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This is Panama's centennial as an independent republic, so the November 3 Independence Day and November 4 Flag Day parades will be bigger than ever. Panama's firefighters, the bomberos, will have the best bands. Like major university football powers in the United States, they recruit the cream of the high school marching bands into the volunteer auxiliaries that you can see practicing their firefighting skills on weekends or swelling the ranks of the professionals when the city's burning, which will make them eligible to wear the uniform and play in the band in November.

Most of the marching bands in the patriotic processions will be from the high schools. In fact the parades are supervised by the Ministry of Education, which under the Moscoso administration has made an annual practice of issuing bizarre and generally ignored edicts like the ban on majorettes throwing their batons into the air or doing pirouettes. Should we be surprised that the church schools tend to have better majorettes and tighter marching bands than the public schools?

Then there are the independent club and community bands, like this one that practices on Sunday afternoons at Parque Porras. At the moment they're concentrating on the music, but soon they will dedicate more effort to the marching.

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