Sophmore and Junior Year

This post has been brewing for a while and I’m excited that I finally have the time to get it out of my head and onto the blog. It’s especially exciting because I’m filling in a gaping hole in the “Acid Queen Stories” by touching on this subject. I’m not sure if I will get around to an actual story to go in there but there is a lot missing around my sophomore and Junior year of High School that can easily be summed up with one word.

Cheerleading.

Many of you may move on from the entry now, realizing that it’s going to bore the hell out of you but for the one or two of you that might be in touch with your inner cheerleader, it is for you I write.

I love cheerleading. I love it. I’m tired of apologizing. I don’t care if you think it’s a non-sport, if it’s shallow, if it’s for ditzy slutty girls. I’m fine with that description. Cheerleading is awesome. Ok, first of all it combines dancing and gymnastics. Awesome. Second, cute uniforms. Totally awesome. Third, you get to ride in the bus with the boys to the sporting events. Hello. I rest my case.

I always wanted to be a cheerleader growing up. I was never good at sports. I took a lot of dance classes and did theater and whenever I went to any kind of sporting event where there were cheerleaders, I studied them. That is what I want to do. I love watching cheerleading competitions on TV. They are so exciting. I could watch that all day.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about cheerleading. My car stereo doesn’t have an iPod hook up. It doesn’t have a cd player. It has a tape deck that is broken and it has a radio. So I listen mainly to 2 different stations going to and from work, which is a total of about 40 min a day. I listen to NPR and I listen to Kiss FM. My favorite is Ryan Seacrest in the morning on Kiss. I like to know what the kids are listening to these days, ok? Most of it makes my ears bleed but there are usually one or two really great pop songs in rotation. My favorite right now would be SUCH A GREAT CHEERLEADING ROUTINE SONG. It’s “Raise your glass” by Pink. Omg. I would do anything to be a high school girl doing a dance routine with back flips and basket tosses in a short skirt bad ass costume in front of an entire high school class sitting in bleachers at a pep assembly. It would be so hot. **sigh** I seriously get butterflies in my stomach imagining it when I turn this song up very loud in my car while I’m driving. I can imagine it happening and I think, “maybe I should coach cheerleading?” It would be a bold career move that would pay almost nothing. And yet….

Honestly, I wasn’t really that great of a cheerleader. I’ve never been super coordinated and I learned back handsprings late in life and was always afraid of doing them…

When I got to the Claw High School, one of the first things I asked was, “Do you have cheerleading for Freshman?” The answer was yes, Freshman could try out for cheerleading but there was only one cheerleading squad and no Freshman had ever made it. At the high school I would have gone to if I had stayed in California, which was 3x the size of the Claw High School, they had a Varsity squad, a JV squad and a Freshman Squad. The Freshman squad was known as the “Dog Squad” but you had to cheer on the Dog Squad for one year if you even wanted to try out for JV or Varsity so all of my friends were doing the last semester of 8^th grade. I didn’t do the try outs because I knew we were moving and so did every one else and it would have been silly. All of my friends were practicing the routines and going to the workshops and I just watched and I was SO JEALOUS. GAWD I JUST WANTED TO BE A CHEERLEADER WAS THAT SO WRONG??????

So when I found out that there was only one squad, even though they told me Freshman never made it, I was kind of into that idea. I felt like, well when I do get on the team, it will be the good team right away. I won’t have to slum it in a dog squad. I knew that I would make the team. I had to make the team because I WANTED IT MORE THAN ANYTHING. It was just like many of the contestants on American Idol. It cracks me up so much when the contestants say things like that, especially during like Hollywood Week or whatever and they get cut and they are being interviewed right after and they are like, “I can’t get cut. I want this SO BAD. NO ONE WANTS THIS MORE THAN ME.” And it’s like, “well perhaps but it’s not a contest for who wants it the most. It’s a contest for who can sing the best.” So…… I wasn’t the best cheerleader. Yet.

I wasn’t able to try out for the Fall cheerleading team which cheered for Football. I was too late for that but I was able to try out for Winter, which was cheering for basketball. They did a sort of cheerleading clinic after school where you could go and learn the routines, the cheer you would have to do at tryouts and practice and of course, get to know the current cheerleaders. I found out pretty quickly, after hearing chatter mostly from the stands at the first day of school assembly where the cheer leaders performed that there had been a recent Coup in the cheerleading echelon at the Claw High School. Apparently there was a new sheriff in town, the cheerleading coach, and she didn’t like how things were being run. She didn’t like that the cheerleading tryouts were basically a popularity contest. She didn’t like that the cheerleaders were only the pretty girls who maybe weren’t the best dancers or gymnasts. She didn’t like that they partied a lot and had a reputation for being sluts. Basically she was no fun.

She came in and changed the entire process. Apparently up until her arrival the entire try out was a one shot deal in front of the entire school and there was a VOTE. That’s how you got onto the squad. Isn’t that hilarious? I mean it was truly 100% a popularity contest. So the Claw. So crazy. So she took the vote out of it completely and brought in a table of judges who were from out of town, supposedly impartial and had some dance and or gymnastic experience. The auditions were open and anyone could come watch, which a lot of people did. It was an event. So what happened is that all of the pretty popular girls got axed and some younger, less pretty but better gymnasts got in and the entire school was up in arms about it. It was pretty sad really because they got booed a lot, even though they were really good.

So when I tried out this had all just happened and the pretty popular girls were pissed and they were back. They were doing the clinic and they were there to roll up their sleeves and learn to dance better and back flip better and bring the DECENCY and the POPULARITY back to the Claw High School Cheerleading Squad. I was a little lost in the shuffle but it was interesting to watch.

To be continued…