Other "Thinking Drafts" and writing by Keith Drury -- http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday .
In high school I was in love with a heavenly cheerleader named Dot. I had gone bonkers over her and thought of her constantly. One time in Algebra she even spoke to me. "Can I borrow a pencil?" she said, but she certainly meant something deeper. Dot got me interested in sports.
Cheerleading was different in the 60's when I went to high school. We'd have a string of girls at our Friday night football games. They shout and scream urging us to cheer and would often lose their own voices in the process. When this line of cheerleaders hollered us into cheering we'd join in, and even the students in the stands lost their voices. Indeed, this was a particular measure of 1960's cheerleader's success -- not just losing their own voices, but how many students also lost their voices.
Had I asked Dottie what her cheerleading job was, she'd have screwed up her cute little pug nose, and look mystified. "Well, to lead cheers, stupid," she'd have replied. That was the primary job of 60's cheerleaders: to lead cheers. The focus was on the audience. They tried to get us to become participants, to cheer the team. They'd urge u