Lisa Cording, 15, is a honey blond with a Farrah Fawcett haircut and big brown eyes. She is also so keyed up she can hardly sleep. Her hands are swollen from hours of baton twirling. The light fixtures in her bedroom and the family dining room have been smashed, victims of incessant twirling. Her mother complains that at 2 a.m. she can still hear the thump, thump of Lisa practicing her "routine" out on the patio. Lisa twirls in the bathroom, and once tried to twirl in the car.
The reason for this madness? It is just one more day until Lisa and 200 other girls from 26 neighboring high schools will be judged at a regional twirling contest run by the Texas University Interscholastic League. The league sponsors 22 contests a year, and Lisa wants desperately to earn a top rating in Division One for her Little Joe flips, reverse figure-eights and, even more important, for a combination of style, smile and sex appeal that is known among twirlers as flash. A Division One finish would mean a chance to make the Huntsville High twirling line next spring. In Texas, being on the twirling line is about as "in" as a high school girl can get. "On Friday nights when the twirlers are on the field, you just want to be out there," explains Lisa. Grins 16-year-old Robin Coburn, a tall, willowy junior who has already made the line: "It's just a big deal. And your names are announced at the games." On those Friday nights every autumn, high school football mania sweeps across Texas, consuming everything in its path. But unlike Northern fans, Texans never streak for the restrooms and hot-dog stands at halftime. They stay to see the marching band and, especially, to watch the high-strutting twirlers showing off flash, skill and baby fat in their tight, sequined costumes.
No one knows for sure why twirling is so popular in Texas and most of the South. Some say it is part of a vaguely defined "Southern culture." Others suggest that twirling is encouraged by the warm autumn weather and a lack of organized sports for girls. Some feminists argue that in Texas more than elsewhere the preferred way for a girl to get ahead is to catch a man's eye, and what better way is there than twirling? Whatever its roots, the twirling line is as Texan as Lone Star Beer and chicken-fried steaks.
Lisa has cause for worry. Only seven girls can be chosen for the Huntsville twirling line, and competition is tough. Her elder sister Susan was a Huntsville High twirler for two years. But then the unthinkable happened. She failed to make the cut. Friends whisper that she gained too much weight to make the line. It was traumatic. "It affected Susan's image of herself," says Dick Cording, the girls' sympathetic father, who is chairman of the philosophy department at nearby Sam Houston State University. As a result, he says, "we've talked a lot about handling defeat in this family."