I don’t like cheerleaders. I never have. I’m not sure why. Is it because, in my youth, they were usually white, blonde, cute, perky and rich? Maybe because they always dated football players (who I didn’t like either) or were crowned as prom queens, crying real alligator tears.

But I’m older, now, not 14. I see some on the early morning Channel 7 news show and I’m filled with venom. They’re still cheery. Smiling. Forever happy. Jumping up and down. Doing routines they’ve practiced after school, in the gym, for hours and hours. Why do they fill me with such ire?

Maybe you never really get over the trauma of high school. Being the “other”–the freak, the weirdo, the hippie, the non-conformist.  Knowing that you will never, ever, be in that “inner-circle”–the world where cheerleaders, football players, prom queen and king run rampant. They hold titles and power that few can attain. But why care?

Teenagers care. They talk, even today, about the “popular people,” those uncrowned but knowing ones who have that certain something they desire. Who are these teens? Surely not the best nor the brightest. Beauty and brains are evident everywhere on the high school campus—in the eyes of the quiet girl who sits in the corner alone and the pimply boy called “nerd” who has few friends.

Why aspire to be popular at all? To have other popular people ask you to Winter Prom? To rule the school? That tiny microcosm of the real world with its heroes and its hated, its in-crowd and its out.

Being popular in high school is, as any one who has survived the four torturous years can tell you, no pre-cursor to future success. At most, it is a tiny, fleeting moment of fame, a page-turner of a book that is soon old news.

Tonight, as I take my daughter to her first school dance, I realize nothing has changed since my high school graduation. As I open the car door at the entrance to the Diamond Bar Country Club, she says, in a hushed tone, “Those are the popular people.” It is said with awe and envy and a feeling of not quite measuring up. 

I tell her and her two friends, "All of you look beautiful.” And they do, in their burgundy satin and black and pink lace and flower-printed silk. Hair blown dry, just right, shimmery lip gloss and a hint of mascara. They are all unique beauties, a blonde, a redhead and a brunette.

“Walk in there like you’re somebody, like you own the place,” I command them. Yet I know my words are not really heard. They are registered but not really taken in. And I do understand.

It took years of mothers-fathers-friends-boyfriends-husbands to acknowledge the person I am today and for me to feel it inside. Why do I expect these young girls to be any different?

I send them off into the dark February night, clutching their black satin evening backs and wishing for the impossible. Perhaps it will happen a little sooner for them. Maybe they will feel and sense their beauty, their selves and wish to be no other. Not popular but free.