Many would argue that we are defined by our achievements.  Many of us are tied so tightly to our accomplishments and actions that we become them, defining ourselves in light of our deeds.  As such, tainting moment is akin to quashing the soul itself- a venal sin, at the very least.  One thing is for sure: God was crabby with me over this one.

The mid 1990s were not kind to me.  After hitting puberty (at least mentally) at the age of 10 or so, I spent the next 3 or 4 years waiting for my level of game and woefully cherubic body to catch up to my addled mind.  To put things kindly, I was a huge fucking mess, as anyone who knew me then could attest.  

Beset by acute heterosexualitis, my academic skills rapidly deteriorated, forcing me to conclude I wasn’t worth a damn at anything.  This lack of self-esteem forced me into deeper states of nihilistic despair, triggering a vicious cycle that would probably conclude in ten years with me wasting away as a Subway sandwich artist and living in a dingy commune as I cried myself to sleep each night.  In fact, there was but one source of validation between this apocalyptic future and myself: music.  For some reason, I was actually fairly good at making the trumpet do what I wanted it to do.  Throughout middle school I excelled over my peers (which- in eastern North Carolina- doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot).  Nor is music something that swells your chest with pride and engenders feelings of excessive coolness.  If someone were able to quantify popularity of student populations, band nerds would no doubt anchor the bottom of the list.  When in doubt, ask any band geek how many non-band nerds they’ve had sex with, divide that answer by three, and round down to zero.  I won’t even get into the sexiness of marching band uniforms, but you get the idea.

Undeterred by (or perhaps willfully in denial of) this equally grim outlook, I pressed on, perfecting my art.  By eighth grade I was testing myself in music competitions and had begun to make some headway.  I had reached the district band competitions and had done well enough to qualify for auditions for state band.  Having beaten about 120 kids for 4 spots at the district, I was now up against 48 other qualifiers for 1 of only 12 spots in the all-state band.

At the auditions I was clutch.  I played as well as I possibly could.  The slow tongue that would plague me throughout the rest of my career in music was- for one- nimble and precise.  I filled up the room with big pimpin’ sound.  It was the rare performance where you know you couldn’t do any better if you had another 100 goes at it.

I made the band, along with 50 other musicians from a pool of thousands of applicants.  Furthermore, I was the only kid to make it from our poor district, beating kids from better-funded programs, kids with private lessons, and kids with nicer instruments, better-looking kids, etc.  This was surely the peak of many of our young lives.  My parents were ecstatic as we made reservations to attend the band clinic and subsequent performance at the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts.

The day of the concert rolled around.  We took the stage, warming up nervously.  I peeked around the curtains.  To be sure, this was the biggest venue I’d ever played.  The auditorium seated almost 3,000 people.  It looked bigger than that, and it was packed.

While music is an aural medium, there is a significant visual component to each performance.  All musicians wore suits or formalwear.  Eyes were trained straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the audience.  Most of all, distracting motion and noise was verboten.  I was keenly aware of this last point as the curtains rolled back, revealing the assembled ensemble to the audience.  The noise from the audience died down as the crowd waited, per tradition, for the conductor to make his appearance before applauding.

It was also at this time that I began to feel the tension, but the pressure I felt was a refluxive gaseous buildup in my upper gastrointestinal tract.  In lay terms, I was sitting on a monstrous belch, no doubt courtesy of an extended visit to Red Lobster an hour previous.  My internal barometer predicted something along the lines of loud and nasty, not the sort of thing that one wanted slipping out during our soft opening number.  Retreat was impossible; I couldn’t fathom leaving the stage at this late juncture.  I needed a covering sound, and I thought I had one.  Even as I squirmed, our conductor was making his way toward the podium from the wings backstage.  As he emerged the audience would applaud, and the ruckus would allow me to dispense of this gastronomic unpleasantness, if not quietly, then in relative anonymity.  To give myself time for multiple emissions (a second act, if you will) I decided to synchronize pulling the trigger with the exact moment the conductor broke into plain view.

Sadly, the curtains on this stage extended just a little farther than those on the crappy middle school gym stage I was accustomed to.  I jumped the gun, so to speak.

The belch was magnificent: long, rolling, and sonorous.  It echoed endlessly on the perfectly optimized surfaces, and I was forced to admit that the acoustics in this place were amazing.

My gas was apparently powerful enough to stop time, because everyone froze, even the conductor.  There was only silence (and the slightly redolent odor of seafood fettucine alfredo) as everyone attempted to identify the shooter.

Time suddenly restarted, and several things happened in rapid succession.  First, the conductor resumed his course towards the podium.  Second, I turned to the kid next to me with a disgusted look on my face, reclined away slightly as though I had smelled something other than my own wonderful brand of effluvium, and cried “Jesus man!  Not now!”  Just as the poor kid realized I was putting it on him, the conductor reached the stage, and applause drowned out his protestations of innocence.

Once again, I played well.  Like I said, I was pretty clutch back then.