Ok, so life doesn't center around band... or does it? These are all band related sightings in the real world. (Mainly clarinet stuff, if you'll notice, since I do play the clarinet)

If you have anything to contribute, please email me. I am very interested in finding fortune cookies!

Dove Chocolate Wrappers

"Music touches feelings that words cannot"
"Take time to laugh, it's the music of the soul"

Leann Womack's "Something Worth Leaving Behind"
I heard this song on the tv, and instantly had to look up the lyrics. This is the first verse/chorus of the song:

Hey Mona Lisa, who was Leonardo?
Was he Andy Warhol?
You were Marilyn Monroe
Hey Mozart, what kind of name is Amadeus
Itīs kinda like Elvis
You gotta die to be famous
I may not go down in history
I just want someone to remember me

Iīll probably never hold a brush
that paints a masterpeice
Probably never find a pen
that writes a symphony
But if I will love then I will find
That I have touched another life
And thatīs something
Something worth leaving behind

MasterCard Commercial #1
The one where she's running errands, and it goes something like, "Clarinet Reeds: $20. Calculator: $15." Then she jumps over the overpass onto the school bus and hands the little boy the sack and it says, "Running Errands Faster: Priceless."
MasterCard.com

MasterCard Commercial #2
I went ecstatic when I saw this, another clarinet one! There's a door, and behind it you hear this really squaky clarinet playing and it says something like, "Clarinet Lessons: $15. More Clarinet Lessons: $15. Knowing That Your Child Could Be Learning To Play The Kazoo (Harmonica? Accordian?): Priceless."
MasterCard.com

Ralph Ellison
I stumbled upon this while doing an English assignment. I was supposed to be reading Invisible Man, but was sort of putting it off (I didn't have a clue how good it is), so I read the short little biography in the front. It says he trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936. I decided to do some more research, and this is what I uncovered:
In 1929, he first became interested in music when he heard Lester Young play with members of the Blue Devils Orchestra, the predecessor of Count Basie's Band.
In high school he was both lead trumpeter (oh no :) and student conductor. How cool is that!
In 1930 he goes to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studies music and music theory as a scholarship student.
It was jazz that first got him into literature. He fell in love with T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," stating that, "Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand them, its range of allusion was as mixed and varied as Louis Armstrong."
Ralph Ellison Webliography

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man
This book has a whole ton of them, let me start...
Prologue: "...when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"--all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the whie mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible." (p. 8); "...you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians." (p. 13)
Chapter One: "A clarinet was vibrating sensuously and the men were standing up and moving eagerly forward." (p. 18); "Then I became aware of the clarinet playing and the big shots yelling at us." (p.19); "...the insinuating low-registered moaning of the clarinet." (p. 20)
Chapter Two: "...the chimes in the steeple ringing and a sonorous choir of trombones rendering a Christmas carol..." (p. 35); "And I stand and listen beneath the high-hung moon, hearing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," majestically mellow on four trombones, and then the organ. The sound floats over all, clear like the night, liquid, serene, and lonely." (p. 35)
Chapter Five: "...I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass.." (p. 109); "...the organ and the trombone choir speak carols to the distances drifted with snow, making of the night air a sea of crystal water lapping the slumbering land to the farthest reaches of sound..." (p. 110); "...I too had stridden and debated, a student leader directing my voice at the highest beams and farthest rafters, ringing them, the accents staccato upon the ridgepole and echoing back with a tinkling..." (p. 112-113); "...listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone's timbre, playing thematic ariations like a baritone horn." (p. 113); "...playing Ha! as upon a xylophone; words marching like the student band, up the campus and down again... counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved, riding upon the wings of my voice out to you, old matron, who knew the voice sounds of the Founder and knew the accents and echo of his promise..." (p. 113); "It was as though he had given a downbeat with an invisible baton. The organist turned and hunched his shoulders. A high cascade of sound bubbled from the organ, spreading, thick and clinging, over the chael, slowly surging. The organist twisted and turned on his bench, with his feet flying beneath him as though dancing to rhythms totally unrelated to the decorous thunder of his organ." (p. 115); "...his hands were outspread as though he were leading an orchestra into a profound and final diminuendo." (p. 127); "Then the orchestra played excerpts from Dvorak's New World Symphony and I kept hearing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" resounding through its dominant them..." (p. 134); "A mockingbird trilled a note from where it perched..." (p. 134)
Chapter Six: "From somewhere across the quiet of the campus the sound of an old guitar-blues plucked from an out-of-tune piano drifted toward me like a lazy, shimmering wave, like the echoed whistle of a lonely train, and my head went over again, against a tree this time, and I could hear it splattering the flowering vines." (p. 146)
Chapter Nine: "...I saw a man pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper and heardhim singing in a clear ringing voice. It was a blues, and I walked along behind him remembering the times that I had heard such singing at home." (p. 173); "I strode along, hearing the cartman's song become a lonesome, broad-toned whistle now that flowered at the end of each phrase into a tremulous, blue-toned chord." (p. 177)
Chapter Eleven: "...above it all I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth--three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in varying volume, and I was struggling and breaking through..." (p. 232); "I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player's hands." (p. 232); "I wanted to call him, but the Fifth Symphony rhythm racked me, and he seemed too serene and too far away." (p. 233); "Strains of music, a Sunday air, drifted from a distance." (p. 234); "Was it a radio I heard--a phonograph? The vox humana of a hidden organ? If so, what organ and where?" (p. 234); "...I saw a uniformed military band arrayed decorously in concert, each musician with well-oiled hair, heard a sweet-voiced trumpet rendering "The Holy City" as from an echoing distance, buoyed by a choir of muted horns; and above, the mocking obligato of a mocking bird. The air seemed to grow thick with fine white gnats, filling my eyes, boiling so thickly that the dark trumpeter breathed them in and expelled them through the bell of his golden horn, a live white cloud mixing with the tones upon the torpid air" (p. 234)
Chapter Twenty: "Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words?" (p. 443)
More To Come: I'm in the middle of chapter twenty-one right now, so I'll keep you posted!
Order The Book; It's Really Worth It!

Rocket Power: July 8, 2002
The episode where they have the paddle board race & the kids get lost--at the beginning of the race, on the shore, is a marching/pep band type group :)
Official Site

SpongeBob SquarePants
Squidward plays clarinet! Okay, so he really sucks, and they burned it in a bonfire once :''(
Official Site

The Drew Carey Show
One of them plays trumpet, one trombone, one was a percussionist, and Kate... ugh, she does what she refers to as singing :)
Official Site

Thirteen Years: A Disney Channel Original Movie
Totally un-band-related. It's about this boy who finds out he's a mermaid (merman, excuse me) on his thirteenth birthday. Anyway, he's not supposed to go to the swim meet, so he sneaks out and goes, and at the swim meet, there's a marching band!
Oh yeah, plus his friend Jess (who can't swim but loves marine biology) plays the sousaphone.
ZoogDisney.com

Totally In Tune
A Disney Channel Original Series, airing every Sunday @ 12 (11 central) all about band!
ZoogDisney.com