This past weekend, our family traveled down to Mobile to take Mackenzie to the Alabama All-State Band Festival. A while back she had tried out for the band and placed first in our district on piccolo. This gave her the opportunity to go down to Mobile and compete with piccolo players from all 8 districts in Alabama for 3 spots open to piccolo players in the All-State bands. There are 3 bands -- The Red Band is the top band, White is second, and Blue is third. Very patriotic. :-) They take one piccolo for each band - SO, if you don't make one of the top 3 spots, then you try out on flute and play flute in one of the bands. Well, Mackenzie is a die-hard piccolo lover... she enjoys playing her flute, but piccolo is her passion. So needless to say, she was very anxious to earn one of the piccolo spots in the bands. We arrived in Mobile a little after lunch time last Thursday. Mackenzie's try-out was later that afternoon. She was the last piccolo of the 8 to try out. After she was done and the judges had deliberated for a few minutes, they began calling the girls in to tell them where they had placed. (This is where you have to insert some tense and dramatic music to set the scene! ha) The first girl to come out had made the first spot - Red Band piccolo. Now we realized they were being called in order... and before we had time to register all of that, they came out and called Mackenzie's name! yay! So she made White Band piccolo - and she was SO happy.... :) So that was a pretty cool moment. She then spent all of Thursday night and most of the day on Friday in rehersals. They had a quick warm-up and dress rehersal Saturday morning... and then Saturday afternoon performed the most amazing concert for a group of young musicians who didn't know each other and had only been together learning their music for a day and a half. It was hard to believe how good they sounded. :) And yes, if you couldn't tell already, I'm one very proud momma... ;-)
This is Mackenze, Maggie and Clay after the concert. Clay and Maggie both play clarinet. Maggie was 8th chair (out of 32!) in the Blue Band. And Clay is the budding prodigy of the group - he's just a freshman and made 4th chair in the Red Band! And I should give some credit to Bob Jones as well -- they were giving out solo awards at the beginning of the concert and I think more than half the kids they called up were from Bob Jones... let's just say that North Alabama was well represented! :)
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