Journalist. Blogger. Author.

As per usual, it looks like the Kates, Katies, Catherines, and Katys of the world have been mighty busy this week. Here, your weekly roundup of name-specific news.

• Katherine Jenkins gave “Dancing with the Stars” viewers quite a fright on Monday night when she threw out her back during her second dance and burst into tears. But Jenkins appears to not have hurt herself too badly, tweeting that she is fine though sore. With Maria Menunous out this week, I think Jenkins could actually take the finale. [Washington Post]
• Kate Upton has been named one of the 10 things a person just can’t make fun of on Twitter. This one is presented without comment. [Gawker]
• I know who I am rooting for when it comes to women’s boxing at the London Olympics: Katie Taylor of Ireland. [ESPN]
• Kate Beckinsale‘s film “The Trials of Cate McCall,” about a hotshot, drug-addicted prosecutor desperate to get her life back, is moving forward! Nick Nolte will co-star in the film, which sounds like “Erin Brockovich” meets “Requiem for a Dream.” [Deadline]
• Catherine McKenzie talks about her new book, “Arranged.” [EW]
• Two Princes isn’t just a song by the Spin Doctors. It’s who Katie Couric will be interviewing in her upcoming special “The Real Queen: By Her Own Royal Family.” [USA Today]
• Speaking of royalty, Kate Middleton dashed bump watchers’ hopes and dreams when she had a glass of bubbly toasting Queen Elizabeth II today. [E! Online]
• Kate Middleton is setting sail on the royal barge. Yes, there is a royal barge. [The Mirror]
• The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended a charity polo match over the weekend, but their cute pup Lupo stole the show. [E! News]
• This one doesn’t surprise me, but it is still pretty impressive—Kate Middleton does not employ the help of a stylist or a makeup artist. [People]
• Katherine Heigl has announced the name of her newly adopted daughter. Her babe’s name will be Adelaide Marie Hope Kelley. [MSNBC]
• Obviously, Catherine Thomas was my favorite contestant on “America’s Next Top Model: British Invasion.” Here, she talks about her dismissal from the show. [Reality TV World]

• Katy Perry has apparently hinted that her new album might veer a little bit country. Or this could be wishful thinking on the part of the website Taste of Country.
• Speaking of Perry, Russell Brand unfollowed her on Twitter this week. [Us Weekly]
• Perry went “goth” at the NARM Music Biz awards. Guess it goes with her new indigo/purple hair? [Twitter]
• Homegirl says she needs a “f—ing vacation” after her next single, “Wide Awake,” is released. [Huffington Post]
• And finally, Russell Brand tells Ellen DeGeneres that he “still loves her…as a person.” [Page Six]
• A brave mom named Katie Hamilton takes on this week’s Time cover debacle by explaining in a video why she breast feeds her toddler. [Huffington Post]
• In addition to her 32 covers of British Vogue, Kate Moss also graces the new cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Inside, she rocks chain mail and perches like a mermaid. [Bazaar]
• Speaking of Moss, she gave out hairstyling tips in the women’s bathroom at that same charity event where she stole the camera. [Scottish Daily Record]
• Katie Cassidy of the defunct “Melrose Place” reboot and “Gossip Girl” has signed on for the movie “The Scribbler,” a “mind-bending thriller” with Eliza Dushku and Michelle Trachtenberg. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive has won a human rights award. [NS Archive]
• Catherine Zeta-Jones will star in “Red 2″ alongside Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. [Cinema Blend]
• Kate Bosworth was snapped pumping gas this week. I’m wondering—do they position a paparazzi photographer at the BP just to get these shots? [I'm Not Obsessed]

Anything I missed? Leave it in the comments.

By Kate Emswiler

There was a flurry of excitement and outrage last week over the rumors that NBC might be canceling “30 Rock”, “Community” and “Parks & Recreation” after next season. The network has since specified that “30 Rock” will definitely be ending after next year. “Parks & Recreation,” meanwhile, has gotten a reprieve with a full 22-episode order and no announced news of cancellation. Unfortunately (for those of us rooting for six seasons and a movie, anyway), “Community” only got a 13-episode order . . . and they moved its slot to Friday nights, which is commonly understood to be a kiss of death. But I still have hope!

This whole roller coaster ride of renewal/cancellation news circling three of my favorite comedies gave me flashbacks to other series that I’ve loved and lost. They were only on TV for a few seasons at most, but I will hold them in my heart forever.

Do you have affectionate memories of these shows, too?

“My So-Called Life”

As a pensively, introverted teen with a fondness for bright red Manic Panic hair dye — not unlike Angela Chase herself — the cancellation of “My So-Called Life” after just a single season was very important and very devastating. Following angsty Angela and her family, wild Rayanne, sweet Ricky, snooty Sharon, uncomfortable Brian and moody Jordan was like therapy for my soul.

