A Late-Night Post With Zero Redeeming Social Value

Those who come to Power Line only for serious commentary MUST skip this post. Because it has to do with marching bands behaving badly, and what could be more frivolous than that?

This halftime performance by the Kansas State marching band has gotten a lot of attention. It shows the Starship Enterprise attacking a Kansas University Jayhawk. Some–the dirty-minded, apparently–have deemed this innocent video NSFW:

To which I can only respond: where, exactly, do they work?

If you want a more memorable innuendo from a marching band, let’s go back in time…to circa 1969, the Dartmouth-Yale game. The merger of Yale and Vassar had recently been announced. So, when the Dartmouth band took the field at halftime, the stadium announcer said that the Dartmouth band–a rowdy bunch at best that worked, apparently, without close adult supervision–would enact the Yale-Vassar combination.

Half of the band lined up near one goal line in the shape of a V, for Vassar. The other half of the band lined up at the opposite goal line in the shape of a Y, for Yale. It looked something like this, only the letters were farther apart:

Screen Shot 2015-09-06 at 9.39.46 PM

On the appointed signal, the Y charged raggedly down the field and *merged* with the V. You really had to be there. It was hilarious.

Of course, even by the laxer standards of the time, we all knew that the axe was going to fall. Sure enough: the Dartmouth marching band was suspended for a few weeks. But it was worth it–decades later, those who were there still remember!

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