Barbie Nuremberg Rally
4 April 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
With the predictably bad timing I became increasingly ill as my trip to the beach approached. By my Friday departure it was apparent that I was infected. “Probably Bird Flu.” said my fourteen year old step daughter with stone face and not a hint of humor. We were headed to the annual Barbie Nuremburg Rally. Reach for the Beach is a regional competition that draws 2,000 young cheerleaders to the Ocean City Convention Center This high-voltage slightly-hallucinogenic extended pep rally is all about conformity: planned routines are done in syncopated lock-step. My step-daughter would compete with her posse in the Junior Class 4 division. Competitors are grouped by broad then subtle categorization. I had thought that since the cheer-fest was being held at the beach in the excellent off-season why not stay for four full days? Why not? So I did; only I was ill the whole time. The Convention Center was packed to the rafters with audience; this is big league stuff, big money, maybe 3,000 paying to watch as squad after squad of identically dressed/identically-moving youngsters danced to the music. Watching elite cheerleaders has become one of my secret guilty hidden pleasures. Watching small does of the very best makes exciting spectator viewing. The sheer athletic ability of elite cheerleaders is nothing less than awesome. I can hang for an hour or so. The best cheerleaders are lean athletes who have developed an ability to fling themselves about with incredible dexterity. One morning we took a long boardwalk stroll and ended up sitting down on the boardwalk. Stacy and I sat and ate a huge bucketful of Thrasher’s French Fries. As we sat we watched squads of cheerleaders engage in a spontaneous Zulander-like “walk off” throw-down.
One trio of cheerleaders decided on the spur of the moment to run through some moves on the sand adjacent to the boardwalk. Two girls and a guy, 17-ish, obviously advanced, went through this amazing display of group and individual moves. Each in turn would bust a move and the other two would attempt to match or best it. They started off with each effortlessly doing a standing back flip; that established the baseline and the degree of difficulty escalated until soon the guy was doing long explosive series of spinning, twisting, corkscrewing aerials that looked right out of a national level gymnastic floor routine. Cheerleaders were everywhere prowling the boardwalk, flying their various colors…it was inevitable that soon a second squad sauntered onto the beach and challenged the 1st group in a friendly funny way, a humorous parody of ‘You Got Served.’ Then a third group and a fourth group step onto the sand and soon the entire beachscape was covered with groups of cheerleaders displaying their chops. I must say, by in large, the huge majority of physiques on this particular group of athletes was excellent; lean and lithe, the top girls were uniformly trim. To be really good you need be exceedingly lean as less bodyweight makes it easier to propel the payload. The name of the athletic game is leaping and spinning through the air. The assembled cheerleader nation is over-the-top demonstrative – after all they’re cheerleaders! Their job is exuberance. I kept seeing in my mind’s eye the Sherry Oteri/Will Farrell Saturday Night Live feckless cheerleader skit as I sat in the hall.
Cheerleader Nation has unison cheers and songs that they do in unison in the breaks between the action. A giant mascot leads the entire convention hall in some sort of strange sing-a-long, complete with stand-in-place dance moves, clapping and singing. It is a positively hair-raising experience when the entire auditorium erupts in this chant-dance ritual led by a giant puppet. Everyone (but you) seems to know the exact steps, the hand gestures and words to the song. My wife and daughter knew the whole Macarena step procedure. I figured my daughter would, but when Stacy started doing the step-shimmy-step routine, I felt like I was a powerless male at an Amazon convention. This whole extravaganza was all about grrrl power and perhaps it was fitting that I was sick with Bird Flu. It was as if the estrogen in the filled auditorium effortlessly overcame my puny Kavorka testosterone supply.
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