West Johnston band heading to NYC

High school band preps for Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

MCGEE'S CROSSROADS -- The West Johnston High School Band is used to marching down Main Street in Four Oaks for the Christmas Parade and through the streets of Benson during Mule Days.

Later this month, the band will try a new route: from Central Park down Broadway to Herald Square in New York, as part of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Plucked from the ranks of hundreds of applicants, West Johnston is one of only five high school bands playing at the parade this year. They're the first band from Johnston County to make the trip.

The school they represent isn't even located in a town, but the band will play an important role in a grand New York City tradition, a signature event of America's largest metropolis.

"The Broadway dancers and the floats are all about New York, but we're the apple pie," said Dave Duffy, the assistant director who has watched the annual parade since he was a child and performed in it once himself.

Only in its seventh year, the West Johnston band is establishing itself as part of an elite group of Triangle marching bands that frequent far-flung, high-profile parades. Think Broughton High School in Raleigh, which marched in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, Calif., on New Year's Day. Or the Cary High School Band, which has traveled as far as Europe to perform.

The West Johnston group made headlines in 2005, when it played at President Bush's inaugural. Since then, the band has played at Disney World, another popular stop on the top-band circuit.

But these brief moments of fame come at a steep cost. The group is struggling to raise the last several thousand dollars of an expected $200,000 tab to send nearly 200 students to New York.

For senior Trey Yoder, a trumpet player, the parade is the perfect reason to take his first trip to New York. Before joining the band, he had left North Carolina only to visit relatives in Ohio. Now, he's played at Disney World and at competitions throughout the Southeast.

"We're representing our county and our state on a national stage," Yoder said. "We just kind of sprouted out of nowhere."

The band will march 2 1/2 miles through the city. But it's the 75 seconds at Herald Square that will be beamed to millions of homes.

"You have one minute and 15 seconds to play for the world," said Band Director Lance Britt. "We'll practice hundreds of hours for this."

Duffy, who developed a new routine the band will perform during the parade, aimed for a festive, New Orleans-style feel. They'll perform upbeat songs, including "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang, as they march. Color guard members will roll alongside the band on wheeled, wrought-iron stages build specially for the show -- an unusual prop they had to seek permission from Macy's to use.

As for their moment in Herald Square, Macy's organizers ask that the routines be kept secret until Thanksgiving Day. But Duffy offered a one-word hint: disco.

Each parade has its own hurdles -- part of the lore that passes down through generations of marchers. At the Macy's parade, it's a practice starting at 2 a.m. in Herald Square and the likelihood of freezing-cold weather.

That doesn't bother Jane Pickens, who remembers shivering on a Washington, D.C., street corner for hours when she was 10 to catch a glimpse of her brother in the inaugural parade.

Now a sophomore in the color guard, she spent hours at a recent practice catching a flag and spinning a rifle in cold, windy weather while wearing an ever-present smile.

"That way, when you get to the real show, it's just natural," she said.

But worse than the grueling practices was the recent Saturday she spent in front of the Garner Wal-Mart, asking for donations for their trip.

"I think it's all going to be worth it in the end," Pickens said.

A committed stable of band parents chipped in $500 for each child, then set about early this year to raise an additional $100,000 for the trip. They've held yard sales, car washes, dinners and a silent auction. They made and sold cookbooks and held band nights at McDonald's -- all at a time when the lagging economy has people hoarding every dime and pinching every penny.

"We've tried to keep it as small and simple as possible, and to keep to things that our community can support," said Cindy Nyberg, president of the West Johnston Band Parents Association.

The walls of the band room are plastered with stars bearing the names of people who donated as little as a dollar, and one artist parent created a sculpture to give donors of larger amounts.

Parents made 200 flags for the color guard. Another group used global positioning technology to paint a Macy's logo in the school parking lot that is the exact size of the one on which they will perform in Herald Square.

The band has been practicing on it for months. In a few weeks, they'll march on the real thing.