"Ice cream and cake."

In my line of work you never know what exotic location you'll find yourself filming high school sports in next. Sometimes it's the arid wasteland of Yakima or it's the dark reaches of Aberdeen WA, who's oh so catchy slogan is "Come as you are." That phrase was coined by some whiny dude who wore flannel and shot himself in the face. I think his name was Kurt Koban or something. Anyway a few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of filming at the Everett Event Center, home to some of the best monster truck rallies this side of the Mississip! What was I there to film?

The second biggest high school cheerleading event in the state, that's what.

To be more precise this was cheerleading/drill/dance. Meaning that there were two stages. One was for the traditional cheerleading stuff you see at football games, girls getting tossed in the air, and lots of "spirit fingers". The other stage was for something my high school didn't have (and probably wouldn't have tolerated) a dance/drill "team". These teams had creative names like "Tacoma Hip-Hop", "Poulsbo Hip-Hop", and the ever popular "Hip-Hop-Hip-Hop". They would do their routines to only the highest quality of dance music. You know what I'm talking about, the stuff that degrades women on the constant, while somehow being just catchy enough that people over the age of 40 won't notice how disgusting the lyrics their retarded children are dancing to are. I think I was really the only one there who saw the irony or maybe not, irony is such a hard thing to make out these days. Besides if those stupid kids like dancing to crappy music who am I to call them retarded, even if they are just a little bit.

After about 6 hours and 100 plus routines, a woman walked out into the middle of the dance routine stage. The other camera guys and I breathed a deep sigh of relief knowing that this was where they would start to hand out awards and we would soon be heading home. But this was exactly when things got weird. Quite inexplicably, cheerleaders started forming what I can only describe as ranks in front of the woman, who will hence forth be referred to as the General. After about five minutes, 300 girls had formed 15 neat little rows in front of the General. What happened next was hilarious, bazaar, and has left me with many unanswered questions to this day.

The General spoke, "Aten' hut!" and I shit you not all of the cheerleader snapped to attention just like soldiers, feet together, chins up, eyes forward, hands and arms pressed firmly to their sides. I was aghast, so were my colleagues, I think we simultaneously said "What-the-fuck." It didn't stop there however, the General barked a few more orders and the girls, turned, twirled, and saluted, in sync.

What freaked me out, was the fact that they all new what to do after each command. Keep in mind that all of them were from different schools aw well as from different parts of the state. So how the hell did they all know the commands? They certainly didn't have enough time to learn them at the event and all be in perfect sync. It was as if they were specially trained at some sort of boot camp. Trained to shoot wooden emotionless smiles, instead of shooting guns, throw back flips instead of grenades. It was an army of teenaged cheerleaders, it was clear these were not your average cheerleaders. These girls were probably all under the age of 18 but they had truly seen some shit. Like the battle of Auburn vs Auburn Riverside, I was there, it rained the whole time but those cheerleaders never gave up, they just kept on doing hand stands and chiding their rivals by chanting "We've got spirit/yes we do/we've got spirit/how'bout you!" To which their rivals would reply in kind, only louder. I barely survived that game, in fact I now suffer from PTS because of it. On top of all that, we lost two really good interns, the doctors said something about bad hot chocolate.

I digress, we eventually figured out that it was just a really huge game of Simon Says. Still, I entertained the thought that they might actually be training to go fight in Iraq. How freakin' cool would that be! Those darn insurgents would be so terrified, they would quit with the IED's and go back to China, or wherever!