This is exactly how it was in my high school. The cheerleading coach was a tyrant and expected that, if you were a cheerleader, you wouldn't be in any other extracurricular activities or demanding electives like band or show choir. You couldn't join Student Council or National Honor Society. (Our pom-pon squad, which was a different thing, encouraged well-rounded participants and had to turn away auditioning girls every year.)

She disregarded safety protocols and wouldn't let a friend of mine call her parents when she hit her head. We thought it was retaliation because the girl had auditioned for a school play. Did I mention the woman's brother was a longtime school board member?

In a school of around 1,000 kids, the only senior cheerleaders left by my graduating class were her niece and a greatly disliked girl who always thought being a cheerleader would elevate her social status. It didn't.

Things have changed in the intervening years, but cheerleading was not a popular extracurricular choice at my school 20 years ago.

I took a really cool, small math course in college that was called something like "Geometry Through Technology: Art and Nature," and with only a dozen or so students sometimes it just devolved into the professor nerding out about Renaissance art and talking about all the cool stuff he did while living in Florence. He and his wife kind of got to be friendly acquaintances with Weller, who was working on his dissertation at the same time.