When varsity cheerleader Hadley asks out Silver Wing High’s newest bad boy Ty on a dare, he ends up being a total surprise. Turns out, he’s like the nicest guy ever, and she's falling head over heels for him. Unfortunately, the cheer captain can’t have one of her girls dating the wrong guy. In fact, she threatens to cut Hadley from the squad if she doesn’t break things off with Ty. Hadley will have to go head to head with her team captain if she wants to keep seeing him. Throw in a jealous star football player ex-boyfriend, a faceless school reporter dishing out all the dirt, and a cheer squad split right down the middle on where their loyalties lie and you've got one mega-CLASH OF THE CHEERLEADERS.
"These guys are funny daredevils of performance, totally fearless as they skewer convention and lazy thinking. Cool."—Eric Bogosian "Important social satire for these urgent times."—Dolores Huerta, Vice President, United Farm Workers Union "Keep kicking them in the cojones."—George Carlin The newest work by the ever-outrageous comic trio, Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza) collects their four most recent investigations into contemporary American culture as viewed in four very distinct American cities. Each piece was commissioned by a local theatre company who invited our three lads into their communities and unlocked the doors. This volume includes: • "Bordertown" examinines the twin border cities of San Diego and Tijuana with special guest appearances by Charleton Heston, Shamu the Killer Whale, and Sidewinder Sam. • "Nuyorican Stories" brings the Clash to the Big Apple as they delve into the personal histories of the early Puerto Rican political activists in New York. • "Mission Magic Mystery Tour" is Culture Clash’s return to their home turf of San Francisco’s Mission District as the locals withstand an all-out invasion by the dot-com generation. •"Dreaming of Lincoln" brings the fearless troupe to our nation’s capital for a unique look at the land of the free. Culture Clash formed in 1984 to fill a unique role in American arts. Their nominal mission is to show cultures in opposition and, by opposing them, bring them closer together. But their talents are too expansive to be restricted to just "political theatre." Culture Clash have managed to gerrymander theatre’s traditional map, erasing the borders between any and all districts they choose to explore. They have a style all their own with a foundation that harkens back to the best vaudevillians of the U.S. and Latin America. Comedy and satire is what they feed on, in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Catinflas.
A behind-the-scenes tour of competitive college cheerleading describes every aspect of the sport from spring tryouts through the NCA Nationals, drawing on the personal experiences of accomplished athletes from three top cheer schools. Reprint.
Sports Plays is a volume about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports. The chapters in this volume examine sports plays through a range of critical and theoretical approaches that highlight central concerns and questions both for sports and for theatre. The plays cut across boundaries and genres, from Broadway-style musicals to dramas to experimental and developmental work. The chapters examine and trouble the conventions of staging sports as they open possibilities for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates. This broad range of perspectives make the volume a compelling resource for students and scholars of sport, theatre, and performance studies whose interests span feminism, sexuality, politics, and race.
Entertainers or athletes? Leaders or losers? Cheerleaders, numbering 3.8 million in the United States alone, are part of everyone's school memories. Looking beyond the poms and megaphones, Cheerleader! An American Icon explores how the sport reflects our shifting beliefs about athletics, entertainment, gender, and national identity. Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis trace cheerleading's history, from its inception 135 years ago as a male leadership activity, through the sassy era epitomized by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, to its current incarnation as a physically demanding sport. Integrating history, pop culture, and interviews with participants of all ages and even those in the business, Adams and Bettis simultaneously celebrate cheering and provide critical analysis as well. Cheerleader!: An American Icon is a poignant, hilarious, powerful, and revealing look at a perennially popular activity.
Mina Hamilton's parents want her dead. (Or undead to be precise.) They're vampires, and like it or not, Mina must decide whether to become a vampire herself. But Mina's more interested in hanging out with best friend Serena and trying to catch the eye of the too-hot-for-high-school Nathan Able than in the vampire training classes she's being forced to take. How's a girl supposed to find the perfect prom date and pass third-year French when her mom and dad are breathing down her neck--literally?
Title IX, a landmark federal statute enacted in 1972 to prohibit sex discrimination in education, has worked its way into American culture as few other laws have. The subject of web blogs and T-shirt slogans, it is credited with opening the doors to the massive numbers of girls and women now participating in competitive sports, yet few people fully understand the extent to which it has succeeded in challenging the gender norms that have circumscribed women's place in society more generally. In this legal analysis of Title IX, the author, a law professor assesses the statute's successes and failures. She provides an understanding and appreciation of what Title IX has accomplished, while taking a critical look at the places where it has fallen short.
The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not. "In March [1892] Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco . . . The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and silver coins. When they finally totaled up the proceeds, they found that the revenues amounted to $30,000—a fair haul for a game that had to be temporarily postponed because no one had thought to bring a ball!"—from College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, Chapter Three In this comprehensive history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football in more than one hundred years has evolved from a simple game played by college students into a lucrative, semiprofessional enterprise. With a historian's grasp of the context and a novelist's eye for the telling detail, Watterson presents a compelling portrait rich in anecdotes, colorful personalities, and troubling patterns. He tells how the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, in which Yale forced a 0-0 tie in a championship game by retaining possession of the ball for the entire game, eventually led to the first-down rule that would begin to transform Americanized rugby into American football. He describes the kicks and punches, gouged eyes, broken collarbones, and flagrant rule violations that nearly led to the sport's demise (including such excesses as a Yale player who wore a uniform soaked in blood from a slaughterhouse). And he explains the reforms of 1910, which gave official approval to a radical new tactic traditionalists were sure would doom the game as they knew it—the forward pass. As college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, Watterson explains, the flow of cash added fuel to an already explosive mix. Coaches like Knute Rockne became celebrities in their own right, with highly paid speaking engagements and product endorsements. At the same time, the emergence of the first professional teams led to inevitable scandals involving recruitment and subsidies for student-athletes. Revelations of illicit aid to athletes in the 1930s led to failed attempts at reform by the fledgling NCAA in the postwar "Sanity Code," intended to control abuses by permitting limited subsidies to college players but which actually paved the way for the "free ride" many players receive today. Watterson also explains how the growth of TV revenue led to college football programs' unprecedented prosperity, just as the rise of professional football seemed to relegate college teams to "minor league" status. He explores issues of gender and race, from the shocked reactions of spectators to the first female cheerleaders in the 1930s to their successful exploitation by Roone Arledge three decades later. He describes the role of African-American players, from the days when Southern schools demanded all-white teams (and Northern schools meekly complied); through the black armbands and protests of the 60s; to one of the game's few successful, if limited, reforms, as black athletes dominate the playing field while often being shortchanged in the classroom. Today, Watterson observes, colleges' insatiable hunger for revenues has led to an abuse-filled game nearly indistinguishable from the professional model of the NFL. After examining the standard solutions for reform, he offers proposals of his own, including greater involvement by faculty, trustees, and college presidents. Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.
