Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Sequins, Spankies and Sass: My Day at the 2007 National Cheerleading and Dance Championship

I’m going to go ahead and rank Cheersport’s 2007 National Cheerleading and Dance Championship up there with the 2003 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as Events I am Most Glad I Decided Not to Smoke Pot For. There are, quite simply, some things in this world that are perfect on their own. So perfect, in fact, as to almost provide me with that ever-elusive Evidence That There Is a God, and that He/She Has a Wicked Sense of Humor.

Some background: Cheersport, aka “The Future of Cheerleading and Dance,” is America ’s premiere organization for competitive cheerleading and dance (a very specific sort of dance). The National Championships this year took place at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. There are 800 teams competing and over 8,000 attendees, making Cheersport the third largest convention in Atlanta, coming in behind the national Poultry and Egg Convention in second place, and, in first place – predictably enough – something Christian. So if convention attendance is any way to judge the character of a city, the things Atlantans hold dearest are cheerleaders, chickens, and Jesus. Not my top three, but sounds about right.

The Georgia World Congress Center is a pretty big place, big enough to hold Cheersport and then some, so this year the event fell on the same weekend as World of Wheels, a hot rod car and motorcycle show, and the Bronner Brothers Mid-Winter Hair Show, an African-American hair extravaganza. This made for quite a mixture of crowds, as portly bearded hicks clutching model replicas of the General Lee weaved their way through gaggles of very large black women made even larger by towering, Divine-worthy hairdos, only to get cut off at the pass by 25 teenage girls standing bent at the waist while their friends attempted to scrape all of the pony tail bumps out of the backs of their heads. It was at this point that my friend – a naughty Atlanta Convention and Visitors Center employee who shall remain nameless – informed me that the hotels and other venues participating in Cheersport had designated special “Glitter Rooms’ for the application of glitter after having spent the better part of last year having all of their furniture and carpeting industrially vacuumed only to have guests still complain of being covered in leftover glitter. I can confirm that even previously applied glitter gets around, and the floor of the Congress Center was covered with a sticky paste of glitter, sequins, Rave #4, and liberal snippets of gold rick rack that had made a successful escape from the trim of someone’s spankies.

The team names are heavy on sports-style boasts – The Something All-Stars seem to be a favorite. Sting Ray All-Stars, Thunder All-Stars, and – my personal choice for Best Name – The Freedom Eagle All-Stars. Guess what flag figured prominently in their costume? If you guessed United Arab Emirates, you guessed wrong. Although a Freedom-Hater All-Stars with little girls in burkas would be awesome…

The competitors range in age from about 6 to about 18. They are overwhelmingly female, with a handful boys thrown in for good measure. The young boys generally seemed semi- to very uncomfortable and mostly stayed near the back during the routines, save for one little flamer who was very talented and the unquestionable star of his team’s show, which ended with the 15 or so girls parting like a sequined sea to allow him to slide triumphantly all the way to the front of the stage on his queer little knees. And how could I forget the poor man watching his twin sons merrily fly through the air – he was smiling and clapping, but his eyes betrayed a soul curled into the fetal position, softly murmuring “I can’t believe they’re both gay.”

And then there were the older boys. Oh, the older boys. 16, 17, 18 - they were all jubilantly, flamingly, homosexual - out, proud and louder than the crowds of mothers screeching “Caitlin!!!” and “Schuyler!!!” at their competing spawn. One of my favorite sights of the day was a young biracial pair of cheerboys of about 17, coming down the escalator as I went up (they were Kelly LeBrock, and I was Robert Downey, Jr. I know it’s LeBrock that goes up in Weird Science, but trust me – they were LeBrock). Both had stripped down to their cheer vests and had their cheer sweaters jauntily thrown over their shoulders as they clearly relished whatever tawdry gossip and dissing of the competition they were indulging in. They were a lovely couple, positively exuding well-adjusted sass, and absolutely made my day. Cheerleading may strike me as a relatively miserable extracurricular option for a girl, but if you’re a Lance Bass in the making, it seems like a pretty good option. There was even a sizeable contingent of gay teenage spectators, such as the pair clearly on furlough from their Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered After School Club – an excitable and exactingly-groomed young man with as solid a grip on the rules of cheering as he had on the wrist of his utterly lesbonic chum, who he dragged from Arena H to Arena G as if she were a ragdoll. Once again, adorable, and made my day.

One of the finest nuances of competitive cheering is, it turns out, not to be found in the cartwheels, round-offs, and back flips, but rather in the vast iconography of facial expressions. My high school cheerleaders smiled, and that was it, unless someone broke something or happened to clap eyes on an offensively unpopular student. Those days are over. Cheersport girls boast a range of expression not seen since the gargoyles of the 14th century. There were growls, sneers, grimaces, bug eyes, Standard Pouty Face, Puffed-Out Cheek Pouty Face, Super-Duper Surprised Face, and so on, all accompanied by a constantly side-to-side waggling head (picture the way someone would move their head while giving a classic delivery of “oh know you dih-uhn’t”). These girls had more attitude than Mr. T, Gary Coleman, and SheNeNe all rolled into one. And 90% of them were white! (We soon figured out that the black cheerleaders were far superior – especially when it comes to facial expressions - and learned quickly how to scour the spectators in the friends and family section to get an idea if a particular group was ethnically mixed enough to be worth watching. Oh how we long for the day when the Cheersport program indicates the race of the teams. This is far from racist – after all, it’s not like we wanted to know where the black cheerleaders were so we could avoid them – quite the opposite!).

I find myself entering potentially offensive territory, so I will leave the particulars of the Special Cheerleading Competition to the reader’s imagination. Better yet, I recommend that anyone with a taste for the absurd come to Atlanta for Cheersport 2008, and help me cheer those gay twins.

2 comments:

crossroadsvirgil said...

You don't explain how you came to be attending this convention... not that it's a bad idea, just that it isn't an obvious thing to do with a Saturday...

Russ said...

Good point Sean. My friend works for the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Center and told me that this event was a must-see. I am a huge fan of the movie Bring it On, and generally enjoy exposing myself (no, not in that way) to stuff and people that I would normally never experience. Stuff like Cheersport is a reminder of how different people are - I could not be more different than these people - particularly the Cheerleader Mothers (and I reserve the right to use that as a band name, except it would just be Cheerleader Mother, singular), who are 100% obsessed and dedicated to this lifestyle. And their perfect little rosy-cheeked girls with ribbons in their spiral-curled pigtailed blonde just could not be more different than how was as a child. The whole thing was truly a spectacle of Debordian proportions.