was someone important in our family because it was the biggest framed picture in our house. You have to love the way the little ones perceive things.

When my daughter was about four, I was watching Young Winston on television one afternoon. She looked up, saw Winston at Omdurman blazing away at the Dervish with his Mauser pistol, then turned to me and said, "Daddy, when I'm older I want one of those!"

Nowadays, she has no interest in guns – or wargames, alas – and is studying to be a civil engineer.

My daughter was a little older than that and I was trying to sneak in a Clint Eastwood western while she was playing in the living room. Clint blasted 2 or 3 guys and the noise made her look up at the TV. She then said, "This isn't very childrenish." I told her that she was right and put on a kid's show.

2am, I'm restless, watching "Starship Troopers." It's the scene at the fort where they're mopping up (Polish Firing Squad anyone?).

4YO says over my shoulder, "They need bigger guns."

She had woken up for a glass of water and followed the noise….

I was in a marching bad that wore shakos. Ugly and impractical as .

I was our Sr. High School's band manager & one of my most important jobs was to dole out & collect the red plumes. Perhaps they were OOP & thus irreplaceable (we had very few spares) but each one was valued as much as a shako.

OMG! Ours had the crappy yarn faux plumes! Nobody would want to steal them.