# 22 - The Pep Rally

We got a new drama teacher our Senior year. Her name was Miss Lana Crosby. She’d grown up in Duchesne but had gone off to college before the two years I lived there. She had married young and then divorced, finished her degree and come to Himni High School for her first job. She was young, attractive, flamboyant and eager to inaugurate a dynamic speech and drama program.

I was interested in politics so I took her forensic speech class. I was excited to participate in debate tournaments. She had other ideas. Politics was definitely not her thing. She was artsy artsy artsy. She encouraged me to attend the first ever Thespian Club Meeting and I was elected President. I wound up with the lead in the School Play and most of my extracurricular efforts that year were wound around the drama department. Lest you think I had a crush on Miss Crosby, not a chance, that would be reserved for someone else. I promise to share that story with you one of these days.

During basketball season the cheerleaders organized a pep rally. We needed one. The basketball team was an embarrassment and attendance was dropping off fast. Miss Crosby had been a cheerleader at DHS and suggested they do a spoof of Duchesne’s cheerleaders at the rally. They thought it to be a great idea.

The plan was to get some hairy legged boys to pose as DHS cheerleaders and stir up the crowd with some antics. Duchesne had a great ball team that year and I guess the idea was to demystify them a bit. Miss Crosby took charge of the project, which is how I got involved.

She instructed me to find three friends and recruit them to join me in the skit. I was reluctant until she promised makeup sufficient to completely disguise our identities. I recruited Mitch Warner, Douglas Winger and Pee Wee Lundquist. We should have practiced, but never found the time. When it came down to it, we barely found the time to get made up and dressed in our cheerleader outfits. In makeup we sort of talked our way through a couple of ideas. We decided to stuff the bodice of our uniforms with a couple of balloons each. Those were procured and filled things out quite acceptably. We wondered who’d worn these things before Miss Crosby scrounged them up.

Douglas and I were made up as blondes with little heart shaped red lips. We each had shoulder length wigs with bangs, pale makeup base with rosy pink cheeks. We looked like a couple of Scandinavian lasses. Mitch and Pee Wee were done up as brunettes with long brown hair, fully painted lips and long black false eyelashes. I was embarrassed for them, they looked forever like a couple of whores.

It was fun rummaging through Miss Crosby’s huge makeup case for resources. It was like the largest tackle box I ever saw and was crammed with everything imaginable. There were warts, noses, beards, scars, eyelashes, wigs, falls, and pigtails. There were teeth, mustaches, and nose jewe…wait a minute. Those pigtails caught my attention.

Every skit needs a bomb and I had found mine.

We hit the stage with a bang. All made up cute and girl like, except for oversized Converse All-stars, to make us look goofy. Actually, I don’t think the All-stars made that much difference. We cheered and bounced and giggled. Mitch in a damatic effort to look like a spaz, was, and falling, gave himself a nasty floor burn. Blood ran down his hairy leg the remainder of the performance.

After leading the crowd in a rousing cheer we jumped up and down with glee and hugged one another with balloon popping enthusiasm. One of Pee Wee’s didn’t pop though, it just bulged out in an embarrassing manner. That nearly brought down the house.

No one knew why Douglas and I kept our elbows to our sides through all our antics. Some, said they supposed we were just trying to look silly. But, when, during the grand finale, we did raise our arms to expose our braided armpits, the house went wild!

We had glued the pigtails, with Spirit Gum, to our underarm hair. They looked remarkably real. We thought we’d kept it a secret from Mitch and Pee Wee, but they made us. When we stepped forward to expose our Norwegian grooming, they stepped behind us and in one coordinated grab, pulled our braids out by the roots! Whereupon, two blonde cheerleaders, screamed every bit like girls.

The next evening during the big game the crowd had invented a new cheer:

Rip those pits,
Rip those pits,
Forget at about the basketball,
Rip those pits.

Douglas and I were still too sore to put much enthusiasm into it, but oblivious to it’s meaning, Duchesne seemed quite discombobulated by the yell and in an 84 to 81 upset we beat them.