The girls who made the team had taken dance lessons from childhood, and had perfected their big vacant smiles and big hairdos. I don't think many of them really had a passion for dance; it was just something they were expected to do, as the white, upper-middle-class popular girls whose parents had dragged them to recitals and classes all their lives. I didn't want to dance to encourage school spirit, or to show off my long legs. I didn't care about competitions. I wanted to dance because, even at fifteen, I knew there was something there. Diane Sylvan, Dancing Down the Moon

It's been over 30 years since I bombed out of high school majorette tryouts, but in my dream the other night, as I lay curled up next to my warm bear of a husband in our sprawling four-poster bed, I had a spectacular plan to shine. And win a place on the team.

Not only would I twirl a baton, but I'd wield that lightning stick while standing on the back of my percheron horse Toby, as he thundered down the football field at a gallop.

Wouldn't the judges be impressed?

Certainly more than they were in my waking life.

For some reason I got this idea into my head in high school. That I, the painfully shy girl near the bottom of the pecking order, the one with the painfully small clothes closet filled with blue jeans and a couple of pairs of Wrangler corduroys, the one with a glaringly painful lack of dates, could be one of those princesses prancing out in front of the marching band like a hackney pony, stepping in time to the music in high white boots, tossing a baton high into the air, so high it would make you hold your breath. And, in my case, hoping like hell I could catch it.

The princess I emulated back then, by the way, was the daughter of the high school band director. The perpetually smug Jean C, with a haircut like a homely boy’s and legs longer than a thoroughbred’s. She was the head majorette the whole time I was in high school and always got the really good parts in the school play.

Go figure.

My dad, who actually had hopes of my being Miss America one day, I kid you not, at least this is what he said on the each and every one night a year the fifty hopefuls got sung to by Bert Parks on TV, tears dripping down their faces, ruining their mascara, and which is of course a rather lofty expectation to lay on a skinny kid in overalls, paid for baton twirling lessons at the dance studio in the local strip mall, where my lack of dazzle and poise exasperated my baton twirling teacher—Jack La Lane in a unitard and perky shoes—to no end.

Jack La La Lane must have thought I couldn't see him rolling his eyeballs nearly out of their sockets at my tortured twirling in the floor to ceiling wall of mirrors before which he demonstrated the finer points of the art, enjoying his own snappy reflection way too much if you ask me.

Although there was one baton twirling thing I excelled at. It was called Around the World.

Around the World was the showpiece of my doomed baton twirling routine back then, and it still is apparently. In equestrian vaulting, I had an opportunity to vault a while ago with a woman who’d actually been a circus performer and was then, as I understood it, studying some kind of fire twirling. Heck, if you gave me a lit-up baton right now at this minute, I bet I could impress you with a global tour of flaming baton magic. Although I might burn my eyebrows off.

I might have kicked the covers off as flames ignited under Toby’s hindquarters like jet plane engines roaring. Or my husband might have turned over on his other side, stealing the covers and snoring.

But anyway, that big percheron horse, my sweet and perpetually darling Big Boo, who shows up slightly larger in my dreams, slightly more dark and sleek and shiny, shot right off the mark to cross the 10, the 20, the 30, and by the time we hit the fifty yard line those folks in the bleachers were on their feet, screaming my name, and I just knew it. I was in. Finally. After all these years. Because I was twirling, twirling with all my heart and soul while standing on the back of this fabulous midnight colored horse. And this time, I told myself, as we dreamers do occasionally, I was going to be accepted.

Maybe as a follow up I could sing a solo.

Or tell you about my plans for world peace.

But instead of stopping at the 50, which was part of the dazzling plan, the percheron horse stretched out his marine-worthy neck, furry black ears flattened against his lovely jar head, one gleaming eye cast back at me, and ran. Like the wind. Like a whole pack of wolves were after us.

Like maybe he could save me from myself. He carried me right past those judges and Jack La Lane and leaped over the fence at the end of the football field.

And kept right on going.

And while I kept on twirling, I honestly don’t know where we wound up after that.

But I do know than when I awoke up in the morning, I could see the mesa burning amber and red from beneath the goose down comforter I’d somehow managed to wrestle back from my still sweetly slumbering, dead-to-the-world husband, who might be galloping through his own dreams somewhere impossibly far away, and I had no doubt Toby was waiting for me at the pasture gate, tail swishing.