Last Monday, January 17th, I spent the day with some of the students I've been teaching at Horace Mann Middle School and at June Jordan High School in San Francisco since the beginning of the school year. We went to Oakland School of the Arts for the Martin Luther King day of service event organized by the Music National Service. Coming in, I was very excited about the day because we were going to play "Lean On Me," the Bill Withers classic, but no one had to know the song in advance. We were all going to learn it there and then play it all together at the end of the day joining more than 75 MusicianCorps students, parents, siblings and volunteers. After the morning workshop it was all great, the Horace Mann students were excited to play the song but I could feel that they had energy building up for something else. They wanted to play "Lean On Me" no doubt, but they also wanted to show everyone there that they had been working hard on music back at their school. That's when we found out that there was an open mic during lunch break. I realized that not playing with them during the open mic was going to leave them flat so we decided to play. What song? It didn't really matter. They wanted to be on stage. They wanted to perform. In 30 seconds we decided that we should play "Stand By Me" which they had played during the holiday celebration last December. We went to a different room for instruments and practiced the song once. When we came back to the room where the open mic was taking place, they were all fired up and ready to roll. No fear, not doubts, no bails. We all shared the stage and our music with everyone at this beautiful Martin Luther King day event. In the afternoon we played "Lean On Me" with all other participants as planned and had a great experience doing so. Beyond that, having played during lunch made the day a thoroughly fulfilling experience for the Horace Mann students who believed in making this MLK day a day ON, not a day off.