I liked to think of Angela and myself as kindred spirits. She was so uncool, and yet utterly cool in her uncoolness. And she really got me, with lines like: “If only there were a button somewhere that I could push. To force me to stop talking.” And: “The worst feeling is suddenly realizing that you don’t measure up. And that, in the past, when you thought you did, you were a fool.” She was the everyteen, a mostly mute (besides the voiceover narration), sullenly blank canvas upon which we viewers could superimpose our own hopes and heartaches and what we thought of as distinctly ’90s problems.

I re-watched the series last year and found that it moved me in even more ways than it did when it originally aired on ABC. There’s nostalgia for the show and for that period of time in my life, for sure. But instead of looking solely through Angela’s tunnel vision, I can suddenly sympathize with her mother and father’s adult relationship issues. I can see the wealthy, intelligent man Brian Krakow would probably become and it makes me laugh. I mourn for the real-life Sharon-type friends, those girls who know every last facet of each other’s being — until the friendships fade quietly into the past when girls leave childhood behind. It’s a show about the turmoil of adolescence, but it’s also about universal experiences of home, love and one’s ever-changing identity. It still seems like a richly fertile source for stories and I’ll probably never understand why it was canceled. All we can say, as Rayanne would put it, is that we had a time. Didn’t we have a time?

Fun fact: “My So-Called Life”, “Friday Night Lights” and “Parenthood” all have a writer/producer in common, one Jason Katims. I think he’s to blame for most of the tears I’ve shed while watching TV.

“Reaper”

This is one of the silliest TV shows I’ve ever seen, and also the most endearing. It premiered in 2007, the same September that Serena van der Woodsen made her return to the Upper East Side in the first episode of “Gossip Girl”. (And somehow that show is still around? It’s gasping for air, but still.) Like “Gossip Girl”, “Reaper” was a CW show, so you already know that the production value was low, but in “Reaper”, the jokes and the characters more than made up for the weird lighting and shoddy sci-fi prosthetics. The story followed a guy named Sam (Bret Harrison) who finds out on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the devil and now he must be a bounty hunter of bad guys — collecting souls and delivering them to hell via a porthole aptly located at the DMV. Sam gets some help (and some clumsy setbacks) from his friends, the hilarious and loudmouthed Sock (Tyler Labine) and sweetly innocent Ben (Rick Gonzalez).

The premise sounds ridiculous, and it is, but no more ridiculous than, say, a kid who’s bitten by a spider and then swings around New York on webs that shoot out of his wrists. “Reaper” was an imaginative show, with a winsome combination of childlike whimsy and adult humor. The dialogue of the boys remained true to the way 21-year-old dudes would probably talk if they found out that their buddy was literally working for the devil now. The most inspired move, however, was making the devil this smooth-talking, sharply dressed gentleman played by Ray Wise. He looks like he could’ve been a part of the Rat Pack, he cooks up gourmet omelets and cares about global warming. Wise rarely drops his glinting smile, and though there are frequent reminders that, oh yeah, he’s evil, this show tricks you into finding the devil to be a truly likable character.
Despite fan efforts to keep the show on the air (there was some talk of inundating CW execs with socks as a way to show support, not unlike the “Jericho” stunt of 2007 when CBS execs received over 20 tons of peanuts from outraged fans, “Reaper” was canceled in 2009.

“Arrested Development”

In some ways, I can understand why this show was taken off Fox — not for quality issues but because it was probably too oddball for many viewers. One of the most popular network comedies, ratings-wise, in recent years has consistently been “Two and a Half Men”. Compare the multi-camera laugh track broad humor of that show to “AD”‘s dry wit, bizarre plotlines and internal references and it might become apparent why fans of the former wouldn’t love “Arrested Development”. (And vice versa; I hate “Two and a Half Men”.)

At its most basic level, “Arrested Development” is another wacky family comedy, not entirely unlike “Modern Family”. But the humor is dark and sometimes quite cold. Small, strange details come back later to serve larger jokes, which means that the payoff for jokes isn’t always immediate. It also means that loyal viewers are rewarded with winks and nods to previous episodes, acknowledgement that only those who have been watching all along will “get” some of these jokes. They’re the cool viewers, they’re part of the club.

This is also a character-driven show and several of the characters are unlikable. These are adults acting like the weird and selfish children. They constantly claim to love their family and support each other, when the truth is that they’re mostly self-absorbed, insecure and greedy. In less capable hands, the whole production would probably be gross and sad. Instead, the writing and acting made this into one of the cleverest comedic series ever made, and earned it a diehard loyal fan base. Every rabid “AD” fan has an arsenal of favorite lines at the ready, which makes it easy to identify and then bond with other crazy fans. Because of this legacy and sort of insiders’ club, it feels like the show will live on for a long, long time.

And it will also live on in real life because they’re going to make a bunch of new episodes to stream on Netflix leading up to an “Arrested Development” movie. I’m doing the Chicken Dance right now.

And I think this means there’s hope for “30 Rock” and “Community.”

Kate’s Television Musings is a column running on Kate-book.com every Friday at 10:30am. It is written by the television obsessed Kate Emswiler, who you should follow on Twitter.

