lone star; As a teenage Wranglerette, Rene Steinke wore big hair, fringe, and short skirts, all the while wondering if outsize Texas glamour couldn't be a tad more subtle.

Byline: Rene Steinke

When I was sixteen, I was a Wranglerette-one of 40 lithe girls who would dance in synchronicity on the high school football field at halftime, high kicking, Rockette-style, white boots aligned. In Friendswood, Texas, a small town near Houston, to be a Wranglerette was the pinnacle of local glamour. The uniform: a tight cowgirl outfit with an obscenely short satin skirt and fringe jiggling at the cuffs and bustline-sort of Dale Evans as styled by Aaron Spelling.

I was aware of a faraway glamour, too, one I glimpsed when I could get my hands on a copy of Vogue. But I didn't know anyone who wore those dreamlike clothes or hairstyles. At the time, the appeal of that world lay in its pure impossibility.

Only this Vogue photo of Jerry Hall, herself a Texan from Mesquite, was different. Taken by Richard Avedon, it captures the particular Texan beauty that we Wranglerettes tried to emulate. Hall's hair sweeps into the frame like a shiny, roiling river, her gaze smoky and direct, her smile defined and knowing. It's a stronger brand of beauty than demure Southern-belle prettiness or the northerner's scrub-faced sophistication. It's an all-American face, but underscored for emphasis, because in oil-rich Texas, beauty is met with enthusiasm, not subtlety. We overglossed our lips, hoping the shine would make people pay attention when we spoke. We painted on thick streaks of eye shadow so it winged upward, as Hall's does here, not only to increase our allure but to be noticed when we shot someone a look. In Texas, size always matters. Hair needed to be gloriously large beneath the cowboy hat. And any sexual provocativeness in my eyeliner I would have seen as just good grooming-if a girl considered herself at all pretty, she wore the makeup to prove it.

Sleepy and just-showered, we arrived at the school gym at 7:00 a.m. for practice, where we stretched into the splits positions and rehearsed high kicks so that knee touched nose. Our leader was hard-

driving, pushing us to practice a step again and again until our muscles spasmed in pain, and she was strict, ordering us to pull back our shoulders and lift our chins, even when we weren't dancing. If a girl made too many mistakes in a routine, she was likely to weep, and we studied the steps as if to master them would bring wisdom and fortune. After practice, we returned to headquarters, a large classroom, empty except for mirrors and dozens of hot-roller sets, plugged into the outlets, their tiny red lights waiting.

I remember how the boys would linger around the door, waiting for us to emerge as if we were chorus girls, how they would watch, speechless, as we marched together, all blue and white, into the football field at the beginning of a game. It was a giddy feeling, dancing under the hot white lights at halftime, the smell of wet grass all around, the band's horns blaring into the night. Each of my limbs felt electric and glowing, as if my body were infused with the hectic energy of the crowd. But it was also stressful-anyone could see if you made a mistake, or if, as sometimes happened, a girl's skirt got caught under her leotard, exposing a buttock.