Oh, the Baton Twirlers

Portland’s MarchFourth Marching Band, M4 to their fans, kicked off the Vancouver Island Music Festival in grand style tonight. They looked like I imagine the Village People would if they’d been started by Brian Setzer with an eye towards taking on Cirque du Soleil and they had the crowd on their feet by the end of the first number.

The music was a mash up of styles, from rock to big-band and beyond, and the energy the band put out was hard to ignore. The stilt walkers were hard to ignore too, as were the dancing girls. And the baton twirlers. Oh the baton twirlers.

In a nod to the sexual revolution half of the stilt-walkers were athletic young men, one of whom looked like Chef from Apocalypse Now and could bend in ways that had to give cold sweats to every chiropractor in a 60 mile radius. It goes without saying that I hated him.

The crowd immediately in front of the stage spent M4’s entire set moving and shaking in that style of dance particular to folk music. You know what I mean: they all dance in one spot, facing the stage like Romans at Mass, as if they’re afraid they will explode should their groins brush one another.

The only people not dancing were myself, cruelly deprived of the rhythm gene, and two small children standing right at the chain link fence separating the crowd from the performers. The boy, not more than 3, had an unkempt head of sandy hair and an impressive scowl on his face. To be fair I’d scowl too if my mother had me harnessed to a hemp-rope tether.

His sister, maybe 4, was spared that particular indignity. Instead she was given corn-row braids and a homemade dress best described as “kaleidoscopic”. She seemed considerably happier although it was impossible to tell whether this was down to a sunnier disposition than her brother or simple color blindness.

M4’s set wound up with a furious energy and the crowd was visibly disappointed at having to return to a reality which lacks wild brass rhythm and spandex-clad women stilt-walking across their field of vision.

One sympathizes.

Brennan Storr writes the blog Largely the Truth.