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May Balling it Up May 20, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, School , trackback

Yes, last Friday it was indeed that time of the year again. I mentioned it last year although it didn’t get its own shiny post dedicated to it.

Unlike last year, this time round I had a bit more time to prepare myself. Back then I had 3 hours of exams the afternoon before the May Ball and barely had time to put clothes on before friends were turning up to be taken there. I had a much more relaxed time this year and we arrived not early but not late either.

Although our invites told us that we needed to be there for 6.45pm to have the photo taken at 7pm it was much closer to 7.45 when the photo actually got taken. We hung around eating sweets and throwing around innuendo in the entrance bit. Unlike last year the photo was taken inside and thus required a lot of squashing up to fit everyone in it, I assume that the photographer did get everyone in, he seemed to take quite a lot of photos so it will be pot luck whether I look ok in the one that is chosen as the “official” photo.

At this point we all sat down to eat. Being that my sixth form friendship group consists of me and 3 other people it was pretty much guaranteed that we would be sat with another group of people although till we got there we didn’t know who. I was quite pleased to find we were sat on table F (for failure, obviously) and were with a group of people similar to ourselves in terms of popularity. Perfectly nice people so that was all good. Last time around we basically had the table to ourselves as a couple of people on it didn’t show up and the ones that did just left the table and didn’t come back.

When it comes to the food I can’t help but feel I’m on my own with my opinion. The starter was a tomato soup with croûtons and bread rolls which I thought was very nice and the staff checked who was vegetarian (on our table it may have just been me, I’m not entirely sure as I was at the end). Main course I already knew was going to be lasagna and chips (strange combination…) and mine was basically a lasagna with all the meat replaced by vegetables, which works fine for me and I quite enjoyed it. From what people were saying in tutor period this morning however, it didn’t seem to go down well. Maybe the meat version was far inferior or perhaps they are just fussy. I don’t know. Pudding was a profita roll type thing with quite a lot of cream. Nice but for whatever reason I was just too full to get through it all.

Once everyone was close enough to finished they brought on the band whose name I couldn’t really hear properly so I won’t try and tell you who they were. They played last year and have band members ranging through a few years although most do not go to our school anymore.  As expected it was pretty crappy pop-rock with rather boring lead even if it was technically correct.  They also had some quite weird line up changes, with some songs the singer was just singing whilst his younger brother played bass but in others the singer played bass as well and the other guy just sat out.  The drummer also did a small bit of playing guitar and singing whilst they were setting up for their second set which was really quite bad and a very good example of why drummers should never be allowed to play guitar.

I also noticed this time round that they had really quite craptacular amps, I think one of them was a Marshall MG (the first amp I got, they are awful) and the other was some other quite small and uninteresting amp.  No one used any effects and the drum kit was a bit lacking in options, although I’m not sure if they would have been used if they were there.  I think that completes my criticisms, to be fair on them, they weren’t really that bad.  They did what they did perfectly well and although the songs they played weren’t really to my taste they were generally good choices for the audience they had, I don’t expect stuff I like to be played.

On the note of band playing though, it would be good if we could get Opium Toad on for next years May Ball, probably just for a small opening set since we would of course be bringing the metal.  I have a little more faith in the will-be-then-year-12s as I know quite a few of them and there is a bigger rock/metal presence in their year. It wouldn’t really be strange for us to be there either, since 3/5s of the band will probably be going to that sixth form and the rest of us are still about.

That’s a bit of a tangent, back onto the ball.  Once the band had disappeared it was just the DJ, a typical balding, middle aged overweight guy if I remember correctly.  Of course from this point the music was just god awful.  Filled with crappy rap and pop, some of the shit was played more than once and that particularly annoyed me because they could have used that time to play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.  It never was played, of course, because any requests for it would be fighting against a flood of requests for rubbish.

At this point the night mostly turned into watching drunk people, such as our friend David, get drunker and drunker and do amazing things.  Sights included seeing my tutor (and IT teacher to friends) attempting to do the Macarena (something I tried last year but there wasn’t enough wine for that this time around) and my friend getting a hug and drunken future encouragements from another IT teacher.  It was gold.

The night culminated with a bit of Don’t stop me now by Queen followed by Livin’ on a prayer, which enticed our drunken David to the dance floor, where his swaggerings kept us all raving away.  Once we were shortly into Livin’ on a prayer David bolted off the dance floor without a word.  Of course, without his swaggering we had no hope of staying on the dance floor, dancing is really not our thing, particularly with my blood alcohol level, it just wasn’t going to happen.

Naturally there was confusion as to where he had gone and after a couple of minutes my friend returned from the toilet with some amazing news: Vomit.  Or more specifically: Vomit Explosion.

As it happens, he had headed to the toilet once he realized something was up but the bodily processes were already in motion and things were already well underway before he was in the door to the mini-corridor that lead to the actual men’s bathroom.  To sum up the damage, there was vomit on the carpet before the mini corridor, vomit on the floor and a bit of the wall of the mini corridor and of course all over the floor of the bathroom as well.  Presumably he got some in the toilet as well but I didn’t really want to get that close, the smell was a pretty potent spectacle to behold and as he exited the building (which he did in a great hurry) he left a great trail of smell behind him.  It was amazing.

The few great sights alone made the night worth it really.  I left out a few bits which I can’t remember in enough detail or can’t really write about in a reasonably anonymous way (eg the awards).  Of course David gets left out of the vague anonymity because of his amazing performance.

Still to come, the report from Saturday, which will hopefully be a bit shorter because this has grown to rather an epic length…

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