By Andy Dittrich
Capital Sound
romeoprovipimpcs@yahoo.com
Due to my final exams, I was not able to begin the story immediately after returning home. Unfortunately, even brilliant students like myself have to study.

Andy Dittrich
Drum corps has managed to find enemies in the graduation ceremony, the final exam, and the college orchestra schedule. Unfortunately, most of those things seemed to happen this weekend. Learning drill with a good number of holes from those conflicts can be quite an adventure. Fortunately, we had the major portion of the battery there for the majority of the weekend. The serious story from this week is Rob. Rob's knees were swollen and awfully painful, so he went back home to Collinsville for a couple of days to get it checked out. Needless to say that I was worried sick anyway, knowing that I could lose my best friend, an important colleague, as well as a valuable member of the corps. We were lucky to have this week off of rehearsal so he was able to get it checked out. I was happy to find out that Rob would be marching, and that the problem was not one to be corrected surgically. He was given some pretty heavy anti-inflammatory medicine, and is now back and ready to go. However, he still feels quite a bit of pain at times on the field, so keep him in your thoughts. Rob met us at rehearsal on Saturday morning, and we were ready to go. LaFollette H.S. is the site for the rest of our Madison rehearsals this year. It was pretty chilly Saturday, for most of the day. We relearned opener with some changes, and went over the second tune and ballad in visual rehearsal. After dinner we put it together. Things are going pretty well, but it is pretty difficult to get a read on things when so many people are missing. Hopefully attendance will pick up over the next couple of weeks, and we can get everyone integrated into the show. The battery had a pretty good weekend overall. We managed to clean some parts up in the closer, especially the drum feature. We were missing the center tenor for a good part of Saturday, and a couple of snares on Sunday due to various conflicts, so we had some hole problems ourselves. However, I still felt like we had a very productive weekend. Sunday we started to work on the rest of the closer, but we still have about 20 sets to finish. We should be in great shape for the first show.    I will be back again next week, as we have rehearsals Tuesday, Thursday, and next weekend, in preparation for the first weekend of shows, not to mention that I am graduating from Romeoville High School on Sunday. It'll be nice to be done with that, and focus on drum corps. Rob sends his best: "Right on." Andy Dittrich is the center snare drummer for Capital Sound, and is a fifth-year member of the corps. He is a 17-year-old senior at Romeoville High School in Romeoville, Ill., and he will be attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall, studying English. He'll be contributing weekly reports to DCI.org through the summer.