I know that, at one point in time, Playboy was all, “I read it for the articles.” But my impression was that said time had long since passed. So I was a little surprised to see that Tom Cruise, a man who does not give a ton of interviews, did a Q+A for the racy magazine’s June issue. In said interview he does talk about wife Katie Holmes, who he affectionately calls Kate. In fact, Cruise explained to Playboy why he named his P-51 Mustang fighter plane “Kiss Me Kate.” He says, “It covers two things I love most—my wife and movies.”

Oh, but he goes on to say even sweeter things about Holmes.

“She is an extraordinary person,” he says. “Everything she does, she does with this beautiful creativity. When she becomes interested in something, she doesn’t talk about it, she does it. One week I said to her, ‘You’ve been up in the middle of the night. Is everything okay?’ She smiled and then threw this thing on my desk and said, ‘I wrote this script.’ She wanted to try it, and she did. She wanted to try designing clothes, and now her line is wonderful and, to me, an example of how she just creates beautiful things in her life. She has a voice and warmth as an artist, as a mother. She’s funny and charming, and when she walks into the room, I just feel better.”

He continues, “I don’t know what to say—I’m just happy, and I have been since the moment I met her. What we have is very special.”

So what does Cruise have to say about that period when he met Holmes and seemed to go a little bonkers, jumping on Oprah’s couch and dissing Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants.

“That time was interesting. It was that moment when the Internet had really spun out,” said Cruise. “It was a learning experience for all of us, how these things go. All you can do is learn and say, ‘This is the way it’s going to go from now on. Here is the line.’”

As for the rumor mill constantly churning on himself and his wife, Cruise said that he has learned to not pay attention.

“There’s a separation between what’s happening versus what people say. This is something I learned growing up, moving and always being the new kid,” said Cruise. “Do you wish they wouldn’t say certain things? Yeah, you wish. Does refuting things help? Not really. There comes a point when you just have to go, You know what? Here’s how I’ve lived my life: I’ve never been late to set. I make films I believe in. I feel privileged to be able to do what I love. You just have to keep going and remember that. The other stuff? I hear it, I read it, I get it. But life is not a matter of trying to prove anything to anybody.”

Wait, do I like Tom Cruise now?

Before becoming a mega pop star in Asia, Kate Tsui was your average University of California Davis student. In 2004, she went on to win the Miss Hong Kong pageant.  For there, Tsui decided to go the music route and released a debut album called “Kiss Me Kate” in 2009.  She says that one of the reasons she wanted to make an album in the first place was because she loved the Cole Porter play of the same name so much. Which I’m sure you can tell from her video, “Hit Me?”

Dear Kate,

I am a woman in my early 30s who has very recently been reconciling with the fact that I am gay.  Only a couple very close friends of mine know the struggles I have gone through to get to the place I am at today.  While I am so grateful for their support, I also still feel very isolated and alone sometimes.  I am not yet ready for the ‘world’ (or my family) to know — but I do feel like I would like to reach out to more people/friends, and try to find others like myself.  I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life.  I guess I just can’t help feeling like I don’t know what on earth I’m supposed to do now?  What’s my next step?

Sincerely,

Waiting and Wondering
****

Dear Waiting and Wondering,

Wow. This is one of the bravest and most heartwarming questions that I have received. Firstly, thank you for thinking that I was a worthy enough columnist to answer it. Secondly, even though I don’t know you, I feel proud of you — very, very proud.

Okay – now that I’m done kvelling, let’s talk.

I certainly do not envy someone coming out during what has become an extremely opinionated climate regarding gay rights – however, of all the years in our history to come out, 2012 might be the most accepting.

Also, the fact that you are now coming into a fuller and better understanding of who you truly are, well, only good can come from that.

Here’s the bright side of your situation: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Not even a little bit alone, though I do understand your frustration and feelings of isolation. The newest studies suggest that over 4% of Americans today identify as lesbian or gay – that’s 1 in 25, and that’s just in America. Now, feeling lonely is probably due to a lack of immersion in the community – and maybe you feel going to gay bars or clubs isn’t the gentle introduction you need. So, try hitting up some websites like HRC.org, and click on the “local” tab to find events in your city and state, or head to EmptyClosets.com, a great online community and resource for gay and lesbian individuals who need help coming out.

It is completely understandable that coming out to your family might seem like the hardest and most anxiety-ridden thing you will ever do – so you should definitely take your time with that. However, on the other side of the coin, I would bet a fair amount of money that your parents have some idea already. Parents are surprisingly intuitive about these things, and if you have a good and healthy relationship with them now – it may be easier than you think. Check out this article for some more detailed advice.
Your next step is yours to choose. The biggest step, which you have already taken, is realizing who you are in your truest, most honest place. There is only growth and self-acceptance in your future.

So take some time to find local resources in your city or town, discover support groups in your area and network with people who are paddling through the same waters. Once you have come to a more solid place of understanding your new position in the world, you can begin to step out into the big, scary dating scene. (And that’s scary whether you’re gay or straight!) By then, the how and when of coming out to your family might fall into place on its own.

