There are times the corporate world and school spirit shouldn’t mix. This was one of them.
First, I’m a diehard ‘Nole. A Florida State University Seminole through and through. I bleed Garnet and Gold. I know this pronouncement will upset my University of Florida Gator colleagues. After all, I received my master’s degree from UF, and I’ve worked for UF Health since 2000, where I’ve made many friends who cooked us meals when my wife underwent surgery and chemo for metastatic breast cancer. I am eternally grateful for their love and support. So, you’d think maybe by now I’d have an ounce or two of Gator blood in me. Not quite. When you’re taught in your undergraduate years to root against your rival, well, those old habits die hard, if they ever die at all. I have given my life and career to UF since 1996 when I started grad school, but I still wield FSU’s Tomahawk Chop privately. Don’t judge me. All you Gators would do the exact same thing if you relocated to Tallahassee and worked for FSU in some capacity, and you know it. So just stop it.
Revealing my strong collegiate allegiance is vital to the story I’m about to tell you.
Many years ago, I and my extremely extroverted colleague, Kim, attended a UF Gator fundraising event at the Harn Museum on a Monday morning at 8:30. The sun had not been up long. The morning was sluggish, and this event was cutting into an already busy and stressful day for me.
Both Kim and I were dressed in our workday best; I in my slacks and tie, Kim in her blouse and skirt. It was to be, we thought, the typical stuffy corporate fundraising event populated by hundreds in suits and skirts, smiling, glad-handing and chortling at financial boons and rising prestigious national rankings. Words like top ten, endowment and major donors would be sprinkled throughout the promising morning. This event was to kick off another fundraising campaign that would undoubtedly rake in many more millions for UF. The champagne glasses would soon be clinking.
I was hoping the event wouldn’t last very long, as my calendar was stacked that day and I wasn’t quite sure why I was there to begin with. Maybe Kim dragged me along? Yes, that’s probably right. To her, every meeting was a social event, and she loved having a partner-in-crime for the experience. (She is always the first one to plan a group dinner or outing, convincing others to step up to the Karaoke machine, anywhere, always, without fail, and she’d be the one to woo others to join her.) I, the melancholy introvert, agreed to join her at this event so long as I could lay low. As one of my dearest friends and creative advocates, I enjoy Kim’s company, but it’s unsettling when she ebulliently introduces me to every stranger in the room. I’m content to hide in a corner while she sashays through the space making perfectly sculpted and genuinely interested small talk with anyone and everyone. She truly has a gift; one I don’t possess.
The Harn is an elegant and reputable place that boasts a large auditorium-style meeting room where stuffy corporate events should feel right at home. Only this stuffy corporate event had a few unexpected wrinkles: namely the Gator marching band and cheerleading squad. You see, UF wanted to imbue this mandatory corporate fundraising kick-off event with as much Gator pride as the room could swallow, and the band and cheerleaders were just the thing. What else could rouse the crowd into a more noble philanthropic posture and create the kind of unbridled energy that would launch this campaign to the moon?
Neither Kim nor I knew of the wrinkles when we (really Kim) chose to sit in the front row, awaiting what we thought would be a series of boring PowerPoint presentations and salvos of how great it was to be a Florida Gator. Instead of the be-suited UF Foundation leader taking the podium to welcome us to a benign meeting, the band—with the sousaphones waving back and forth—raucously fired up the Gator fight song as members marched through the room, kicking up energy like dust. One of the male cheerleaders screamed into his megaphone on this sluggish Monday morning, “Okay Gators, get on your feet and MAKE … SOME … NOOOIIIISSSSE!!!” Feet? Noise? Now? Here? Really? As this maverick implored us to rise from our seats, scantily-clad female cheerleaders spilled into the auditorium screaming and waving their pom poms like they were running from a rattlesnake-infested sorority house fire. It was all cacophonous mayhem, and for a moment I forgot where I was. If you’ve ever seen a drug-induced dream sequence in a movie where things blur through a fisheye lens and everything sounds like it’s under water, that was me. I felt trapped in an impromptu Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes celebration. The only things missing were the confetti and balloons, and they were bound to drop from the ceiling any second the way things were going.
The happy cheerleaders lined the front of the auditorium, which is where Kim and I were sitting, if you recall. One of the buoyant young ladies stood directly in front of me—no more than a foot away—shaking her orange and blue pom poms in my face and exhorting me to climb to my feet and join in her exuberance. I forced a smile at her, then looked around the room to see that everyone else in the place was already standing, their arms extended in front of them ready to eagerly do the Gator Chomp in unison. The effervescent cheerleader in front of me had an orange and blue ribbon holding her blonde hair in a ponytail. She had little Gatorhead emblems plastered to each cheek, and her teeth were as white as an arctic fox. She wore a miniskirt and a sequin halter top that revealed her stomach.
