From Champaign, Illinois - Sparkle! (said with lisp)



Season 2 Repertoire:
The Season 2 show will be titled:
Living with Liza: a Fanciful Journey Through the Music of Liza Minelli.

Songs include:
"Try to Remember"
"Cabaret"
"I Believe in Music"
"So Long Dad"
"Together (Wherever We Go)"

Sparkle! from Champaign, Ill. triumphantly returns to drum corps competition after last season's Finalist placement! Following their 13th place finish, the corps' leadership has continued to work towards bringing the all-male corps' unique brand of entertainment back to the field.

Corps director Gordon Reardon has announced that the vast majority of the staff from last year will be returning for Season 2, with a few exceptions.

Tour director Martha Stewart has decided that she will take this season off due to a relocation of her primary residence. Martha has been replaced by Jai Rodriguez, who will bring his unique grasp and understanding of culture to the corps' traveling schedule.

Michael Jackson, Housing Coordinator for the corps will be receiving an assistant. He will be sharing his duties with Tom Felicia, who is very excited to be able to fashion the corps' housing locations into a Feng Shui paradise.

Tour Director - Jai Rodriguez
Housing Coordinators - Michael Jackson, Tom Felicia

Creativity Director - Don Farnsworth
Program Coordinator - Barbara Streisand
Visual Designer - Brian Boitano
Music Arrainger - Liberace
Percussion Arranger - Melissa Etheridge

Brass:
Caption Head - Harvey Firestein
Brass Tech - Ellen Degeneris
Brass Tech - David Hyde Pierce

Percussion:
Caption Head - Melissa Etheridge
Perc Tech - Rock Hudson
Perc Tech - Ricky Martin

Visual:
Caption Head - Rosie O'Donell
Marching Tech - Judy Gold
Marching Tech - Big Gay Al

Guard:
Caption Head - Greg Louganis
Guard Tech - Christopher Lowell

The corps will again be sporting the uniforms designed by Mr. Boitano. Silver sequin pants and rainbow jackets with zushed sleeves and a pink lamé triangle on the chest worked very well for them last year and established the corps' new image. "When they're coming in through the tunnel, you just know it's Sparkle!" says Creative Director Don Farnsworth.

"We are going to have wonderful second season," says Mr. Reardon "and we are looking forward to reaching new levels of performance."

Sparkle! Drum and Bugle Corps has received overwhelming support this year, not just from the local community of Champaign, Illinois, but from cities and towns throughout the country. They have received a multitude of donations to help keep the corps fiscally viable and to ensure that the corps will continue to take the field for years to come. “The outpouring of support for the corps has been a blessing,” says Gordon Reardon, the director of Sparkle! “We have been able to purchase all of the equipment and services that the corps will need for the season, including new busses and tractor trailers.”

Even with the purchase of the equipment, the corps had a large surplus of funds and they could not find anything else to spend it on. “It put us into a predicament we never could have thought of. Last year we were knocking on doors and stretching every dollar as thin as we could trying to keep the corps afloat. We couldn’t believe it.” Being that the corps is a 401c non-profit organization, they could not legally justify keeping all of the extra cash. They had to find a way to utilize the budget surplus while staying within the 401c guidelines.

“The management committee discussed many options and they came to one conclusion: We are bringing the Sweet Meatmen back to the field!”

The Sweet Meatmen Drum and Bugle Corps had failed to raise the funding needed to be able to field a corps for this past competition season. Because the corps had gone inactive, many of the corps’ members looked elsewhere to march, and the up-and-coming Sparkle! Seemed to be a great fit for them. “It felt like home to most of us,” says former SM member Kevin Crowley “even though we had never met any of these people [Sparkle! members and staff] before, we shared a bond that just brought us so close together.”

“There were many things that lead to this decision,” Mr. Readon states. “Many of the members of the 2003 corps were from the San Francisco area, and even though they loved marching here, the transportation expenses imposed by the monthly flights to and from camps severely strained their bank accounts, and some of them would only be able to march one or two more years, even though they had another five or six years of eligibility left. We also had a very large turnout of great talent come and audition for Sparkle!, so many, in fact, that we had to turn most of them away because we just didn’t have the spots.

“The excess funding we had enabled us to be able to keep our fiscally challenged members involved in the activity by giving them a place to march that is closer to their homes, and we were also able to bring back some of the very talented auditionees for Sparkle! who would not have been able to march elsewhere. And just the fact that we are able to bring a corps back into existence on a solid financial foundation made it a win-win for everyone.”

Some of the former members of the Sweet Meatmen have chosen not to return to their old corps. “As much as I enjoyed my time with Sweet Meatmen, the quality and skill of the staff and administration of Sparkle! is too good for me to leave,” says Devon Miles, a bass drummer for Sparkle! “This is the organization where I want to age-out.”

The entire staff for Sparkle! will stay in place and a brand new staff for the Sweet Meatmen will be put together. Mr. Reardon said “We will offer as much guidance and support to the SM staff as we can, and if they need our help administratively or organizationally, we will certainly help them out. We don’t want to see them fail.”

...Devin Miles...

Sparkle! would like to thank all of the corps that came out for their home-away-from-home show in Elizabeth, NJ and made it such a huge success.

The show kicked off with Tony Soprano singing the national anthem, and all of the crowd joined in for the last few bars. From the end of the national anthem until the first corps took the field, there was a buzz of electricity that could be felt growing though the whole stadium. The crowd was ecstatic at the prospect of seeing the top contenders for the 2004 DLOFDC Championship, and they were not let down.

Whiskey River Regiment and YogiBoo duked it out on the field but it was too close to call (from the judges' point of view at least) and wound up in a tie not only for first place at the show, but also for the top ranking in the circuit. This season will certainly be an interesting one.

The Washington DC Scandals reinforced the double-knockout of Yogiboo and WRR by following through in a close third place, only 1.1 behind the leaders.

The bottom three corps at the show; Sparkle!, the Red Flames, and the Brooklyn Rodgerers, slugged it out and wound up only seven tenths apart from each other.

Between the last competing corps and the finale, the stadium was rocking from the sounds of Jon Bon Jovi and his band kicking out some old Jersey classics. In a big surprise to the show organizers, Bon Jovi was joined on the stage by Bruce Springstein who sang backup for "Living on a Prayer".

Both Jon and Bruce stayed on the field to present the trophies to the corps during retreat, after which, the corps played themselves off one-by-one in the old style, which will hopefully become a more common occurance in future shows. The crowd showed their appreciation of hearing each individual corps by giving each one a standing ovation. WRR and Yogiboo entertained the crowd with standstill performances of parts of their respective shows, and marched off to the busses as one unit.

The event was such a hit that by the time the last spectator left and the lights were turned out in the stadium, Sparkle! had already sold out half of the tickets for the show next year!