Rose Bowl-bound

On Jan. 1, the San Gabriel Mountains will spring into view as rows of band members nine wide turn onto Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, Calif. 

“A vista opens up, and you can’t miss it,” said Cindy Wade, founding director of the Star Spangled Girls dance team. “It’s exquisite.” 

And Wade would know. She’s traveled with Homewood High School to the Rose Bowl Parade two of the three times they have been.

“It’s a lot of beauty that’s out there with the lay of the land and the excitement of the people,” Wade said.

Along with the band and dancers, she was awake at 3 a.m. to get lined up before spectators arrived around 6 a.m., and she was there when they got to see the floats made of roses as they were being created.

“The first year we were thrilled to be invited because we were the smallest band there,” she said. “They were all huge like Homewood is now.”

On the first day of 2014, she will return to Pasadena’s wide-open streets to see 320 Patriots — the largest HHS group ever to take part in the event — march past. She will be there to see them perform “Sing, Sing, Sing” before they step off at the beginning of the parade for the first time. Their performance in the parade will be broadcast to 400 million viewers in 200 countries.

Wade will be looking for her grandsons, drummer Hogan Bexley and tenor saxophone player Wade Bexley, as they pass by, but a special glisten will form in her eyes at the sight of girls in sequins.

The image of the Star Spangled Girls reminds her of the vision she cast for the ensemble when Homewood High School opened in 1972.

Their uniforms have remained the same since 1976 — a silver and red sequined halter with white gloves and knee-high white boots like the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders wore. At each performance Wade checked every part of their look; it was part of their grade in the class. Their lipstick was always red, their ears studded with rhinestones, their hair up in a headpiece, and their legs covered in suntan-colored opera hose. 

Just like the Rockettes, she wanted their looks indistinguishable from one another and their steps to be precise.

 “They look professional from head to toe,” she said. “If you don’t know them, it’s hard to tell who is from yesteryear and who is from today. They are unusually and uniquely polished wherever they go. That was always the case.”

A New Orleans native, Wade also wanted the girls to bring the excitement of Mardi Gras parades to the field.

In 1998 Wade retired from Homewood High School to join her son, Billy, in the real estate business, but only when one of her former Star Spangled Girls, then an Auburn graduate, was able to take her place. Today pictures of her years with the Star Spangled Girls line the walls of her Oxmoor Road office. She organized a band reunion performance in September that raised $1,800 for the band uniform fund, and she chaperones the parade trips any chance she gets.

Still, her legacy with the girls was about more than way they look on the field, although she admits she’s always loved glitter and sparkles.

“One of the most gratifying things is for girls to come back in their 20s or 40s and tell me they knew how to be prepared and be accountable when they entered college, jobs, medical school,” she said. “‘No one was stricter than you,’ they tell me. Being a Star Spangled Girl is not about steps, it’s about life.”

Rose Bowl Parade

Watch the Homewood High School Band 

Jan. 1, 10 a.m. 

Broadcast on HGTV, ABC, Hallmark, NBC, RDF TV, KTLA