Word: band
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Temple Drake--her friends call her Tempie--came reluctantly to her sudden heroism. She really would have preferred just to endure, stoically accepting the hardships and indignities of Band life, certain in the knowledge that her agony ultimately would end. But her conscience would not let her. She began to lose sleep and weight and she was put on the Undesirable List at the Deke House...
...terribly moving thing, listening to Temple Drake talk about her days in the Band. "When I enlisted," she says with the hint of a lump in her luscious little throat, "I was just naive. I thought bands were supposed to do good things. Oh, like, you know, make people happy with gay music and inspire Love of Country with the national anthem. Things like that...
...pauses, hard memory reflected in her sweet blue eyes. "But I was all wrong! I was being used. I had to cut Sociology classes in order to practice formations. The Band Master shouted at me when I dropped my baton. We were forced to play music we didn't like and we had to cut our hair at neck length, and I know you won't believe this but once we had to form a dollar sign in front of 60,000 people! They tried to make us think we were serving the cause of good music and making people...
...that weren't bad enough, on Saturday morning Tempie refused to get on the Band bus for the Minnesota game. The Band Master looked her hard in the eye and asked: "Aren't you going to Minnesota, Miss Drake?" She looked him harder in the eye and shouted: "Heck no, I won't go!" Whereupon the Band Master put her in handcuffs and sent her to Minnesota under the guard of two tuba players. "What they did to me," she says, "was forced induction...
Everyone who watched television that afternoon knows that Purdue lost the ball game. But it lost more. It lost Temple Drake. As the happy Minnesota crowd filed out of the park, Temple Drake slipped into the Band dressing room. She got out of her glitteringly oppressive majorette's uniform--hated thing!--and pulled on a Dashiki she'd stuck into her suitcase. Then she went to the bus station and bought a ticket for South Bend...