Laurel: Purple, Purple Everywhere

I am wearing a purple shirt. On top of that lies a purple cardigan. Some rally beads, a purple headband, and a SHS silly band finish off the Rally day outfit. The bell rings. No time left to linger on my ensemble.

Some are rushing through the halls on a similar Purple Friday high. Others are merely looking at this as a break from English. Regardless, I feel like a sardine, the concentration of people is so high.

A sea of purple lies ahead. Purple shirts, purple pants, purple socks, hats, capes, and tutus. It could be a Justin Bieber music video. Administrators direct us to our assigned gym entrances. As we all file in, we note the long lineup of winter sports teams. Girl’s soccer has matching hair ribbons. JV boy’s basketball sports their warm up shirts.

Seniors and freshmen head to one end and juniors and sophomores rush to the other. By some miracle all 2000 of us fit in that one gym.

Once we finally all sit down, our MC’s enter. They introduce the cheer team and then the dance team.

To this day, I do not know how they manage to move their bodies in that insane way. All I know is that it takes years of practice, time and devotion… oh, and flexibility.

Next up is the first game of the afternoon: Frozen T-Shirts. Before I go on, let me explain to you this…activity. One representative from each respective class must take a T-shirt, frozen in a ball, and unfreeze it any way they wish. They are given a table. That is it. To win, one must by the first to successfully put the T-Shirt on his or herself.

I’m that friend that always stands up and cheers at sporting events. I will get up and do the twist cam at a Stanford basketball game, but never in a million years would I stand up in front of all my peers and try to defreeze clothing. So, one can infer that I have a lot of sympathy for those that had a wavier signed so that they could participate.

In the end, the tables that they were using to pound the T-Shirts on, collapsed at least four times (the sophomores drew the short end of the stick) and the shirts didn’t want to be worn… at all. The seniors got the farthest, as usual, but they had to stop the game before it was fully finished because it was taking too long. We run a tight ship here at the Sequoia rallies.

I catch a glimpse of two of my favorite teachers laughing across the way. They watch their students perform and clap, cheer, and laugh like the rest of the crowd. I see that they too are living in the moment and realize how great it is to be a Cherokee.

After the rally is over, people congratulate the Winter Formal Court nominees and we all talk about which performance was our favorite. When our friends from band and dance get back from changing and storing their instruments, we give them big hugs and tell them how amazing they were. We sit down by our standard tree and smile, laugh, and eat.

School goes back to normal but the memory of that simple forty-five minutes remains. It wasn’t necessarily the fact that classes were fifteen minute shorter that made this day better (though that is nice). However, it’s the chance to cheer for our friends and see them do things that they love and work so hard on, for the benefit of our school.

Life can’t get much better than that.

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