Day One Hundred and Ten: Falling Squirrel

As I was lying in the hammock looking up through the trees this warm spring afternoon, a playful squirrel decided to perform some high-wire acrobatics above my head. And it got me to remembering....

...back to my sophomore year of college, when a ragtag group of musicians (rounded up by yours truly) squeezed into a kitchenette-sized dorm room with their trumpets, trombones, saxophones, drumsticks, keyboard and bass with one goal in mind: Winning the KU Student Union Activities-sponsored citywide talent competition.

The song to be played was Harry Connick Jr.'s "Whisper Your Name," a funk piece well-suited for piano, bass, drums and a brass back-up band (I never leave home without one).

By my sophomore year I had become quite comfortable arranging music for brass and woodwinds, and I was no stranger to performing live - mostly in the dorm's living room. But this competition wasn't in any living room - it was center stage at KU's main performing arts hall, the Lied Center.

But this entry isn't about the talent competition - it's about the band.

You see, this ragtag bunch only spent about 20 minutes actually practicing the piece that day in the crowded dorm room. The rest of the time was devoted to a task far more arduous than rehearsing.

We needed a band name.

We racked our brains trying to come up with names that showed off our creativity and our style. One by one names like "7th Sense" and "Pete Haack and the Cigarettes" (because cigarettes make you "hack" - I did not come up with this one) were shot down.

Finally we came to the realization that all of the current popular bands had names that were nothing more than random combinations of adjectives and nouns - groups like Blind Melon, Pearl Jam, Counting Crows (or is "counting" a verb there?) - and so we decided to randomly spew out adjective-noun combinations until somebody said something we all liked.

And that is how the group "Falling Squirrel" acquired its name.

If you've never heard of Falling Squirrel, don't feel bad. We had one performance, the KU-SUA talent show.

Maybe if we had won, things would have been different.

Maybe we would have stuck together.
Maybe we would have gone on to win bigger and better competitions.
Maybe we would have signed a record deal, gone on tour, become famous...

As it is, we did not win.

We finished in second place, behind an 8-year-old tap dancer who choreographed her own routine.

We did get a prize for our second-place finish: forty dollars.

It covered the cost of renting the piano on stage.