For now, read on here at ComingOutSupport.com, and watch videos of like-minded folks at ItGetsBetter.org.

And if you just want someone to email because you’re feeling alone, I’m always here at msdearkate@gmail.com with a friendly ear.

Gay is way okay!

Kate

By Kathleen S. Kirk

A moderately long time ago in a remote Ohio town absurdly far away, there was a young girl named Kathleen who decided when she grew up she would be a Jedi. Unfortunately, a short time later, reality set in; her mother gently informed her that girls who were nerds were “just plain weird” and she didn’t really want to be viewed as that, did she?

When this homeschooled chicken first started college full-time at 16, she was scarred by her first encounter with nerds. It was unfortunately with one of the bad varieties; they were purposefully rude and offensive and they seemed to have a distinct aversion to personal hygiene.

These nerds belong to a special class, according to my good friend So Purely French Antoine. They were groups of gamers and, as any exploratory nerd knows, encountering them can be a permanent turn-off from geekdom. I theorize that because they operate on the fringes of normal society, they reinforce their own frightening subculture.

Regardless of why, they sufficiently managed to frighten me away from embracing my nerddom … until one day I Netflixed the new “Star Trek” movie. And, just like that, with the simplicity of throwing a switch, I became obsessed. I became a Trekkie.

Around the same time, I became close friends with two Finnish exchange students. They taught me their language and instilled in me an indelible appreciation for Finnish culture. I was still a nerd girl at heart, but had very few like-minded friends from whom I could seek guidance. I was apparently hiding it so well that it was hard for me to make new nerd friends.

That was when I met So Purely French Antoine. Antoine and I were set up through a language exchange (as you can probably gather, I have a thing for languages) and, purely by chance, we clicked. And he was all-nerd. We chattered in French and he became one of my first nerd mentors. A few weeks into our friendship, he was already pressuring me to play DotA.

For those of you in the know, DotA is a MOBA mod for a map for Warcraft 3. For those of you outside the know, that means that DotA is a game inside a game. It’s a MOBA (a multiplayer online battle arena) and it’s a modification made for a map of the popular video game. Over the course of one weekend, I installed and reinstalled Warcraft 3 no less than 22 times until it finally worked on my Mac and I had a chance to attempt the game.

I failed at DotA.

In my defense, I didn’t know I’d need a mouse. I was using the trackpad, with a very bad internet connection. Half the time I couldn’t see my avatar and I kept getting disconnected. By the time we had finished three games, I had died many, many times. Antoine was thoroughly frustrated with me, and I was fairly certain gaming wasn’t for me.

That was when I met my Militantly Nerdy Boyfriend Alex. I was convinced I was unlovable and, furthermore, I was very happy being single. He proved me wrong on both counts and took a more full-immersion approach to my nerd training. I’m fairly certain he has my enculturation mapped out down to the finite details. And he got me into video games that I actually enjoyed.

The would-be Jedi grew up. She became a rambunctious screenwriter, a pseudolinguist, a really bad fashionista, and a Finnish fangirl—but, above all, no matter how many labels she wears interchangeably, there’s that one label she wears proudly now.

She is a nerd girl, and these are her voyages, bravely exploring new worlds and civilizations, going where that little Ohio girl could never have gone before…

Captainess Kirk a new column running on Kate-book.com every other Thursday at 10:30 am. It is written by the  fascinating Kathleen Kirk. For more of her adventures, follow her on Twitter here and check in for future columns.

Kate Moss isn’t content to stay behind the camera. Last night during a charity event in London, Moss nabbed a camera from fashion photograph David Bailey and began snapping her own pics with it. Oh, but Moss did far more helpful things throughout the event, which benefited Marie Curie Cancer Care, reports The Mirror. She also showed off a painting created by Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones featuring none other than Rod Stewart. The painting, which you can see after the jump, fetched more than $19K. Meanwhile, the event raised close to a million smackers.

Kates are apparently very popular in sitcom titles. Especially when it comes to sitcoms about single moms. First came the 1980s classic, “Kate and Allie.” Now, Fox has unveiled its new fall show, “Ben and Kate,” which as far as these things go, looks far, far more amusing than your standard laugh track fare. The show is about one Kate Fox, a single mother who isn’t sure what to think when her brother Ben returns to town, to try to stop his ex-girlfriend from getting married. But when Ben sees his the state of his sister’s life, he decides to stay and help her raise her 5-year-old daughter.

Kate is played by  Dakota Johnson, aka the girl who tells Justin Timberlake about Facebook in “The Social Network” as Cinema Blend points out. Meanwhile Ben is Nat Faxon, who apparently won an Academy Award for co-writing “The Descendants.” Such pedigree!

“Ben and Kate” will be joining the “Raising Hope” in Fox’s Tuesday night lineup. Which sounds like a must DVR to me.

