It was basketball season in 1984, my senior year at Tekamah-Herman, and we were having a pep rally before the last regular-season home game.
Pep rallies were pretty predictable.
The pep band was packed into the old auditorium playing the school fight song and throwing in the appropriate horn blasts and ba-dum-dum-crash drum stings whenever somebody said something that apparently deserved one. The cheerleaders were onstage doing their skits and cheers. The rest of the school was yelling because getting out of class and yelling was pretty much the whole point of a pep rally.
Our auditorium was a relic from the 1930s. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many people it seated, but somehow we managed to cram the entire junior and senior high schools in there. My graduating class had fifty-something kids, so we’re not talking about a cast of thousands. Maybe 250 people total.
It felt like Madison Square Garden to us.
On game days, the basketball players dressed up for school. Nice pants, nice shirt, and our purple Tekamah-Herman letter sweaters. The big T-H was on the front, and the sleeves accumulated chevrons representing the years you’d lettered in sports or academics. Basketball. Football. Track. Band. Speech. Whatever you’d managed to accomplish without getting yourself expelled first.
By senior year, some of those sweaters were getting pretty busy.
That afternoon, the five varsity starters were called up onstage.
Todd, Mike, Tim, Jeff and me.
We climbed the stairs at the front of the stage while everybody cheered. We each got our chance to say something about the game that night—how we were going to win, how badly we were going to beat the other team, the usual high-school bravado.
We were eighteen years old.
Confidence wasn’t exactly in short supply.
When we’d finished talking, the cheerleaders announced they had one more surprise.
For good luck, each starter was going to get to plant a big kiss on a cheerleader.
Suddenly this was the greatest pep rally Tekamah-Herman had ever organized.
Five senior boys. Five cheerleaders.
You didn’t need advanced math.
We lined up across the stage, each of us facing a cheerleader. I don’t know what the other four guys were thinking, but I’m reasonably certain none of us was objecting to the program.
Then the girls pulled blindfolds from behind their backs.
That seemed a little strange.
They told us it would make the whole thing more romantic.
Romantic?
Whatever.
Gag me with a spoon. Just get on with the kissing.
They got all giggly, came around behind us and tied the blindfolds over our eyes.
“No peeking.”
Fine.
We weren’t afraid.
Once you’re blindfolded on a stage in front of your entire school, however, you become remarkably dependent on your ears. I could hear the girls moving around us. Feet shuffled across the stage. People whispered. Somebody in the audience laughed.
Then the band started playing striptease music.
Perfect.
Apparently nothing says high-school romance quite like five blindfolded basketball players standing beneath stage lights while the pep band plays stripper music.
I remember thinking only one thing.
Could you play a little faster?
What none of us knew was that the cheerleaders had arranged something else.
They had invited our mothers to the pep rally.
And while the band was distracting us, our moms were being quietly brought onto the stage and lined up directly in front of us.
The cheerleaders stepped behind them.
We had absolutely no idea.
Finally, the music stopped.
The girls told us that on the count of three, we were supposed to reach out, grab our cheerleader, give her a hug and plant our best kiss on her.
One.
Two.
Three.
I raised my arms.
Around me I could hear the other guys moving too.
And in that tiny space between hearing “three” and actually grabbing whoever was standing in front of me, I heard something from the audience.
A laugh.
Not a normal laugh.
It was the kind of laugh that tells you 250 people know something you don’t.
Uh-oh.
I ripped off my blindfold.
There, directly in front of me, waiting for her big romantic kiss, was my mom.
I stopped about one second before making a memory neither of us would ever have been able to erase.
The auditorium exploded.
I don’t remember who won the basketball game that night.
I don’t remember what I said during my little speech.
I don’t even remember which cheerleader I was originally supposed to kiss.
But more than forty years later, I still remember the exact moment I pulled off that blindfold and saw my mother standing there.
Some reflexes are developed on the basketball court.
Apparently one of mine was stopping before I committed the foul.
If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.
