On Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 10:27:13 PM UTC-4, jeff wrote:

On Apr 16, 1:34 pm, MelodiousThunk <thunk.melodi...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Apr 11, 10:10 pm, jeff <reamj...@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

And involking Catherine's name gets YOU points (on the RAMD scale),
but really means nothing.

actually it's a valid comparison. You are behaving as she did.

Notice jackie and JB and some others don't defend her anymore?

This has bothered me since you posted it nearly a week ago. Catherine
was a good friend of mine back in the day, and we renewed our
friendship around 2000, and for several years she and me and my wife
were good friends to the point that we exchanged “priceless” drum
corps artifacts. Yet, she turned on me and my whole family.

Nonetheless my gut wants me to defend her. Here is my defense:

Somewhere on RAMD there is a link to a video that captured her
performance at DCA individuals’ competition. 2003 or 2004? I haven’t been able to find it; perhaps someone with superior google search
skills can help. At any rate, I remember the performance. I remember
her sound, remember her eyes, remember the “feel” she emanated from
the stage.

All of us who have competed in individuals, even when the audience has
been modest, know and appreciate the enormous pressure of standing unaccompanied on the stage, offering ourselves up to the critique and judgement of our peers. To call it stage fright doesn’t do the feeling justice.

Combined with that, RAMD at that time and her interactions with her
peers here was particularly venomous. She was dishing it out like a
sailor and yet getting it back tenfold; it was a particularly ugly
period. And there before her, in that audience, were some of the very enemies she had made here on RAMD. When I visualize myself under those circumstances, I would very much fear personal abuse *during* my performance; in fact, I would fear potential physical abuse and I
expect that she would have had that same feeling.

As if the stage fright and potential for verbal and physical assault weren’t enough, Catherine stood there playing modestly challenging
music on the most difficult of all bugles to play cleanly, namely an
early 1970s vintage piston-rotor “longie” french horn. An Olds Ultratone BU-10, if memory serves. Any horn player with experience on
that particular horn knows that the only horn more challenging to play
with accuracy is a Whaley, Royce & Co. mellophone.

So, in that setting, with stage fright and personal safety concerns
and an unwieldy wild-man bugle in her hands, Catherine performed in competition. Her intonation was not very good. She did not hit her
pitches with accuracy. She did not maintain stable tempi. And that
“old witch” resembled a scared little girl. But, she didn’t sound horrible. She didn’t embarrass herself. She completed the competition without disqualification. And IIRC she took 2nd or 3rd in a 3-person contest.

I feel that, in that competition, Catherine demonstrated big brass
balls – balls in the drum corps sense that is. I got the impression
from the video (and this was also reflected in some of the comments
posted here on RAMD) that her audience, even her enemies, had to
grudgingly admit that the woman has balls in the best sense of the
term.

Whatever else she is, and I do think that she is mentally ill, she is
a drum corps peer, from all the way back when that meant something. As badly as she treated me and my family, and she was particularly nasty
to my wife and my father-in-law, I choose to remember her from that
DCA individuals’ competition. I think that all of her various online nemeses, such as you Jeff, should at least give a (grudgingly if
necessary) nod of the shako in her general direction (Arkansas, I
think) as an acknowledgement that, once, she could march right
alongside the ballsiest of us… as a peer, not as an object of
derision.

<snip>

oh she had balls. But she also turned on those that didn't tell her
what she wanted to hear.

and...um...you actually thought people would physically assualt her?
really?

I mean come on, the one time I had interaction with her face to face,
I shook her hand.

I think you're creating some drama where it isn't needed. Yes, I&E is daunting for even the most serious pros. But to insinuate someone
would try to physically attack her is, IMO, way out of league.

You might add that you didn't tell me whom you were until mid-handshake, after which I said "see you on RAMD" and left. More than once, people whom I had never met before pretended to be friendly for their own purposes - in your case, perhaps to provoke
a response. All you did was prove your capacity as a lying phony, nothing that isn't well-enough documented elsewhere.

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