Go-Go Bananas

As most girls their age, S & K are obsessed with cheerleaders so when they found out I was a former cheerleader, they were impressed. I didn't have the heart to tell them I probably only made the squad because I was built like a Mack truck and they could use me as the base to hold up all the princessy girls who got to pirouette on top of the formation. Nonetheless, I dug into the back of my brain for an old cheer we used to do that went like this:

Go bananas
Go go bananas
Go bananas
Go go bananas
First you lean to the left
Then you lean to the right
Then you peel the banana
And you "mmm", take a bite

Not sure why we ever cheered on fruit or why I have forgotten the important things in life, like how to find the area of a cone or what a gerund participle is while maintaining other worthless bits of knowledge like this cheer and all the words to the "Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?" song.

Equally weird is the fact that I am not very girly at all yet spent five years of junior and senior high posed up in front of people in an impossibly short skirt trying to get them to yell the same things I was. What is the purpose of cheerleaders, anyway? Most people were craning their neck around me trying to watch the game and would rather yell at the ref than chant "Go, fight, win...do it again." (Like the team really needed that direction or they would have stopped mid-football field, looked at each other, and said, "We've just gone, fought, and won...what do we do now?")

At any rate, the girls LOVED the cheer and my 4" vertical leap looked like two feet to them. Much prancing, jumping, shouting, and pumping our arms in the air later, they are still "go-going bananas" and me? Well, most days I can go bananas without anyone cheering me in that direction at all.