By Kaitlin Williams

When I’m not bare-knuckle boxing in cage matches, dancing angrily/offending the elderly in the town of Bomont, or watching Adventure Time, I work as a secretary. A few months ago, I would have thought that “secretary” or “administrative assistant” were detailed-enough job descriptions for most of the world to understand what I do for a (meager) living.

Apparently this is not this case. To illustrate the confusion, I present you with the handy meme above.

When running a Google image search of the word “secretary,” one is likely to get a wide array of pictures, not all of which are suitable for work. In fact, I wouldn’t suggest that you run that kind of search at work.

Images you are likely to find in a “Secretary” image search:

• Clip Art depictions of women who are WAY too excited to be working
• Women in collared shirts displaying ample cleavage while wearing thigh highs and/or biting pens in a sexual manner
• Contortionists typing with their feet
• Hillary Clinton
• “Mad Men” characters

Clearly, there’s more confusion surrounding this subject than I had ever realized. In order to clarify for those non-secretaries who are curious about the lives of the administratively adept, here is a list of some of my daily work responsibilities, along with what I consider to be a fair assessment of the tasks’ difficulty levels.

Answering the Phone
Difficulty Level: Trickier than you’d expect

While any idiot can answer the phone in a pleasant voice and correctly state the name of the company, it takes massive amounts of self control to keep calm while regularly being sworn at by angry or impatient clients. Because of my language skills, I also do this in Spanish. (+3 bonus points)

Paperwork
Difficulty Level: Primate

(Reenactment)
Manager: “Hey, Kaitlin. See that stack of papers? I’d like you to put it in numerical order and then combine it with this even larger stack of papers.”

Kaitlin: *beats head repeatedly against desk*

Deliver Mail
Difficulty Level: Amorphous blob

Take pieces of mail. Put pieces of mail addressed to specific employee in the box labeled with said employee’s name. Repeat as necessary.

Special Projects/ Filing
Difficulty Level: Some knowledge of Alphabetical order may be required

This could be any number of tasks, be they filing, typing numbers into various and sundry databases, or carrying boxes hither and thither.

Actually, now that I think about it…

…this one seems pretty accurate.

And that’s the way the post-grad cookie crumbles.

My CompliKAITed Life is a column by Kaitlin Williams running on Kate-book.com every other Wednesday at noon. You can read all about Kaitlin’s Zombie Apocalypse plans on her blog Zombies4breakfast.com. Oh, and follow her on Twitter here or on Pinterest here. She pins obsessively.

Kate Beckinsale loves a good prank. And not just sneaking sex toys into her poor mother’s luggage as she is on her way to the airport. During an appearance on “Ellen” on Monday, Beckinsale revealed that she also loves pranking her husband, Len Wiseman, who directed the actress’ new flick, “Total Recall.” (Beckinsale has already discussed how odd it was filming sex scenes with co-star Colin Farrell in front of her hubby.)

Apparently, Wiseman is such a deep sleeper that Beckinsale discovered years ago that she could apply makeup, and much more, to his face while he was asleep, without waking him up.

“Once I found out that I could do the make-up, then it got really crazy and I’d start gluing a proper ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ beard on … and then a bullet hole, all this stuff you can get in any Halloween store,” said Beckinsale. “It’s hours of fun for me.”

Beckinsale continued, “He’s, like, the shyest person ever so the thought of being the center of attention is the most horrid idea for him … I wanted him to have to go to work and then have to go to the make-up trailer and say, ‘Please can you get this beard off before I have to go on set?’”

But Beckinsale can’t take it like she can dish it. The actress reveals that while she is allowed to prank Wiseman, he is not allowed to prank her.

She explains, “I’m kind of more of a nervous wreck than he is. I freak out if he comes into the kitchen just in socks.”

Are pranks allowed in your relationship? While they are very welcome in mine, if I woke up with a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ beard attached to my face, I would be pissed.

Think cheerleading is just pom-poms, “gimme an ‘R’,” and pleated skirts? Not so much. This book is an exhilarating trip through the rough-and-tumble world of competitive college cheerleading. Because college cheerleaders are extreme athletes who fly thirty feet in the air, build pyramids in which a single slip can send ten people crashing to the ground, and compete in National Championships that are won by hundredths of a point. CHEER! is a year-long odyssey into their universe, following three squads from tryouts to Nationals.

CHEER! has been called “the Friday Night Lights of a new generation.” Read much more about the book here.

“A fist-pumping, Astroturf-banging tribute to the women and men who make up the in-world of competitive college cheerleading. It had me rooting from the edge of my seat for the final countdown of Nationals.”
—NY Post

“An engaging, voyeuristic narrative that suggests college cheerleaders are as close to real-life superheroes as exist.”
—Dallas Morning News

“Torgovnick has done an excellent job of reporting, bringing the reader into this world most of us would never see.”
—USA Today

“Fans of Bring It On will find much to cheer about in Kate Torgovnick’s meticulously reported account of the often-mocked but fascinating world of cheerleading.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“This book manages to be that unique hybrid of narrative non-fiction that reads like fiction. The characters and story lines are so engaging that we give you this warning: It will be your next page turner.”
—Daily Cents

Read much more about CHEER! here.

