PARIS, FRANCE – To the St. Augustine High School Marching 100, the sixth day of a trip to France roughly equates to Bacchus Sunday during Mardi Gras.
“At this point, the band is literally on autopilot,” assistant band director Darren Rodgers Jr. said Sunday before the musicians marched through the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a lush garden/amusement park in Paris. “The exhaustion is there.
“It’s calm until it’s ‘horns up’; then the energy comes. They understand they have a job to do. And they do their job. Some way, somehow, they will give you the product everyone is expecting.”
After nearly a week in France, it wouldn’t be easy. Jet lag and the grind of daily performances prefaced and followed by multi-hour bus rides had taken a toll on the 159-person traveling party.
St. Augustine High School Marching 100 cymbal player Aidan Moore, right, and Riverwood Hornets Cadet Band of Australia musician George Aleamotua, left, trade hats following their performances in the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris on Sunday, June 9, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
The teenage musicians stayed up late and didn’t necessarily eat well. While based in the Normandy region for D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations, some skipped hotel-provided meals in favor of McDonald’s and Domino’s via Uber Eats.
Both students and chaperones have slept two to a room, so privacy isn’t possible. Inevitably, tension resulted. By the time the caravan arrived in Paris on Saturday night, chaperones were monitoring “hot spots” in the band ranks, points of potential conflict.
The trip has been tough on the adults, too. During a late-night solo McDonald’s run in Paris, one staff member fought off a pickpocket who flashed a knife. Another staffer tripped on a curb and hurt his knee while helping the band cross a busy Parisian street.
Members of the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 head into the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, June 9, 2024, during the New Orleans marching band's week-long trip to France for D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations.
Emmanuel Hudson, the Marching 100’s hard-working equipment manager, stayed up until 4 a.m. the first night in Paris prepping uniforms and equipment. Despite his efforts, two kids still managed to show up without their uniforms the next morning.
Meeting mummies at the Louvre
In Paris, the band bunked in La Défense, the business district west of the heart of the city.
Newly graduated St. Augustine High School senior Tyran Battiste, a tuba player in the school's Marching 100, and Santa Harris, vice-president of the band's booster club, examine a mummy inside the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, June 9, 2024, during the band's week-long trip to France.
“Is this Detroit?” one band member joked as the band buses emerged from a tunnel among the contemporary high-rises.
The first glimpse of a famed landmark in the distance sent a ripple of excitement through the bus. “I’ve got a picture of the Eiffel Tower on my phone!” one student exclaimed.
The plan was to take a band portrait at the Eiffel Tower on Sunday morning. But rounding up stragglers at the hotel delayed departure. The photo op was scrapped so everyone could arrive at the Louvre museum on time.
The Louvre is a vast repository of history and art filling several buildings. Seeing everything would take many months.
The Marching 100 had two hours.
The Rev. Tony Ricard, St. Aug’s campus minister, assigned the boys three big-ticket items to find: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Egyptian mummies.
“Let’s go see Mona – I think she’s from Uptown,” cracked English teacher C. Maxille Moultrie.
The 112 students broke into small groups with assigned chaperones and dispersed into the maze that is the Louvre. In their band uniforms, they squeezed through the crowd to take selfies with Mona from Uptown.
“The Mona Lisa is not the most impressive painting,” one student decided. “The stuff on the ceiling was fire.”
Miraculously, they all made it out in time to pose for a photo with the Louvre’s iconic glass pyramid in the background.
A former 'human zoo'
The guides and drivers hoped to stop at the Eiffel Tower before heading to Jardin d’Acclimatation. But President Joe Biden was in Paris. Roads closed for security and roads closed for construction ahead of next month’s Olympics thwarted an Eiffel Tower detour.
The buses pulled up alongside the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a stunning, Frank Gehry-designed art museum and cultural center on Mahatma Gandhi Avenue, which borders the Jardin D’Acclimatation and the surrounding Bois de Boulogne urban forest.
The history of the Jardin d’Acclimatation is, to say the least, colorful. It was founded in 1860 by Napoleon III as a zoo and garden, a center of scientific and social life.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-’71, the zoo’s elephants, kangaroos, camels, bears and wolves were butchered to help feed the starving population of Paris.
Rebuilt after the war, the Jardin featured “ethnographic shows” – live displays of “exotic” individuals from around the globe such as Nubians, Lapps and Kanaks.
St. Augustine High School Marching 100 band members get their first up close view of the Eiffel Tower in Paris on their last day of performing in France on Sunday, June 9, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
The Jardin’s “human zoo” is long gone, replaced by a carousel, a small roller coaster and other attractions for children.
The Marching 100 was part of Sunday’s D-Day commemoration. The program also included the Voodoo Orchestra, a high school jazz band from Utah, and the Riverwood Hornets Cadet Band from Australia, both of whom St. Aug had performed with in Normandy.
On a warm afternoon, the Marching 100 pulled on their gold helmets and overlays one last time in France.
For the recently graduated seniors, this would be the last time ever.
They formed up at one end of a tree-lined midway framed by French children and parents, plus a smattering of New Orleans expatriates eager for a taste of home. The band marched the length of the midway, turned around in formation, and marched back, pumping out one bold, brassy arrangement after another.
Former New Orleans residents, Amy Freeman and Antoine Passelac, who now live in Paris, made a special trip to Jardin d'Acclimatation to catch St. Augustine High School Marching 100's last performance in France on Sunday, June 9, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
As Rodgers had predicted, they sounded far fresher and more energized than they were.
Park officials wanted the band to perform a second time. But St. Augustine president and CEO Aulston Taylor nixed that idea.
“We gave more than enough great value to the amusement park,” Taylor said. “It was time to make that (march) the final performance in France.”
Members of the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 walk along the Avenue de l'Opera following a visit to the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, June 9, 2024, during the New Orleans marching band's week-long trip to France for D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations.
But there was still one more stop to make.
A date with the Eiffel Tower
After a meal of vegetarian alfredo lasagna at a restaurant in the park – band director Ray Johnson Sr. noted that the cawing of the peacocks roaming nearby sounded like, "St. Aug, St. Aug!" – the band rode to the Trocadéro area in Paris’ 16th arrondissement.
They walked a block, turned a corner and, to the extent tired teenage boys can be, were wowed: There, just across the Seine river, was the Eiffel Tower in all its glory.
Dodging pickpockets, dance troupes and vendors hawking miniature Eiffel replicas, the band directors assembled the musicians for one final photo in full uniform. The Eiffel Tower would serve as a symbolic exclamation point on the whole trip.
Sun in their faces, the musicians stood at attention and looked up at a photographer balancing on a restaurant patio’s retaining wall.
Click. The image was captured. “That’s a wrap!” the photographer announced.
The ranks dissolved. The boys took their own photos and took in the view. They trundled back to the bus, ready to call it a day, and a journey.
On Monday morning, they boarded buses once again, this time to be tourists in the City of Light. One bus, bedeviled by traffic and full of sleeping teenagers uninterested in listening to a tour guide, turned back early.
The other two reached Montparnasse Tower and its observation deck overlooking the city. Outside, the St. Aug students ran into the three World War II veterans who'd been with them at the Brittany American Cemetery on Thursday.
The boys sang the traditional gospel hymn "We Are Soldiers" to the vets, and prayed the Prayer of St. Augustine.
"We know this will be the last time those three men will be with those boys," Ricard said. "What a powerful way to end our journey."
On Tuesday, the Marching 100 flies home.
They are ready.