The Continuing Travails of the Halloween Dance Band

It all began back where we left off in November, on the roof of Masterman, surrounded by helicopters and sirens and school climate staff, plotting our escape. The Band figured that if it was never going to play the Halloween Dance, it could insert itself into another beloved Masterman institution, International Day, and seeing as its members had escaped with the instruments on their backs, vowed to play at least once for the school in 2022.

Perhaps as divine retribution for playing the accordion or forcing Ms. Tiknaz to listen to us practice, we were thwarted. The venerable Band, signed up for the International Day showcase under the highly bizarre aegis of the Jewish Culture and Ireland-Korea workshops, was forced to abandon its accordion-heavy celebration of cultural amalgamation to shelter at home from a snow day without snow. Initially tasked with performing two minutes of material for four hundred school-weary students, the Band now had to get through the extended Winter Break without diminishing in morale or excellence. In constantly having to recalibrate our bandwidth and retain the caliber of our band without breaking our backs, the Band is brought back to that broken November day on the roof, making the time fit for another epic narrative of exaggerated and fantastic scope of the further adventures of the Halloween Dance Band. Oh, the fools we were, so trusting in chance to work on our sides this one time… how all occasions did so narrowly inform against us once more!

Thinking quickly, we invited ourselves to Ms. Waber’s Chanukah Party and proceeded, like another Chanukah miracle, to play two songs we did not know. By divine grace, the Band, despite their fatigue after scrounging about for an extension cord (that has not yet been returned to the teacher from whom it was stolen) picked up our instruments again and belted out a red-faced five-minute version of an old Yiddish song about the joys of Romania, featuring a rapid-fire list of high-cholesterol foods that our Romanian non-Yiddish speaking band member did not recognize, an ostentatious high note four weeks too late for Legally Blonde auditions, and a chorus that disappointingly translates in English to “hai-diga-diga-dum” and is repeated ad nauseam when one forgets how the following verse begins. Spoiler alert: the lyrics seem to imply that wine, as opposed to anything intrinsic to Romania, is what makes living in Romania so great. After singing it so many times, one begins to suspect that the original writer selected Romania merely because it rhymes with everything in Yiddish and because nobody else had yet cornered the “songs not distinctly about Romania but that indelibly mention Romania 47 times” market. Despite its lyrical shortcomings, the Band’s performance ended on a high note, receiving possibly the warmest applause an out-of-tune accordion could get.

After discovering that we had somehow missed out on all the food (with the exception of the makeshift menorah, a burnt half-donut with six lit birthday candles in it), we dragged Ms. Neu’s bass drum back to where we hoped it went, left the detached pedal nearby, and prayed that our getaway car would arrive before the music department did. While in the process of escaping, we lost a CVS umbrella of intangible personal value, and perhaps our minds. Our debut album will be dedicated to their memory.

As our plans took a rain check, the saga of the little dance band that never exactly could will continue, if the weather and peer counseling’s outrageous plans keep up, with the Halloween Dance Band… nautical edition. Ahoy?