Most people simply aren’t aware of the fact that cheerleaders were originally men. Cheerleading goes back to the very first college football game, between Princeton and Rutgers. Princeton students started chanting, “Rah rah rah! Tiger tiger tiger! Sis sis sis! Boom boom boom! Ahhhhh!” It became a tradition, and soon the school appointed “yell leaders” who sat in the audience and lead said chants. The idea spread across the country, and in 1898 a University of Minnesota yell leader ran in front of the crowd to lead his chants. Cheerleading was born.

For the next 40 years, male cheerleaders (usually elected by their student body) stood faithfully on the sidelines. It wasn’t until the World War II era, when women started filling the male void in factories and colleges, that female cheerleaders became the norm.

Then in the 1950s came Lawrence Herkimer, the great grandfather of modern cheerleading. Not only did he found the first national organization for cheerleaders—he is also the mastermind behind the pleated skirt, pom-poms, and spirit stick. Wearing Herkie’s uniform, through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, cheerleaders became an American icon.

In the early 1980s, the first cheerleading competition was held at Sea World, with teams from all over the country traveling to compete. It was an instant success. At the same time, high school and college gymnastics programs were under fire due to questionable coaching and high insurance costs. Many homeless gymnasts started finding their way into cheerleading, upping the gymnastic elements.

Ever since that point, a new type of cheerleader has been emerging—the competitive cheerleader. Modern cheerleading is almost an extreme sport, along the lines of skateboarding or surfing. Today, cheerleaders build human pyramids where a single slip can send 12 people crashing to the mat. They perform partner stunts where women do Cirque du Soleil caliber acrobatics while balancing in the few square inches of their partner’s palm. They do basket tosses where a group throws a “flyer” 25 feet in the air. They say the adrenaline rush of performing these risky moves is what they love. And they keep on going even if they have a broken finger or a fractured rib.

In other words, cheerleaders are probably not who you think.

Read much more about CHEER! here.

A friend sent me this slideshow of famous folks who were once cheerleaders. There were a few on here I had no idea about. But since they also missed a few good ones, here is a comprehensive list of former cheerleaders who now run (or at least entertain) the world.

The Presidents: George W. Bush (Andover, Yale), George Bush Sr. (Yale), Ronald Reagan (Eureka College), Dwight Eisenhower (West Point), Franklin D. Roosevelt (Harvard)

The Celebs You Could Have Guessed: Katie Couric (University of Virginia), Madonna (University of Michigan), Paula Abdul (Los Angeles Lakers), Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Calista Flockhart, Ann Margret, Jamie Lee Curtis, Halle Berry (Bedford High), Sandra Bullock (Washington Lee High), Mandy Moore, Cameron Diaz (Long Beach Polytechnic), Meryl Streep (Bernard High), Natalie Maines, Alicia Silverstone, Sally Field, Reba McEntire, Kelly Ripa

The Ones Who’ll Surprise You: Samuel L. Jackson (Morehouse College), Ruth Bader Ginsberg (James Madison High), Michael Douglas, Gloria Steinem, Steve Martin, Aaron Spelling (Southern Methodist University)

Read much more about CHEER! here.

Happy first day of the NCAA, everyone! My bracket is filled out and ready to go. Anyone want to start a pool? Don’t worry. I’ll lose. I always do, because I go for wishful thinking rather than pragmatism in choosing my winners. In other words, I’ve picked the same team to win every year since I was a little kid.

But let’s shift focus a little—this is a blog about cheerleading after all. Several years ago, in the week before the NCAA tournament, a Southern Illinois cheerleader named Kristi Yamaoka fell off the top of a human pyramid. The basketball game was put on hold for several minutes while medics ran to the court floor, wrapped her in a full-body brace, and lifted her onto a stretcher. As they wheeled her off the court floor, the band began to play the school’s fight song. Kristi’s arm shot up, her fingers wiggling—she performed her school’s fight song while being rolled toward an ambulance. This image was replayed on the nightly news for weeks and it got many people thinking, “Is cheerleading dangerous?”

The answer is complicated—risk is absolutely a part of competitive cheerleading, and many top cheerleaders say the adrenaline rush is part of why they love the sport. But at the same time, I think there’s a definite gender bias going on in the reporting of cheerleading injuries.

First, I’ll give you the stats you hear most often. Every year, about 25,000 cheerleaders will end up in the emergency room for everything from hyperextended joints to serious head and neck injuries. And over the past 23 years, of the 104 female athletes catastrophically injured in a high school or college sport, more than half were cheerleaders.

These numbers are shocking, but they’re also misleading. First of all, there are more than 4 million cheerleaders out there—which means that 6 of every thousand cheerleaders will be injured in any given year. In football, that number is 42 out of a thousand. And for that second figure, we are talking about a 58 women catastrophically injured in cheerleading over a 23-year period. Terrible, yes, but hardly scandalous number.

