Our local high school football team plays a state semifinal game this weekend (class 3A – four or five hundred student enrollment). Victory Saturday takes us to Champaign next week for the championship game.

Our community has been an avid HS football town for many years, but until Red Haired Girl became a cheerleader we never bothered to go to the games. I have to say, the community has developed quite a pagan ritual, but it’s a lot of cheap fun.

The other day I was thinking about a little “thing” that the cheerleaders do; when a player is injured they all assume a crouching position, metaphorically not unlike a bunch of birds with broken wings. Once the player is walked from the field, they all jump and clap and everything is good.

I also made the observation that one of the cheerleaders seems always to be tending some injury or another – usually involving an Ace bandage – and right out if front of the crowd, as though to remind everyone that things aren’t just tough on the field.

On the way home from the last game, I asked RHG a hypothetical – If a cheerleader gets injured while performing a stunt, does protocol require that the football players assume the wounded bird position until said cheerleader is walked from the running track (with a corresponding stop of the clock)?

Having inherited my sense of humor, RHG liked the joke – so much so that she asked her cheerleading coach that very question today. She reports that Mrs. T. responded with a fake laugh and a strange look. I felt it time to warn her that there are two kind of people in this world – those that get your jokes and those that don’t, and that you have to be careful around the latter lest you make them nervous.