I had just finished up a breakfast meeting with Bare Bones Software’s Rich Siegel—Bare Bones was a might bit busy leading up to Macworld Expo—and was scurrying off to Moscone Center to attend the next in a series of day-long drop-ins with assorted Mac developers. Which is when I saw the glitter of crashing cymbals and heard the thunder of rolling drums and the shimmer of trumpets.
“Expo week taxes all of my mental faculties,” I thought to myself. “But surely I am not so far gone that I am imagining a revival of The Music Man has spontaneously broken out before my eyes.”
And it hadn’t—it was an honest-to-goodness marching band parading in front of the South Hall of Moscone Center, just as the show floor was opening up to the general public.
(Side thought: I am sure the Australian Southern Stars drove or flew up here from its Rose Parade appearance. But the crazed part of my brain that I try to hide from the public likes to entertain the notion that the band simply marched all the way from Pasadena to San Francisco, playing the entire way up US-101, and that they will continue their trek northward along the Pacific Coast. Keep on your guard, Portland!)
Like I said, hearing the marching band put a spring in my step before what figured to be an exhaustive day. (In contrast, the next morning my walk to Expo involved several police squad cars mediating a local tiff—that was a whole lot less uplifting than a marching band.) So my plea to Expo organizers: More bands, please —fife-and-drum corps, show bands, Beatles tribute groups, I don’t really care. But once you’ve had musical accompaniment to mark the start of a day at Expo, anything less is unacceptable.