Kim leaned down and elbowed me in my side. “C’mon, man. Get up!” She began clapping along with the band. “Oh this is so much fun! Let’s do this for every meeting!”
“Yes, on your feet!” the cheerleader echoed. “Leeeeeetttt’s GO!” Her pom poms shook more vigorously than before.
I grimaced, coughed into my hand and said dully but loudly, “Um, I pulled a hamstring yesterday.” I clutched my quad, unwilling to join the Gator party. “I think I’ll sit this one out.”
With the band thumping away and all the cheerleaders screaming and shaking, the vivacious cheerleader in front of me shouted, “Nonsense!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me up to a standing position directly in front of her. I towered over her. She laughed and waved her pom poms in my face to cheer me up. I forced another awkward smile. I could feel my mouth going dry, like I was sucking on 1,000 cotton balls soaked in desert sand.
The sprite male cheerleader with the biceps, megaphone and blue wristbands bellowed into his megaphone, “Okay Gators, lllllet’s see the CHOMP!” The band began its Jaws theme, which encouraged everyone in the room to smack their extended arms together in the infamous chomping motion. I meekly extended my arms out in front of me and tried to look anywhere but at the jaunty cheerleader bouncing in front of me. I felt sweat trickling down my sides, and my face was as hot as a working frying pan. As a married conservative man, I was far too close to this young co-ed, who grabbed my arms and reversed them. “It’s right over left, silly! You’re doing it wrong.”
“Oh, I see,” I shouted over the band. I didn’t know there was a right and wrong way to chomp. Though the chomp was a simple exercise, I kept missing my hands out of sheer fright … and probably a subconscious desire to do the Tomahawk CHOP instead. I simply couldn’t commit to the Gator cheer. I looked like a rhythm-less uncle clumsily trying to dance at a wedding reception. I felt all the eyes in the room upon me. And I felt the scoffs from hundreds of rabid Gator fans. What is this idiot, a ‘Nole?
“Like this,” the cheerleader beamed, as she dropped her pom poms and taught me the appropriate motion so that my hands met at the middle. I kept looking over my shoulder, now cringing with shame as I chomped along with moribund disinterest.
The band was blowing the roof off the place, the audience—save me—was shouting “Go Gators!” as if this were a prime-time SEC game in the Swamp, Kim was clapping like she had just won the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right, and the cheerleader before me wouldn’t break eye contact as she made me continue chomping with the rest of the revelers. “That’s great!” she hollered. “Now you’ve got it! Good job! Goooooo Gators!”
“Um, yes, yes, go.” Sweat poured down my face, and my legs were beginning to buckle. Chills swept across my body. I felt an invisible force pressing down on me, trying to grind me into oblivion. Feeling presyncopic, I fell back into my seat and said something dumb like, “Well, ahem, that’s enough for me on this Monday morning. I’m bushed.” The cheerleader made a comically sinister face at me, then pouted as if she were mortally wounded by my lack of participation. To try to whip me back into the same frenzy the assembly around me was in, she stood with one rattling pom pom raised to the Heavens and the other rattling pom pom practically tickling my nose. Her exposed midriff was at eye level. This, I knew, was what cheerleaders were supposed to do, but I wanted no part of this Gator euphoria. As I sat there trying to look at the ceiling, my feet, the others around me, her white sneakers—anything else but her—I wondered what else she could possibly want from me. Hadn’t I done enough already? Was I supposed to tip her? Did I need to exclaim, “Go Gators!” before she would let me, a loyal Seminole, escape back into my sluggish Monday morning? Could she not tell I wanted to be left alone, that I wanted out of that nightmarish room as if it were filled with tear gas?
Thankfully the band stopped, which caused the cheerleaders to immediately scatter and return from whence they came. The assembly sat down, many of them applauding and laughing as they did, overjoyed that their Monday morning fundraising event had begun this way. I was drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, and my heart was crashing against my ribs. Kim elbowed me, “Wasn’t that great? Oh this meeting is going to be so goooood! I want us to do our meetings this way from now on! What fun!”
A be-suited gentleman who counted the millions of donated dollars took the podium at the front of the room. He dabbed his forehead with his Gator blue pocket square to absorb his beads of excitement, pulled from inside his lapel a piece of folder paper, adjusted the microphone, adorned a pair of reading glasses, and said, “Isn’t it great to be a Florida Gator! Wasn’t that something?” He looked right at me as he said it.