Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!

In January of every year, the Husky Marching Band holds the band banquet, which is a chance to come together, eat some generally decent food, reminisce about the last season (including a member-made video of varying quality), and hand out some individual and sectional awards.  It's generally a pretty good time.

For the last several years, this has been held at the Don James Center in Husky Stadium, which is basically a club for rich people at the top of the North side of the lower bowl.  (If you happen to Google it, know that it looks way nicer now, after the stadium renovation, than it did while I was there.)  (And now I have to specify the location in the stadium, because there are several clubs for rich people there now.  Back in my day, there was just the one.) However, that wasn't always the case.

My rookie year in band, the band banquet was held at a marina.  (I want to say it was the Shilshole Bay Marina, but it doesn't look like what I remember on Google Maps, and I caught a ride with someone else and was still figuring out the layout of Seattle, so I didn't have a lot of reference points at the time.  Anyone who wants to confirm or correct that, be my guest.)  It was a pretty nice setup; a long room with lots of tables seating about 8, nice centerpieces with candles in jars, etc.  Food was alright, too, as I recall.

The problem arose after dinner, when the awards started being handed out.  The problem with long rooms like this is that those sitting way in the back, as I was, can't hear very well, and really just aren't terribly involved with the ongoing proceedings.  Additionally, the clarinet section that year, while certainly full of nice people, wasn't likely to be winning any awards that year.

(The problem was that the section, for the most part, was completely introverted.  We rarely did anything with any of the other sections.  On band trips, instead of partying, or at least hanging out, with anyone else, we all sat around in a room together, with MAYBE one bottle of alcohol.  (Which I did not drink, Mom and Dad.  (Who it turns out really do read this, despite my earlier jokes (or what I thought were jokes), which is slightly awkward, but I'm a grown-up and going to power through it.))  So no one outside the section really knew us, and we weren't really likely to win awards for most spirited or anything like that.  Even performance-based awards kind of require you to be known to other people, so basically we were screwed.)

And so, boredom set in.  Being clarinets, especially as described above, we were too polite to carry on our own loud side conversations, so there really wasn't much going on at the table.

So I lit a napkin on fire.

I didn't really mean to, though.

At least, not like it turned out.

(And they were paper napkins, so it's not like I was burning fine linen or something.)

In my boredom, and because I'm a fidgety person, I was playing with one of the paper napkins... folding, unfolding, rolling up.  And somewhere along the way, I thought it would be entertaining to light the end of the rolled-up napkin on fire with the centerpiece candle.  We had lots of water at the table, so I wasn't worried about lighting the table on fire or anything.

So I did.  And the fire gradually burned down the length of the napkin, leaving behind charred napkin, but never really flaring up too much.  It was fun, and killed a few minutes, and then the flame was near my fingers, the rest of it was just char, and I figured I'd just toss the napkin into the candle to let it finish burning out.

And the entire napkin went up at once.  Apparently there was still plenty of viable fuel inside all that char.  Who knew?

Anyways, the flame from the napkin absolutely dwarfed the candle flame.  It looked like the entire jar was on fire (these weren't the tiny concession-stand style napkins, or even the common dinner-table type napkins you get at Target in packages of 500.  These were the nice, thick, large paper napkins you get when you want things to look fancy but you don't want to have to wash 250 napkins afterwards.  So it pretty much filled the jar around the wick).  And this wasn't exactly subtle; it was like someone had just turned a 60-watt lightbulb on at our table in a rather darkened room.  The surrounding tables were quite obviously being lit up as well, and they were noticing.

I froze.  This was not at all what I had expected.  And how was I going to put it out?  I couldn't just dump an entire glass of water into the candle jar to put it out!  (Well, I suppose I could have, but I didn't want to make that much of a mess.)  And it didn't seem like it was going to burn itself out anytime soon; for all I knew, the entire napkin would still be burning when we left an hour later!  I'm in college now; I'm supposed to be responsible!  Responsible people don't set entire napkins on fire!  What was I thinking?  Was I going to be forever known as the guy who started a bonfire at the band banquet?  That's not exactly what I wanted to be known for!

Someone (and to this day, I can't remember if it was me or someone else at the table) finally put a plate over the candle jar, the fire smothered and went out, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.  I would NOT be the person who burned down the band banquet.  And, as usual, Brad (the director) hadn't noticed something the clarinets were doing.  (One time, we played an entire song in the wrong key because we'd gotten the wrong music, directly in front of him, and he didn't notice.  Seriously, we were off by a minor third, standing right next to his podium, and nothing.  It sounded pretty cool, actually (it was like a dirge version of Battle Hymn of the Republic), but was clearly wrong.)

And from then on, I vowed to never burn entire napkins again.  Small strips of napkin only!  Because giving up burning things entirely?  Yeah, that's not going to happen.