Christi Chesnut, 17, a senior member of the Oxford High School marching band, is writing a daily journal for The Star’s Web site about the band’s trip to New York for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Christi, who plays the saxophone, will enroll in Auburn in the fall, where she will study veterinary medicine.This is her seventh journal entry, as told this afternoon to editors at The Star. She filed her report shortly after Oxford band marched in the parade.
Well, we did it. It went awesome. We had a couple of snags, but they ended up being kind of funny, rather than debilitating, so they were OK.
We got there to warm up, and everyone’s got on layers, since it was so cold. We warmed up in the street, and lined up and got ready to go, then all of a sudden, we were moving. The parade coordinator comes over there, and we’re gone. Before you know it, we went a block.
Then we ran across the parade – seriously, across the parade, because NYPD had started it, I guess – to line up on the other side of the street, because we weren’t where we were supposed to be, I guess. So we had to run across the whole thing and get ready to play.
We marched from 47th street all the way up to 88th street, all along Fifth Avenue, and that was incredible. There were so many people, just packed.
They saw the banner that we were from Oxford, Alabama, and they were yelling “Roll Tide” and “War Eagle” and “Georgia Tech.” And they were tossing Southern accents at us.
We played two songs, “Alabama Bound” and “Alabama Jubilee” and that went well. Of course, I don’t know how many people recognized that. There was just an ungodly amount of people, all in green. All in green.
We’re gonna eat tonight at Planet Hollywood, then go see Beauty and the Beast. Right now we’re gonna go shopping, We’re headed to Macy’s, so that’s gonna be fun, and we’ll just see how it goes.
