My Summer of ‘68

“You can always get warm, but it’s hard to stay cool.” My mother’s words, muttered every summer since I can remember, rang like a mantra in my head as I stood in the uncut grass of a football field (the 20-yard line, to be precise), knees locked and eyes forward, arms akimbo, to balance a 28-inch-long metal stick at a 45-degree angle, just so. Perspiration trickled down my temples and collected under my jaw, but I held still. Since reaching my teens, I’d come to dread the wasteland of summer vacation: heat and more heat, the sodden press of humidity that forced my painfully coifed pageboy to retract its hooks, sun that turned my caramel complexion to burnt umber if I forgot to wear a hat.

It was the 19th of August, 1968, four days until the Soap Box Derby Parade and nine days before my 16th birthday, and I still hadn’t figured out how to keep my minimalist emergency ‘do (French twist with bangs pinned to the side) from shrinking to that fine corona of frizz usually found in the National Geographic photographs of ostrich heads. Why, oh why was I standing here at attention like a tin soldier, ankle-deep in crabgrass in the middle of a sweltering Midwestern summer, sweating out all the good sense Mom had pressed into the curls on my head?

Four months earlier, in April, a week or so after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, I was packing up my cello one afternoon after orchestra practice when Rhonda bounded up, flute propped on her shoulder like a baseball bat, and clapped me on the back. Rhonda was always doing things like that; copper-skinned and confident (even in glasses!) to the point of being uncomfortably gung-ho, she was what my grandmother would call, wrinkling her nose, sturdy. I started to straighten up, but she couldn’t wait. “Rita,” she whispered, “I’ve got a terrific idea. Let’s try out for the majorette squad!”

Funny thing is, even though I gulped and felt my heart pound into my throat, I thought it was a great idea, too. In the Byzantine hierarchy of high school, majorettes and cheerleaders were the Cream. Cheerleaders enjoyed a noisy devotion from the masses, but majorettes were the serene wizards, the silvery circumferences of their batons humming before them like horizontal pirouettes. If I said yes, if I tried out and actually made the squad, maybe I could finally be—I closed my eyes to savor the possibility—popular.

Just thinking the word sent a shiver of longing through me. What was it like? Ever since junior high, I’d been called “brainier.” I thought I was used to it, but sometimes, on pale green spring mornings or glimpsing the tentative expression on my face reflected in a store window, I’d wonder. Although I’d never been exactly reviled, had never borne the brunt of schoolyard taunts or classroom pranks, I’d also never been pursued by a boy, at least not ardently. I could not imagine attaining the courtly cool of Carla, every hair in perfect alignment against her cocoa profile. Nor could I ever hope for the effervescent cuteness of Quinita, barely 5 feet tall, with wide-spaced, tilted almond eyes large enough to bring any basketball player down to her size. I just wanted. . . well, not to be regarded with dread or, worse, utter indifference. But how to accomplish that, skinny-Minnie me with my Catwoman glasses and hair that frizzled in the rain because I was not allowed to put a relaxer in it? How could someone who attended all AP classes and played cello in the school orchestra become popular?

I picked up my bow from the music stand and loosened it, slowly. “Why not?” I replied, utterly cool.

We figured the only way to break the barrier of the all-white majorette squad was to make it impossibly hard for them to refuse us. Rhonda had taken twirling lessons before and volunteered to coach me during the open training session offered by...