There’s a scene in the film I, Tonya where Tonya Harding is competing in a big skating competition.  Tonya doesn’t come from money.  She is wearing a homemade skating costume (something the judges absolutely noticed and cared about, and not in a positive way) and she performed to, not a traditional song one might expect, but to ZZ Top.  She didn’t win with that routine.  She was met with disapproving frowns.

This scene in the film reminded me of an experience I had in high school.  I was involved in high school dance.  In Texas these high school dance competitions were in many cases formal, similar to figure skating.  Teenage girls had to wear lots of face makeup like heavy blush and bright lipstick, and do their hair in eye-catching, snazzy ways.  The outfits were expected to be full of flair, sexy and of course they aren’t cheap to purchase (the dance shoes costing as much as the outfit if not more).  Much like figure skating, the high school dance competitions were driven by class meaning wealth.  You had to pay to enter the competitions, you had to pay for transportation, your costumes, and in many cases, depending on how competitive one was, you would pay for help in choreography or dieting so you could look your best and win.

The North Texas Senior Regionals is/was a big competition held in a suburb of Dallas.  It brought an interesting set of teenagers to the mix because Dallas has some very wealthy suburbs and subsects (like Highland Park) and then there are other suburbs that are very different.  Beyond the actual Dallas suburbs you have all the small towns within an hour or two of Dallas.  This competition was always a real blend of class and performance.  I came from one of those small towns looked down upon as being blue collar.  It was a railroad town originally, and the biggest employer in the 90s was a giant Pillsbury factory (since closed).  I lived with my mother (my step father had passed) who was a school teacher, we raised Hereford cows and in addition to being a high school student I worked 2 jobs: one as a waitress and one as a cashier in fast food.  I didn’t make my own costumes for the dance competitions but I helped pay for them.

Here’s the point of my post:  the 1997 North Texas Senior Regionals.  This was my first time competing in the competition.  It was spring 1997 and I was a high school junior.  I knew based on smaller competitions that you were expected to dress well, dance well and pick a song the judges would love and relate to.  Most of the judges in the late 1990s were in their twenties and had graduated high school in the late 80s and early 90s so the girls would pick songs like Toni Basil’s “Mickey” to dance to, or maybe Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking On Sunshine”.  The songs were typically upbeat, cheery and fun.  The style of dance most girls would take to competition was called jazz, which is a traditional peppy style of dancing.  The idea is that you would smile until your face hurt, shake your booty (but not too much, this is Bible belt North Texas) and overall kill the judges not just with your dancing ability but your sweetness.  Me?  I was like Tonya Harding.  I liked rock music.

I knew going into the competition that I wouldn’t be able to perform a dance to the type of rock music you would hear at like a BYOB, all nude strip club, such as Pantera.  That would be way too much.  But there was a new form of rock music that had become big a few years prior called alternative rock.  I just knew being edgy and trending that this would be great, right?  While all my peers were stretching and getting ready to take the stage to their Bananarama and the Go-Go’s classics, I was ready to perform my solo routine to a new band who had scored a bunch of hits the past couple of years : Bush.  The song I was going to dance to? Their 1996 single “Machinehead”.  The style?  Military dance.  I was ready to shake things up, be different, and show the judges, the parents watching and all my peers what the future looked like in dance.  I wore an outfit that was mostly black, with some streaks of purple that covered my whole body.

The lights go down.  Girls cheer in encouraging pep talks before the music starts.  The typical response is throughout your dance you would hear encouraging cheers.  Not this time.  The opening guitar riff of “Machinehead” fills the dance hall.  I started off the routine standing with my head down and my hands crossed across my chest.  As soon as the drums started a few seconds in I dropped to my knees suddenly, causing some people to gasp.  From here I rolled, stood, fell again and again, swung my ponytail around while I writhed on the floor like a true machinehead.  When Gavin starting singing “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in” I mimicked breathing in my dance like a woman in deep labor.  The songs in dance competition could only be no more than 2 1/2 minutes so I previously had to edit my song down (I did it with the help of our dance director’s husband who was an 80s metal head and actually really liked my Bush song selection, it was a big change for him from what he had been typically having to edit).  What ended up happening as a result was that I used the beginning and the last minute or so of the song, so the entire dance was just Gavin singing about a machinehead over and over again that was green and red, while I spin and twirl and fall and gasp and (this is crucial) never, ever smile.  Not once.  I’ve got a machinehead, and it’s better than the rest.

I finish my dance curled into a ball, my face hidden and arms out, like child’s pose.  The song ends and the lights go back up.  There is dead silence for a few seconds.  Then a few people politely clap.  My face grows hot as the emcee quickly announces my name and my high school which causes some parents’ faces to change shape from bewilderment to understanding once they hear what high school I was from.  Then there was this one, lone girl.  She wasn’t from my high school, but probably one similar.  She looked and talked exactly like Tai from the film Clueless (Brittany Murphy’s character).  “Ohmygosh that performance was AMAZING!!” she said as she came rushing up to me with a big smile on her face.  She got it.  My one homegirl in the audience who could cut through the stereotypes, bullshit, pretense and tradition and who understood.  She understood what Gavin was singing about with machinehead, and the trappings of the ego.  Right? Or maybe she just liked the guitar in that song too.

I didn’t win anything.  I actually got some sort of participation type award, which I threw away in hot, angry tears in the trash can at the competition before leaving.  I hating being weird and being misunderstood, a problem my whole life.   The next year, my senior year, I came back to the competition with another rock song.  This time I had to change things up to conform a little better, if I wanted to please the judges and place in the competition.  I picked Eric Clapton’s cover song of Leroy Carr’s “Blues Before Sunrise”.

I decided I would have to dance jazz, not military style.  I wore a crushed blue velvet crop top with bell bottom sleeves that exposed my belly, and I went tanning before the competition so my skin would glow bronze in contrast to my blonde hair.  I put my hair in a high ponytail that would bop up and down and swing when I moved.  I wore bright red lipstick, blush and rouge.  During my dance routine I smiled my face off.  I waved.  I nodded my head up and down multiple times liked a caged parrot.  The audience loved this.  They cheered and clapped along.  At the end of the song Clapton says “You can go ahead now little darlin'” and I, not shitting you, BLEW A KISS at the audience and giggled and waved goodbye before executing my final move that ended with me holding my arms in the air, face grinning from ear to ear I, Tonya style.  The applause was thunderous.  I had won over even the snobs.  It was everything they expected: sassy, sexy, FUN and most importantly: CHEERFUL.  I fit the mold.  I placed in the top 10 out of the entire competition.  I had sold my soul just like the blues men prior to my time, and won.  Please understand that the irony is not lost on me, this being a blues song, and a black man’s song being performed by a white teenage girl to a mostly white audience who things it’s adorable.

Started from the bottom now we’re here.