Visiting Band Finds It’s Camp on the Floor

The room is hot. The floor is hard. Her neighbor in the next sleeping bag snores.

No matter. Sarah Matthews and 102 other Canadians who are bunking for the next eight days in a crowded Calabasas High School meeting room are happy campers.

The 83 student musicians and their 20 chaperones are members of a Surrey, B. C., youth band group visiting Southern California for a round of performances. To save money, they have arranged to sleep on the high school floor instead of at a hotel.

“I don’t miss the rain we have at home. But if it gets hotter, I’ll put an ice bag on my head,” said 10-year-old Sarah, a flag twirler.

The musicians range in age from 8 to 21. The boys sleep on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Parents of group members, serving as chaperones, have unrolled their sleeping bags in the middle.

“I was a little bit stiff when I woke up this morning,” tuba player Jasen McNiven, 13, admitted Tuesday. “It was different. I’m used to hotels.”

The band members will give performances at the Queen Mary, Burbank’s Starlight Amphitheatre and other locations, and will visit such attractions as Disneyland.

But their first stop Tuesday was at the Fallbrook Mall, where Jasen and the others rushed clothing stores to stock up on tank tops and T-shirts.

Alan Dyck, founder of the 11-year-old nonprofit Pacificaires music group, said the organization raised most of the $30,000 being spent on the trip by staging bingo games in Surrey, on the outskirts of Vancouver. Band members paid $190 each.

Bunking on the high school floor will save $9,000 in motel costs. More savings are coming from cooking the group’s meals on a butane grill set up outside the gym.

The accommodations were arranged by Calabasas High’s music boosters club, said Jack Burke, the Calabasas group’s president.

Calabasas High Principal Dorothy Schneider said booster club members are also sleeping at the school to fulfill a Las Virgenes Unified School District requirement that local representatives be on campus whenever outsiders are present.

She said she didn’t volunteer. “I don’t mind being a Good Samaritan, but it only goes so far,” she joked.

Schneider said she warned the Canadians about the danger of brush fires from smoking near the chaparral-covered hills next to the campus and about snakes and coyotes. “I told them they should go in pairs if they have to use the restrooms at night. The coyotes come down to scavenge at night, and the rattlesnakes are definitely out and about. I told them how dry it is around here and to be careful with cigarettes,” she said.

‘Just Rust Out’

“This isn’t Vancouver, where people don’t get old, they just rust out.”

Misconceptions apparently abounded Tuesday at the high school.

“People think we live in igloos and wear parkas and seal boots,” laughed saxophone player Tennille Courville, 13. But she admitted surprise at seeing sweaters displayed next to T-shirts at the Canoga Park shopping center.

“The sun here is so hot. I even saw some ski jackets for sale and wondered why anybody living here would ever need one of those.”