Season’s greetings as Concert Band returns after 2 years

The Pomona Concert

Band’s 2020 and 2021 seasons both were scrubbed because of the coronavirus, but the band was back onstage Sunday for its holiday concert. Instead of indoors inside the cozy Palomares Park Community Center, the band braved the outdoors of Ganesha Park, and so did its audience.

Ganesha Park is where the venerable band, founded in 1947, typically performs weekly in July and August, not in December. But the midafternoon weather was favorable, if brisk, and audience and band members alike seemed jazzed to be there.

“It’s been 737 days since we last played for you,” Allan Small, a trumpet player and the band president, told the audience at the start. “Remember how hot it was the last time we played for you here and you said, ‘It’s too hot; when will it cool off?’ You got your wish.” Everyone chuckled.

I was emcee for the first time and was pleased as punch to have been asked. This involved introducing each number from the script they’d given me, but of course I added some flair. I also had to roll with the unexpected, like when I read aloud that the vocalist would return for the next number.

“No, he won’t,” conductor Linda Taylor said from across the stage.

“It’s here in the script,” I replied in mock consternation. “Sorry!” she said.

When the script later called for me to introduce the vocalist again, I added, “Unless this is another trick.” It was not.

I also took the time to say something uncharacteristically serious, but appropriate for the occasion, I believe.

Noting that 800,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, I added that Pomona’s toll is 513. The city is the seventh-largest city in Los Angeles County, but No. 3 in deaths behind only L.A. and Long Beach, a sad testament to Pomona’s population of essential workers who didn’t have the option of isolating or working from home.

And so we had a brief silence to remember them as well as the losses of any of our friends or family.

I placed this moment prior to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a Judy Garland