MINNESOTA
Go to a Minnesota Vikings Cheerleader Reunion
Here’s a report from Mark Rosen, Sports Director and Anchor of WCCO in Minneapolis, Minnesota
You Can Go Home Again
Apr 23, 2006 7:18 pm
It’s a safe assumption most of you have attended one or more of your high school reunions. I graduated from St. Louis Park High school in 1970 and have attended my 10, 20 and 30-year reunions. They were all special and weird in their own ways.
This weekend, I was asked to host a different sort of reunion: the 50th reunion of the St. Louis Park Parkettes, one of the first high school dance lines in the state of Minnesota. If you watched the Vikings play football, especially in the late ’60s and ’70s at Met Stadium, you would remember the Parkettes as the “official” dance team of the Vikings, long before “professional cheerleaders” took over.
Back in high school, most of these girls were the really “cool” girls. Guys like me didn’t have the courage to speak to most of them, to say nothing of asking any of them out on a date. So here I was some 35 years later, at the podium of the Marriott Hotel in Minneapolis, facing a “roomful” of Parkettes.
I’ve interviewed everyone from Sandy Koufax to Michael Jordan, but I was never as nervous as I was looking around the room and seeing my class of Parkettes staring back at me.
It was great fun. I mean, I actually spoke to Andi Harris, the queen of the Parkettes in 1970, and in my speech said that moment was every bit a “Do You Believe in Miracles” as actually covering the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. She said my comments earned her a lot of brownie points with her husband.
I am very proud to have graduated from St. Louis Park, with some terrific classmates, including the amazing columnist and author Thomas Friedman. That pride came through loud and clear in the words and feelings of everyone in attendance at the Parkette reunion.
For those three hours we all proved you can go home again. And for one night, I was the luckiest man in the world to be the chosen one to host their reunion. Now I can go on with the rest of my life.
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