Alive and Kicking
(Page 2 of 2)
By Monday night, five days before the final results would be announced, nerves had already begun to fray. But grace under pressure is a Rangerette tradition: The group's slogan is "Beauty knows no pain." I had heard stories of girls who kept smiling even after kicking so high they bloodied their noses. I'd heard how Gussie Nell Davis, the Rangerettes' revered and beloved founder—who was never seen wearing anything but stylish suits and four-inch heels—once stomped up to a girl who had fainted on the field and yelled, "I have no time for this! Get up!" That evening, when director Blair announced a surprise evaluation of the dance routine the hopefuls had learned on Sunday, word was out that one stressed-out girl had already packed up and left. Morgan's group of four nailed every move, while Lory's group struggled, panicking in the middle of the routine until one of them remembered a key jump. Throughout the evaluation, however, the girls' expressions remained determinedly cheerful as they strutted and leaped across the floor. Even the one who had mono. Even the one who had slipped and fallen on her behind. Even the one who had thrown up in the middle of the routine.
"ALL THE HARD STUFF is done," Morgan said on Thursday night. After being weighed in on Sunday, each hopeful had sat down for an interview, during which many of them were asked to describe the ultimate all-American girl (although Lory was asked the more existential question "What makes you Lory?"). On Monday they had suffered through Model Night, when each of them, wearing only a leotard, had to exhibit poise by striding onto an empty stage, turning around to show off her figure, then walking up to a microphone and announcing her name, hometown, and proudest achievement. (The answers ranged from "raising a prize goat" to "organizing an education program for needy children in Indonesia.") On Tuesday night they had sat on the gym floor and eaten pizza while former Rangerettes, some in their seventies, told stories about Gussie Nell Davis, who had once boasted, "By the time I was through with [my girls], they were scared to death to act like heathens." The hopefuls cried when one speaker said that learning a Rangerette's discipline and optimism and perfectionism had guided many women through hard times, "even if it was difficult to understand that not everybody strives for perfection, such as a spouse who is not nearly as ever-so-perfect as you."
At the talent show on Wednesday, Morgan and Lory had performed a jazz routine, which they had paid twin former Rangerettes in Houston $400 to choreograph for them. "It was okay," Lory said, hesitantly. "It was good. Except my adviser said that I kept looking at the ground while I was dancing." Despite her usual optimism, Lory was beginning to seem nervous about her chances. Later that night, in the dorm room, Morgan took a bite out of a peanut butter sandwich and said, "My adviser is so awesome. I love her. She tells me what to do so I can fix it, and she said I've been fixing all these little things." Lory, who was munching on Cheese Nips, just stared blankly at the wall.
One day Morgan told me that her friends from high school thought she was crazy for wanting to be a Rangerette. "You don't understand," she said she told them. "It's tradition." When I mentioned that prancing about in miniskirts and white hats and white boots would be ridiculed in some places these days, she and a few other girls looked baffled. They figure that if someone doesn't understand why they would want to spend their first two years of parentless freedom in the Rangerettes, then that person must have never felt the thrill of being in a world-class drill team and is to be pitied. Besides, Morgan and Lory and the other hopefuls had made their pilgrimage to this little town for a bigger purpose: to become ambassadors for a disappearing way of life. It is a role that clearly strikes a chord. Watching the Rangerettes perform to the school's fight song, a college staffer told me, is an experience so powerful "it will make your hair stand on end."
On Thursday night, before the next day's final tryouts, the hopefuls filed into the auditorium for a "special presentation." Dana Blair walked onstage in front of the silent, ponytailed girls with their perma-grins and said, "You can stop smiling."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Mrs. Blair," they said in unison. Blair announced that there was a special surprise, something that would remind them of why they had been working so hard. A drum roll sounded over the loudspeakers, then, as "The Rangers' Song" played, the Rangerettes marched onto the stage. "I thought I was sobbing," Morgan told me later, "then I looked at Lory."
"Sobbing," Lory said.
The hopefuls watched the Rangerettes that night with a heartbreaking eagerness to please, their smiles so fixed their faces twitched. Some of the girls had no backup plan if they didn't make the cut. One of them looked shocked when I asked what she would do if she didn't make it. "Go home, I guess," she said. Lory and Morgan assured me that they would be all right if neither of them made it; Lory would go on to teach elementary school and Morgan would be a Broadway star. But it would not be cool at all if one made it and the other didn't. Explained Morgan, "We wouldn't be on the same level anymore."
EARLIER IN THE SUMMER, I had asked Morgan and Lory to describe what the tryout week's finale is like. "So they bring us all into this auditorium and it's this big thing, right?" Morgan said. "And they bring us all on the stage and we sit down and we're all holding hands and shaking and we're already crying, right?"
"Waaay in advance," Lory said.
"And the Rangerettes are standing there in a line in their uniforms."
"Crying."
"Bawling-crying, because they know who didn't make it," Morgan explained. "And we're crying, and a couple of people say some things, you know, about how everything happens for a reason."
"Blah, blah, blah," said Lory.
"And then finally Mrs. Blair tells us all to bow our heads and say a prayer." Morgan looked at Lory and they each took a deep breath as they relived the moment. "And then a sign drops down"—a board listing the tryout numbers of the new Rangerettes—"and it's chaos, with girls screamin' and runnin' and jumpin'."
On Saturday morning at ten, judgment day had finally arrived. No guests were allowed in the building until after the announcement, so the tortured parents waited outside. Inside the auditorium, the line of Rangerettes stood onstage, as stiff as their hats. Their lips trembled and their wet eyes looked far off into the balcony as the hopefuls silently filed in and sat cross-legged on the stage floor in front of them. Lory was far less confident about the outcome than Morgan. At the final tryouts the day before, her foursome had slipped up again and forgotten a good portion of its third routine, to "Son of a Preacher Man." With so much disarray in the group, she had had a tough time remembering the steps. Afterward she had walked proudly off the gym floor, but in the waiting room had collapsed into a pile next to Morgan. Inconsolable, her face red, her lashes and lips blurry with tears, she had held her head between her knees for a long time.
Now it was the moment of truth. Blair stood before the hopefuls and began The Speech. She encouraged the ones who didn't make it to not give up on their dreams, recounting the morning's news report of a surfer who, although she'd lost an arm to a shark attack, was still surfing. The group sniffed and brushed away tears and prayed. Lory was sitting between Morgan and me, and she grabbed our hands and squeezed. Then a Rangerette read a poem called "Freshman Hopeful," and all around us chests heaved as girls sobbed and sweated.
When the sign was lowered, the room fell silent as the girls searched for their numbers. Then everyone let out a high-pitched scream, as if a winning free throw and a car crash had just occurred simultaneously. Lory and Morgan had both made it.
Meanwhile, the anxious parents waiting outside attempted to identify the shrieks inside. There were 45 girls whose numbers had not appeared on the sign. Some of them hurried through the lobby to the parking lot, their parents hovering silently at their sides. Others lay paralyzed on the stage floor until their moms and dads helped them to their feet and smoothed their hair, hugging them and trying to remove them from the scene gracefully.
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