A woman freezes at the sight of white boots. A representative from Lucchese—the John Lobb of cowboy boots—conducts fittings with a gravity akin to a nun being fitted for a habit. I’m watching America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a reality-TV series about the world’s most famous cheer squad, and the religious overtones keep coming. The older women in charge, all ex-DCC, run the show. They coordinate standards and issue coded assessments. “I can’t see her in ‘Thunderstruck’”—the AC/DC anthem inseparable from the DCC’s routine—is how one applicant is dismissed. Eventually, Charlotte Jones arrives. She, daughter of Jerry, first of her name, Stanford graduate, abbess of tasteful upkeep and of smizing, renders final decisions in firm epigrams.
The Cowboys’ cheerleaders signal America and Texas: a land of bespoke cults honing craft in private before exerting themselves in public. In this case, we see a cult of young women who dance in front of 100,000 people exceptionally well, in white cowboy boots and in perfect formation. But they are, in the end, only a sect within a greater religion: The Dallas Cowboys. The congregation at large worships Aikman and Staubach and Emmitt Smith. Only a DCC alumnae would recall members from the past. Like proper cults, the costs and rituals are known only by the initiated. These women have trained in ballet and in modern dance and in gymnastics. There are women from Texas—from the pine curtain of East Texas to the ochre-colored canvas of the plains to the Rio Grande—who have envisaged the white cowboy boots since girlhood. There are others from far away who want to dance in front of the largest audience possible. The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in New York holds fewer than 300 people. AT&T stadium welcomes around 350 times that. The pain is grand too. A common end game for these women? Bilateral hip surgery from years of landing in splits. You too can buy the boots that these young women break their bodies for.
If you know Texas, and you watch the show, I’d bet that a second thought kicks in: People in Houston would hate this. Someone in Sugar Land or in Katy with a framed Earl Campbell jersey is calling the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders a cult. They mean it.
The myth of Texas is the endless braid of isolation and independence where the land becomes a vision board for Americans looking for heroes. Earlier this year, I found myself in a public-school building in a Dallas suburb, listening to a blend of preaching, crypto-history lessons, and an invitation to celebrate an empire’s number-one boy, dead for a century.
A small child in a tuxedo stood on stage and waved a flag bearing the Habsburg Empire’s coat of arms—a double-headed eagle on a black and yellow field, crowns on each feather. In this public-school auditorium in Plano Texas, about 300 people stood—some with something close to reverence, others looking respectful but confused—as the speakers played Haydn’s Kaiserhymn, the imperial anthem of the Habsburg Empire. It was the second time we had heard it that day.
