Customs: The Nymphettes

It was a sunny Saturday morning, and the big parade was about to begin. From the horns came tentative tootles as bandsmen warmed up, and here and there snapped the punctuating rap of snares. Off to one side, a little lipstuckup ten-year-old girl in a resplendent black uniform spun a shiny stick. Her perspiring mother hovered near by, brandishing a hairbrush. The little girl pursed her lips and swung her baton with the same concentration and faultless precision that another might devote to a game of jacks. The baton shot up and around as the girl flipped it into a neck roll, then an elbow roll, then an elbow roll with a throw-out, then a shoulder roll with a cutback, and a hitch kick, and a split jump, and then a tour jete. Beaming with satisfaction, her mother patted the daughter on the head, flicked a speck off her shoulder, and said: “Bye, bye, dear. See you later.” As an afterthought, she turned once again and barked: “And smile!”

Pacer’s Strut. Nowadays, an American mother need not riffle through her Spock with alarm upon observing that her daughter has developed the unnatural strut of a pacer. When she begins walking around the living room sticking out her chest, mother should know that her daughter has merely caught a whiff of a booming mania, and that soon the child will become a drum majorette.

It used to be that most high schools and colleges fielded brass bands to pep up the Saturday-afternoon football game. In the ’20s, somebody dreamed up the idea of leading off the band with a female drum major, and the drum majorette was born. Soon there were teams of majorettes with high hats, tight pants, and chin-cracking dimpled knees. Today the drill teams are almost more active—in regional and national competitions, before TV cameras, on the road—than the school footballers they complement. Their marching and twirling routines are in finitely more intricate than football plays, their costumes more beguiling, their pride and discipline more astonishing. For every struggling, prancing, stick-swinging, tail-twitching majorette in the nation, there are about too or so others who would give every Bobby Darin record they own to get on the squad. The searing competition carries into home and family. Costumes have to be sewn or bought (for as much as $100). Many mothers are as ferociously competitive as stage mothers. They preside over home practice sessions and grooming, chauffeur the girls to rehearsals, form auxiliary committees to raise money. Says Mrs. Charles Gehm, whose daughter twirls with the University of Miami’s Hurricanettes: “Some of the mothers say that their daughters practice regularly on their own, but don’t you believe them. I kept Jean at it, and all the mothers do the same.”

The Pros. Many colleges even give scholarships to talented twirlers. And after that it is practice, practice, practice. The girls do not seem to mind all the grueling sacrifice that fame demands. It teaches them poise, keeps their figures neat, and, testifies one Georgia nymphette in a Dixie Cup drawl: “Ah thank the thang teaches us to thank.”

Twirling can be justified to some extent on the ground that it furnishes a healthy outlet for the young female’s instinct for public preening and innocent exhibitionism; it even provides some pleasures to fathers and bystanders. Its fanatics insist it even builds character. “Some of the organizers don’t care about training the girls,” comments Don McNeal, who with his wife schools the Port Clinton Majorettes in Ohio as well as teams in a clutch of nearby towns, “but we’re proud of the kind of girls we turn out.” One 19-year-old, for example, recently expressed doubt over whether she would appear for a performance or accept a date with a boy friend. “I told her she was out even before she made up her mind,” says McNeal grimly. “We can’t have girls who put their own activities ahead of their job.”