In the past few years, stories have run in many major newspapers and magazines and on various news programs dubbing cheerleading a dangerous sport. But it’s only a fraction as dangerous as football, and hockey for that matter. While I think it’s important to talk about injuries in cheerleading—this is what leads to better coach training and safety standards—I can’t help but feel like there’s a touch of, “We need to save our women folk,” in the coverage.

What do you guys think?

Read much more about CHEER! here.

Wendy Brown, a 33-year-old woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, used her 15-year-old daughter’s ID to enroll in high school. Now why, oh why, would any adult want to go back to to high school? Because Wendy desperately wanted to be a cheerleader.

Before school started, Wendy tried out for the squad, bought her uniform (with a check that bounced, naturally), attended multiple cheerleading practices, and attended a pool party at the coach’s house. However, during the first week of school, she only went to class for a single day, leading school officials to investigate her more closely. They soon discovered that Brown’s daughter actually lived in Nevada with her grandmother, her legal guardian, and was happily attending high school there.

Brown has been charged with felony identity theft and could face up to six years in prison. Not to mention that she didn’t even get to go to Homecoming.

Now, this story brings up a few questions. First, how did no one notice that a 30-something was in their midst? “In school you see a lot of children who look older and dress older,” said the school’s spokesperson. “At what point do you say, ‘You’re lying.’”

And second, why did this woman so want to be a cheerleader that she’d break the law to do it? In her statement to the police, Brown said that she cooked up this scheme because she had, “no childhood and was trying to regain a part of her life she missed.” To me, this is a prime example of cheerleaders’ symbolic power. They are deeply entrenched in our high school mythology as the ones at the top of the social pyramid. They have those elusive qualities that seems like the key to happiness when we’re teenagers—beauty and popularity. In short, their lives seem easy, enviable, perfect.

Wendy didn’t want to be a straight-A student. She didn’t want to be class president. She wasn’t even after a diploma. She wanted to wield the pom-poms and pleated skirt.

Interesting, no?

Read much more about CHEER! here.

When I first had the idea to follow three college cheerleading squads for a year and write a book about it, I bought into that stereotype that most male cheerleaders would be gay. I was absolutely wrong. While doing my research, I was stunned to find out that male cheerleaders were actually the opposite of what I was picturing in my head. Below, who guy cheerleaders really are:

1. They’re jocks. Most guy cheerleaders started out as football, baseball, or basketball players. Some of them had an injury that took them out of their original sport—others didn’t get college sports scholarship they were looking for and decided to change focus. There’s one guy in my book who played both football and rugby before becoming a cheerleader. “Cheer is by far the hardest sport I have ever been a part of,” he said.

2. They almost all give the same three-word explanation of how they got into cheerleading: “For a girl.” This is where Fired Up gets it right. Most guys don’t think, “I should be a cheerleader” on their own. Sometimes a girlfriend, a female friend, or a sister suggests it. Other times, a guy will be working out in the weight room at his college, and a random female cheerleader will come up to him and suggest he come to a practice. Almost all of the guys say it only took one practice to get hooked. Why? Because in basketball, it’s hard to come up with, say, a new dunk. But cheerleading is constantly evolving—and there’s tons of room to innovate and try new moves.

3. It quickly stops being about the women. Cheerleading is one of the only sports where men and women compete on the same team. And though they may start out with the idea of their team being a dating service, the guys quickly find that they develop big brother/little sister type relationships with the women on their team. Though on any given squad, there may be one or two couples, for the most part, dating and hooking up with teammates is discouraged. Cheerleaders on other squads, though—they are fair game.

4. They’re strong. Very strong. I watched one guy cheerleader tear a phone book in half, and another lift the tail end of his car.

5. They’re in it for the long haul. In sports like basketball and football that are governed by the NCAA, you’re only eligible to play for four years. But cheerleading isn’t technically a sport—and it isn’t under the NCAA’s umbrella. So it’s very common to meet guy cheerleaders who are cheering for their 5th, 6th, even 7th year in college. One guy in my book is even cheering for his 8th year in college.

6. They feel body pressure, too. The aesthetic in coed cheerleading is to have teensy girls and ginormous guys—the size differential makes it easier to perform acrobatic stunts. But for guy cheerleaders, this means that there’s a ton of pressure to be even bigger and stronger. As one guy explained to me, it’s considered embarrassing for a guy cheerleader to be under 200 pounds. Most eat a ton and work out to put on weight. But steroid use is also surprisingly common in the cheerleading world.

Read much more about CHEER! here.

You knew that, eventually, I was going to write about this infamous YouTube video. By now, you’ve probably heard the story. Several years back, eight Florida high-schoolers—several of them members of their schools’ cheerleading squad—lured a friend (also a cheerleader) over to a house and then proceeded to pummel her for half an hour. The friends were evidently pissed about comments the girl had made on her MySpace page, and orchestrated this beat-down to be filmed and posted on YouTube.

