FF- Go Rough Riders!

Once again it is time for Flashback Friday! Woo Hoo!

My mother’s friend Connie has been posting some wonderful pictures from back-in-the-day. Last week, I was tickled when she posted this one:
This was our cheerleading picture from good ol’ Symsonia Elementary School. I believe that this might have been my only year in cheerleading. (Mom, did I cheer for more than one year?) Anyway, I had a very short lived cheerleading career, because I lack coordination and/or any athletic ability.

I think that I am the one on the back row, third from the right. Yep, that is me….the one that can’t hold her elbow out the correct way. I am uncoordinated even in the cheerleading picture.

I am pretty sure that I was in 5th grade for a few reasons:

First, this was before junior high, because anyone that wanted to be a cheerleader could be a cheerleader…..no matter how awful you were. Did I ever mention that I still cannot do a cartwheel? Plus, there is one girl in the picture that is older than me, so that means that I could not be in 6th grade, because junior high was considered to be 7th and 8th grades.

Second, I have that horrendous hair cut. Through 4th grade, I had awesome hair. But everyone was cutting their hair and getting perms. I remember begging my mother to get a perm and when I finally did……I hated it. My brother called me a poodle on the way home from the salon and I tried not to cry. I remember taking a yearbook to the hairdresser and pointing out a girls hair that I looooved. In the end, I looked NOTHING like her. I debated washing it out, but my mother had spent so much money on it that I didn’t have the heart to do it. When I went back to school in 5th grade, I remember a boy being shocked and asking me what I had done to my hair. (Within the year, I also got braces and glasses and I thought that my world was coming to an end.)

The pom-poms in front were the ‘good pom-poms’. They were HUGE and had clear plastic rings for the handles. I remember that you had to scrunch the plastic strips to make them bigger. I coveted those pom-poms. The ones that I had from Wal-mart were only one color, had white plastic stick handles and were about a quarter of the size of the perfect poms.

The picture was taken in the “little gym” which was the original gym in the school. There was a stage at one end where the guys in my class auctioned off their legs. A bigger gym was built on years later. The school is where my parents graduated from high school, but when the county high schools consolidated when I was in 5th grade, this became my junior high. This must have been the first year for Symsonia Jr. High School. The school was torn down a few years ago and it still looks strange driving by the new construction.

Oh, such fun memories! Goooooooooo Rough Riders! Go Big Red!

For more Flashback Friday Fun.....go HERE.