Cheer Day (Another !&*%$@! Cheer Day)

It is cheer day.

One of our daughters cheers for her school, but also participates on a competitive cheer team. Today is the first competition of her season, which means we are in a distant, large city, preparing to spend long hours in some cavernous convention center, surrounded by hundreds of teenaged and pre-teen girls with cheerleader attitude and not enough clothes, dancing to mindless, too loud (c)rap music.

Oh boy.

At least, I console myself, it’s not Cotton-Eyed Joe. My older children were clog dancers, and their competitions featured that inane song as loud as it could go, every team, every age division, over and over and over. The four of them were dedicated, so they practiced every day at home, where I heard Cotton Eyed Joe over and over and over.

I was an invisible nerd in high school, in the days before being a nerd was cool or socially credible in any way, so I had no experience with cheerleaders other than secretly admiring their legs from a distance. Certainly none ever spoke to me, and I likely would have passed out had one stooped so low.

So it is interesting to live with one now, and to have her friends around, to see the pretty girls up close and personal. They still have the attitude, and few of them talk to me, but from my perspective, it is a relief to realize that the snotty girls weren’t that different after all, that they had their fears and worries and jealousies and doubts, too.

Could it be that Janet and Jane and Lee Ann and Kathy and the rest were more like me than I thought? That they hid their insecurities behind upturned noses and school colors, rather than standing silently in the back?

Or is that just wishful thinking from a high school cipher?