Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [34]
Theodore’s guest room is simple and comfortable. There is an old, rich chocolate-colored four-poster bed, a matching dresser, and a small Tiffany-style lamp. There’s a luggage rack for my duffel bag and a full-length mirror behind the door. The walls, the linens, the rug—everything is white. I pull back the coverlet and climb under the cool sheets. This is the first time I have been alone in a bed since I married Jack MacChesney. I’ve never gone anywhere without him in all this time, nor he without me. I wonder if he is thinking the same thing at home in our bed. I stretch my arms from edge to edge in the double bed and my feet as far apart as they can go. I stay in this snow-angel position until sleep comes.
Big Orange does not begin to describe the University of Tennessee Football Experience. It should be called All Orange, All the Time. Thousands of fans descend upon Knoxville wearing the theme color, and many of them have painted all exposed skin to match; their devotion seems to begin on a cellular level. I have never seen such football mania (and I went to Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana!). Painted people aside, Knoxville is a genteel Southern city famous for its Dogwood Festival and debutantes. You get a sense of times gone by when you walk the streets here.
Once I’m at the stadium, I weave my way through the tailgate parties (a man is actually roasting chicken on a spit in the back of his station wagon). Theodore let me sleep late and left without me. He meets me at the staff entrance and takes me up one of the aerial booths where the football staff films the games. This is also Theodore’s perch, where he can watch the 125 brilliant musicians who make up the UT Marching Band. “Theodore, remember the county band competitions?”
“Yeah. We always beat Appalachia’s Tricky Sixty,” Theodore remembers.
“Enrollment took a dive since you left. Now they’re called the Dirty Thirty.”
Theodore laughs. I can’t believe he’s gone from the Wise County band competition to national television in less than ten years.
We barely watch the first half of the game as Theodore checks via headsets with the camera crews who are set to record the halftime show. He is a celebrity and honored auteur here—people stop him and ask for his autograph—because he delivers. Theodore, however, takes it all in stride; he knows his popularity rises and falls along with the success of the football team: no sense having a winning band with a losing team.
When the band takes the field at halftime, the crowd goes wild. If you could tap the energy in this stadium right now, you could win a war or move a pyramid. Theodore plays right into the razzle-dazzle. The majorettes are glorious, magazine-cover gorgeous: the whole weekend is an homage to youth, powerhouse athletics, and white-toothed sex appeal.
Theodore’s shows are more technical, more complex, than they were back in Big Stone Gap. Of course, this is another level entirely. But it is a wonder to see how Theodore has grown with the challenge of college football, most of it nationally televised. He has assumed the mantle with little fuss. He has Elizabeth Taylor to thank for this opportunity, and he knows it. If it weren’t for her fateful visit to Big Stone Gap, Theodore never would have been discovered.
As the band takes the field, Theodore is calm and focused. A row of small television monitors on the desk in front of us all record several angles of the performance at once. Theodore takes some notes, occasionally curses, sometimes smiles. I don’t know how he keeps what he’s watching straight. All I know is, when I look out of this glassy cube in the sky down onto the bright green field filled from end to end with crisp