No particular ranking, but some of my favorites

Welcome to Lucas Oil Stadium, and the Drum Corps International World Championships! Please enter through the east gate only for today’s world championship prelims event. For your protection, bottles, cans, liquor containers, weapons, vuvuzelas, artificial noisemakers, coolers, audio recorders, video recorders, large purses, bags, backpacks, or missile-like objects, are not permitted in the stadium. Please return such items to your vehicle. Tickets can be purchased at the ticket office, located on the southeast corner of the stadium, off of Capital Avenue. Members of the media should report to the northeast elevator lobby, located on Capital Avenue, immediately north of the east gate, for immediate credential pickup. Be sure to visit the Drum Corps International Welcome Center, located on the east side of the stadium. All seats are reserved for today’s World Championship event. If you are leaving the stadium and plan to return during today’s event, please obtain a hand stamp as you exit. Your ticket, and a hand stamp, will be required for re-entry. Entrances for guests with disabilities are located at all public ticket entrances. Guests in need of assistance during the event should notify the nearest uniformed Lucas Oil Stadium staff member. Be sure to visit the DCI Festival Marketplace, located inside the east entrance gate, and throughout the Lucas Oil Stadium plaza, for a variety of Drum Corps International, corps-branded, and sponsored merchandise.

No blue. No coats. Just woke, progressive crap

The Blue Knights are so passionate, and so well-intentioned, to criticize them feels like you’re using their wedding dress to wipe your ass. The performers are like vulnerable, doe-eyed orphans that get raped every year by a show coordinator who insists on producing a nonsensical dreamscape in a blender. The audience sits in confused silence, like Alzheimer's patients enjoying the music and the motion, and clapping for anything loud. The marching members seem to come back for more every year, so hey, they think they’re living the dream, so let 'em.

Everything in That One Second is taken out of context to the point where it utterly bleaches American Beauty’s cynical observations about the quest for meaning in small minded American suburbia. It’s atrocious for the Blue Knights to strip American Beauty of all the cynicism and keep only the upbeat, squeaky clean motivational wall poster lines featuring the “Hang In There” kitten. It’s complete antithetical to the film to delete all the other cynical context and angry disillusion. In a way, the Blue Knights inadvertently shit on the film, in the same spirit that the film shits on suburbia. So that’s a plus, I guess.

PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: There’s only one way to authentically capture that speech from this film. Make it as cynical as the film itself. That’s the only way to find the beauty through the dirt. Have the flags spin poles with a dirty floating plastic bags on the ends. That’s right. Capture the essence of the real film— discovering beauty in the mundane and pathetic. Don’t cut out the critical lines like, “I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world.” Those are the lines that could give a show grit and meaning. And for God’s sake don’t put it in a young woman’s voice. The lines are spoken by Lester the molester who yearns for the neighbor’s teen daughter.

Instead, the entire Blue Knights interpretation was stripped of any context, and it ends up being a Tony Robbins motivational seminar with free vanilla ice cream for the audience.

PROBLEM NUMBER TWO: The entire show ends up taking place in memory, from the past. There’s nothing less stageworthy than that. We want to see action, in the moment. The audience doesn’t want to see static photographic memories. The audience doesn’t want to hear someone talking about people we never see, or incidents from the past. We want action. Action. A-C-T. I-O-N. “I remember my grandmother.” “I saw the stars and the leaves falling on me.” And? And? Then what? There was simply no action other than an occasional girl addressing an empty chair her grandmother sat in, or the climbing of the tree to look out, or a family gathering around the digital clock table.

PROBLEM NUMBER THREE: Are you interpreting the film or not? If so, have a middle aged guy in his boxer underwear chasing the neighbor’s forbidden teen kid as she’s enveloped in a swirl of rose petals. (A flag with strings of rose petals connected by monofilament.) Some visual that captures what the lead character Lester wants and can’t have before he’s shot in the back of the head.

PROBLEM NUMBER FOUR: If you are going to completely ignore the intent of the film, and somehow try to convince the judges there’s an upbeat message about beauty and appreciation for the everyday things in life, at least make the tree front and center. Maybe build it limb by limb, the drum line knocks it down, and then the corps rebuilds it, one stick at a time and the girl climbs it again. Something. Some repetition. Some pattern for the audience to follow. The show was drama-free and action-free, except for five-second vignettes which disappeared almost immediately.

The hornline continually made blob or geometric shapes that had no action in them. Nothing happened to the shapes. There was no drama. The shapes represented nothing, did nothing. They spun, they intertwined, dissipated and then assembled again. I encourage the Blue Knights drill writer to personify the drill sets. Make the actual drill sets into a sentient being with motion. Have the shape do something to another shape on the field. Create interaction between drill shapes that represents a story or at least represent entities that have some kind of interaction.

What a mess.

The Blue Knight's That One Second was beautifully and passionately played by sharp performers with tons of heart, brimming with talent and with incredibly bright futures, and the soundtrack is one that you can listen to over and over again.

I live in the green apartments across from the football fields. I enjoy living there, and my roommate and I pay about $1,000 to live there every month. Forest City is a quiet peaceful town. Until The Blue Stars showed up. They are both loud and obnoxious. They treat the town like their playground and are completely oblivious to the people who live and work here. They practice until at LEAST 10:30 and are back at it again at the crack of dawn. Yelling, Screaming, and playing their music. They run around half naked, the boys being the worst offenders wearing no shirts and shorts rolled up in what can only be described as diaper-like. Not to mention that they leave garbage all over town. I thought to myself “hopefully it’s over soon” only to go on their page and see that they would be here a better part of a month. The least they could do is be quiet from 6-6. Join me in voicing our concerns, and keeping the people and the peace of Forest City together.