Oh American football. I don’t understand you at all. But you have marching bands and dancing girls, chants, half time shows by tiny little cheer leaders and football players from elementary schools, television screens that tell us when to cheer and when to be quiet, concession stands, a million varieties of Cal Poly t-shirts and did I mention the marching bands? So how can I not love you?
So I went to my first Cal Poly game last night with my housemates and some of our neighbours. My regular interpreter, my housemate was working that night but thankfully I had help in the form of a plethora of other Americans to translate what on earth was happening on field. Including the importance of waving one’s keys in the air at each kick off (I just made that up, I don’t actually know when one is suppose to do that). But it is a real phenomenon. When we arrived we were given t-shirts. For free! So now I have an official Mustang Maniacs shirt to wear to all my Cal Poly events in the future. Yes, I am pretty excited about this development.
This is the back of my Mustang Maniacs shirt. The Mustang Maniacs are the official Cal Poly spirit group and are astoundingly enthusiastic. So enthusiastic that they appear to be completely unaware that their official team song makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If you can translate this song for me I would be much obliged.
My favourite part of the game was the Cal Poly Marching Band (aka The Pride of the Pacific). They dress up! They march! They do formations! They have baton twirlers! They play stirring music! Hilarious. After marching around the field a few times they hang out in the stadium and play music at pertinent moments in the game.
The various permutations and combinations of cheer leaders were great too. There are two kinds. The cheerleaders proper who are uniformly short, uninspiring, chaste looking, wearing cutesy white bows in their hair and turtle neck tops. Turtle neck?! What?! Their counterparts are the Cal Poly Dance Team. The CPDT are lithe and sexy and fun. They’re like the disowned older sisters of the cheer leaders. I suppose I just included this because I never imagined that anyone other than the cheerleaders would be the girlfriends of the football players. However, in San Luis Obispo I think it is far more likely that the quarterback dates a member of the Cal Poly Dance Team.