Do I think the making of this video had anything to do with the fact that some people involved were cheerleaders? Not at all. But I do think the fact that they were cheerleaders ensured that the story would blow up. Here are a few sample headlines:

Cheerleader, Others Beat Up Teen Girl, Tape the Crime

Cheerleaders Pummel Girl for 30 Minutes in ‘Animalistic’ Ambush

Cheerleader beaten on YouTube Opens Up About the Ordeal

Notice the first word in each of these?

Not only did this incident spawn six clips that made it into YouTube’s most-viewed hall of fame (before the videos were taken down, of course). But since then, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the Today Show, the New York Times, etc, etc, etc have all covered the story.

This reminds of a couple of other incidents that got massive coverage in the past few years. Remember those two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who got in a bar bathroom brawl after they got caught by fellow patrons making out in a stall? Yeah, that one got a lot of coverage, too. And who could forget the Fab Five, a group of cheerleaders who were terrorizing their Texas High School? They were a water-cooler topic for weeks.

Why are we all so taken with stories about cheerleaders gone wrong? Here’s my short answer: Cheerleaders are one of those high school archetypes that, like the jock or the geek, we for some reason relate to even decades after high school. In this taxonomy, cheerleaders stand for popularity, beauty, untouchability, even perfection. And, man, is it fun to see the mighty fall. America loves stories about good girls (or girls who are supposed to be good, anyway) gone wild. It’s all about corrupting the uncorruptable.

I could go on for hours, but I’m interested to hear what you think. I will leave you with this closing note, though. There’s one line that seems to be in every story I read about the YouTube beat-up video. While being arrested, one of the attackers evidently said, “Does this mean I’m going to miss cheerleading practice tomorrow?”

Read much more about CHEER! here.

Even though I’ve been to Nationals several years running, I’m still blown away by the meticulous attention to detail female cheerleaders put into their hair and makeup.

The average female cheerleader spends 2-3 hours perfecting these things, which is a lot considering that the judges mark scores from more than 100 feet away. Teams tend to have a specific look—on some teams, all the women will have curls, others will all do low ponytails, and I even saw one team here last year who had matching cornrows.

For SFA, the women do enormous curls—they individually hairspray each strand of hair before wrapping it around the barrel of a curling iron. For makeup, the look is sparkly eyes, usually combining 2-3 shades of technicolor glitter. They also go for intense blush and bright lipstick. It’s almost like Kabuki masks—every feature is exaggerated to the highest degree.

Sometimes I’m bothered by how much appearance counts in cheerleading. I remember at tryouts at the University of Memphis, I was shocked that when I analyzed the scoresheet, “look” was the single item that earned squad hopefuls the most points. “I’d rather look at someone who’s cute and boring at a game,” their spirit director explained. At Nationals, the “overall impression” category lets judges score teams partially on appearance alone. Teams also receive scores for facial expressions—hence the winks and head bobs you’ll notice if you watch a competition. Overall, cheerleading is a sport where normal I’m-not-pretty-enough-feelings are put in a pressure cooker. (And don’t even get me started on cheerleading and body image—I’m saving that for another post.) At this point, cheerleading has evolved into something close to an extreme sport and it takes a high degree of athletic skill. So I can’t help but think that cheerleading would benefit tremendously from letting go of this focus on beauty.
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But on the other hand, I appreciate the honesty of it. I remember reading a study in a psychology class where college students (male and female) were asked to grade their peers. They subconsciously gave much higher grades to women who fit the traditionally-attractive mold. And I can think of so many fields—flight attendants, newscasters, even women’s magazine editors—where beautiful women seem to go far, yet it’s assumed that appearance isn’t a factor at all. At least in cheerleading it’s right there on the scoresheet. Everyone knows the playing field, right?

What do you guys out there in blog-land think?

Read much more about CHEER! here.

Without further ado, here they are:

The Stephen F. Austin State University Lumberjacks are the best of the best, the Yale of college cheerleading. Located in Nacogdoches, Texas, SFA attracts the top college cheerleaders from across the country. Their tumbling is phenomenal, their basket tosses are textbook, and their pyramids are the biggest and most complicated out there. The Lumberjacks have eight national titles under their belt—in fact, they’ve won the past four years running. CHEER! chronicles their quest for their fifth National Championship in a row.

The University of Memphis All-Girl Tigers are a new team—created just four years ago, they brought home the National Championship trophy their first time appearing at UCA Nationals. They have since established themselves as one of the best All-Girl teams in the country. They are one of the teams nudging the bar for All-Girl cheerleading higher and higher. Still, some of the Memphis women feel like the forgotten step-children to the school’s Coed team. CHEER! chronicles the team’s quest for another trophy—and respect.

The Southern University Jaguars are like both teams in Bring It On rolled into one. A historically black college squad, they are known equally for their great stunting and their hip-shaking choreography. The Jaguars have never won a National Championship, but in 2002 they came within two-tenths of a point of being the first black squad to win at NCA Nationals. Sadly, the team has not been able to travel back to Nationals since. CHEER! follows the team as they struggle to get back to NCA Nationals.

Read much more about CHEER! here.