It'll Be a Very Merry New Year's

It's a bird, it's a plane, no ….. it's a stealth bomber flying straight over Mary! (Don't tell me you can't see her there in the USA formation.) This is from last year's Rose Bowl (courtesy of my "friends" in high places, i.e., the Blimp, but really it's thanks to photo sharing online). Last night Stanford sealed another Rose Bowl deal, beating Arizona State 38-14 in Tempe, winning the Pac-12 championship on the road, and accepting a repeat trip to the Rose Bowl ….. and not just the Rose Bowl, the 100th Rose Bowl!

As you might imagine, the Stanford band was there for the game. It was an away game, occurring just before finals (which start tomorrow, so only about a third of the group could make the trip, but luckily for Mary her finals are late in the week), and the band avoided their usual fate in such circumstances of a super long bus ride and instead got to fly on a chartered plane down to Phoenix. I'm not sure that they would have been allowed to do this on a commercial flight, but since the world's largest rock n roll band always puts their unique LSJUMB stamp on things, here are Mary and two of her fellow tenor sax bandmates boarding their plane in matching outfits that simply defy my understanding. All I know is that they look like they're having an awful lot of fun.

After the game and on their way back to campus, the tenors show their love for Shane Skove, a favorite player whose unique eye black they wore as a tribute throughout the game. (That's Mary on the bottom right.) A few of the tenors also shaved their heads a la Shane Skove, and if you've seen his hair (think mohawk) you'll be glad when I tell you that Mary didn't go that far. It was - as you might guess - a happy flight home for a very tired group of kids who were away from campus for less than 24 hours. So ….. it'll be another New Year's in Pasadena for them, and for us ….. another chance to see our daughter march down Colorado Boulevard. California, here we come!