winter guard

And if you already know what that is, you're ahead of me.

Long-time readers here may recall my occasional but welcome encounters with the five-year-old who asked me to index her book, who became a ten-year-old who ran in the municipal race. Turns out that the omen for the future on that occasion was her dance academy performance, when she and a line of other pre-teens in sailor costumes tap-danced to a recording of "Anything Goes."

For now she is seventeen. Seventeen. Not a little girl any more. And her love of dance is now manifesting herself in ardent participation in her high school's team in the aforementioned activity of winter guard.

For it seems that the custom of having flag-spinning and other formalized cavorting around marching bands at football game halftime shows and such events, itself derived from the practice of the guards of regimental flags at military parades and like it called color guard, is so enjoyed by the flag-spinners and cavorters that they've taken to discarding the band and performing in indoor gymnasia during the winter months, and that's winter guard. I'd never heard of this until recently, but it's a thing. It's dancing of a kind, quite dissimilar from ballet or anything else I know, as it's still ultimately of military derivation, and military dancing is to dancing as ... well, you get used to it.

Our heroine's team was appearing in a competition in some other school's gymnasium, just after the Inklings conference let out, so by permission her mother whisked me over there. I saw most of the set, about six teams. Interesting stuff, varyingly imaginative choreography at which daughter's team was the most distinctive. Daughter thought her team was at its worst today, and I did notice a lot of glitches, but the others dropped more clams (in the form of dropping their spinning flags and mock-rifles), and her team won the set if only by default. If there's no marching band, what's the music? Prerecorded; movements from Philip Glass violin concertos are popular; otherwise various pieces of Windham Hillery or singer-songwriter folk songs.

Here: this is daughter's team last year, when they gave a crisper show, so you can see what I've been trying to talk about: