Personal Bests: 2006

Oh, the spectacles, the tableaux, the drama
... that is pageantry!

The end of any year is a time to look back and project forward, and by offering my personal bests in pageantry for 2006, I'll begin the look back. Throughout December, I will also wrap up the decade-long tenure of Field&Floor, with lists that will span the years of chosen favorites from both field and floor. I'll also throw out for your consideration the top pageantry events of the past ten years, as well as a front page full of pageantry's top headlines -- the news of the decade.

While Field&Floor's best lists for both winter guards and for drum and bugle corps offer up the industry leaders, this list, and those that will follow, are all mine: personal preference, viewpoint specific, and lense-colored by my pageantry eyeglasses.

Pageantry is an oft ill-used and denigrated word, but one that, in this context of field and floor, fits, and more importantly lifts my chosen idioms of indoor color guard and drum and bugle corps to their rightful place in history. You see, the word pageantry has its etymology in Middle English as a derivation of a Latin word. Its meaning: "an elaborate colorful exhibition or spectacle often with music that consists of a series of tableaux, of a loosely unified drama, or of a procession...."

For those of us who consider these forms of entertainment essential to our lives, to use any other word for large context, would simply be small.

2006: how I loved you. Here are the ways!