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Just one of the pleasures of the community where I reside is having the ability to just simply walk down the street for a amazing free evening of good music by our Municipal Band. This band has been in existence for 101 years, the longest on-going Municipal Band in the land. The music director and conductor Larry has been doing his thing for the band for approximately eighteen years at this point, and I have seen more or less every performance he has been involved in during those years. So needless to say it is easy to understand if I am feeling sad today to learn that our city just cannot afford to keep going with the band and this year is the ultimate performance for our yearly Summer Music Concert Series.

In our town we have all kinds of free music, free movies on the beach and a lot of little free rock concerts that occur all summer. But not one of these compare with the attendance at the Municipal Band Concerts. They are very famous, with overflow crowds’ at all four good sized city parks where they hold them. In fact, it is so packed that I have been doing what countless in our town do on concert day. I have been heading out to the park first thing in the early morning to stake out my place on the lawn with a blanket and chair to mark my spot until I return in the evening. I imagine it claims something good about our town that fifty people can leave their chairs and blankets seated on a lawn for hours on end and they are all still there when we come back to the park at 6Pm that night to sit down and enjoy the concert.

By the time the concert starts each week, there are commonly around 200 people sitting at the lawn, the majority of with picnic baskets of amazing goodies and the very illegal wine to drink. I do find it funny that they consistently announce at the start of each show that it is illegal to consume alcohol on park premises while everyone inside earshot of the announcement is uncorking their wine bottles and serving them into wine glasses to pass around. But no one has ever gotten rowdy, we are a rather sedate lot who sit and munch our cold chicken, sip our wine and listen to Star and Stripes Forever. The wildest anyone gets is when every Fourth of July show the band asks participants of the assorted armed forces to stand when the band plays the theme for their specific branch of the military. Some get very teary-eyed and many sing along pretty loudly, even if they are tone deaf. But if is very small-town and fairly sweet to see.

My girlfriend and I have been traveling to these concerts with each other for approximately five years now, from the time we met and realized we both loved these concerts. She doesn’t always get out of work in time to be there at the outset, so I will put the food together in the afternoon while I am writing and carry it to the park as she is closing up her store and venturing out our way. We meet in the park, with her little dog Susie securely in check, and smile at the bliss this performance brings to our lives.

So I am heartbroken to think that with next week’s performance this wonderful ritual of summer in our town will be ending. The town declared last year that they would be curtailing because of limited funding and when the bucket went around for donations almost everyone ponied up big time. We raised twice the amount we typically do, but it still wasn’t enough. High schools did car washes and little old ladies scheduled rummage sales, but it nevertheless wasn’t enough. They talked over it for three months at town hall gatherings, but the musicians are all top artists, a lot of them are session artists in Hollywood studios when they aren’t at the Municipal Concert performances. Even though they wanted to go down in their fees, they are all union and can not bring it down any more than they have. So this is the end of an era. And we will be all the poorer to be without it.

When Deni isn’t lamenting the loss of her Municipal Band, she is writing blogs about many unique and entertaining things. Some of those include a blog about how to use metal bandsaw blades correctly, the best way to build a brick retaining wall for your garden and what the real estate market is like in Monroe County in Southern Florida.