I watched Bring It On yesterday but didn't get a chance to blog about it until today. Last night...got kind of out of hand. I spent the early evening strolling around Dinkytown and frat row taking pictures of all the kids who had been drinking since early morning for Spring Jam, the U's annual Greek-centric block party thing. When the headliner for the night's concert, Talib Kweli, canceled, my friends and I headed to their place in Dinkytown. The streets and liquor stores were full of drunk kids. Back at the apartment, we were just relaxing until someone broke out a bottle of Patron, and things got crazy fast. Only random texts and phone calls indicated the real insanity going on a few blocks away: bonfires in the streets, a clash with the police that involved tear gas and rubber bullets, a frat house apparently on fire (although the news reports I've seen today don't mention that, so maybe it was a just a rumor). Though the whole incident is mostly laughable to me (as far as I know no one was hurt seriously, although the TV news reports did show some tear gas canister wounds), it's still a little weird to shift from that intensity back to a shiny, peppy '90s movie about cheerleading, in which the first line is "I'm sexy! I'm cute! I'm popular to boot!" I like Bring It On; parts of it are funny and it's definitely entertaining. It's almost laughably tame and artless compared to sharper, funnier teen chick flicks like Mean Girls and Clueless, but it agreeably passes the time for an hour and a half.
I didn't see Bring It On when it came out. My first viewing of it came freshman year, when a bunch of the girls from our floor crowded into a dorm room to watch it, squeezing onto beds and beanbag chairs. More than the movie itself, I remember the fact that we were interrupted midway by a trio of nerdy kids from one of the arts floors, who were apparently wandering around and were happy to find a captive audience for things like a puppet show of stuffed animals they were carrying around. They were definitely strange, but we didn't mind, and the funny thing is that they kind of became friends with us all, and one of the guys even dated a girl who lived in that room for over a year. If for nothing else, I value the friendship with that guy because he and his weird friend that also hung around on our floor would always rope us into watching movies I'd never heard of--much artier fare than Bring It On, like Me and You and Everyone We Know and American Splendor--and they always turned out to be wonderful. I like the privacy of having my own room, being able to cook for myself, and so on, but I miss the days when you could always find something to do because everyone would always just be sitting around watching movies, dancing or listening to music, having random conversations, and occasionally drinking cheap rum or vodka in little huddles behind closed doors.
Anyway, Bring It On obviously has no pertinent associations about the first time I watched it; what it reminds me of is my own short stint as a cheerleader. In fifth grade, I tried out for the elementary school squad kind of on a whim, with my friend and neighbor. I didn't make it, but because it was elementary school I got to be on the "spirit squad," who still cheered but didn't get to wear a uniform, and then before we even had a game, enough girls quit to make room for me among the real cheerleaders. I've never been very athletic or coordinated, and I remember being a little annoyed at times with the bossy sixth grade girls who kind of controlled the rest of us, but I remember really enjoying being a cheerleader. Again, this was elementary school, so we didn't have a whole lot to do--certainly nothing like the complicated pyramids and gymnastics of Bring It On's cheerleaders--but I liked doing all of our cheers, and the little dance routines we did at halftime. Our basketball team that year was pretty good; there were a few kids who, to us at least, were superstars, and they made it to the semifinals. There was a pep rally, and I remember being really proud as the cheerleaders marched in among all the kids and teachers forced to go to the assembly, our hands behind our back with elbows pointed out as we always did while walking. Of course, back in class I got taken down a peg as the boys sneered and made fun of me, but I really did enjoy it. But then that was it: I never had any desire to cheer even just the next year, when a couple of my friends were on the middle school squad. Two years later, people who hadn't known me in fifth grade were openly shocked that I had been a cheerleader; it was something of an anomaly for bookish, determinedly nonconformist me. What's funny is that even though this was a year or two before Bring It On came out, we did our halftime routine to the same song, "Get Ready for This," that the movie's Toros use, and sometimes we would do the cheer from "Mickey," which plays during the credits and outtakes at the end of the movie. I guess cheerleading is just pretty stereotypical and easy to mock--but I'm still glad I did it for that one year.
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