CHICAGO — Hadiya Pendleton made sure to send her mother a picture of her outfit each day of her trip to Washington, where she and her high school bandmates performed at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
In the most memorable photo, the 15-year-old majorette dancer from Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood playfully winks and sticks her tongue out while wearing a sharp black dress shirt. Back home, her mother Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton beamed. She knew the teenager was teasing her for insisting on daily snapshots of her stay at the nation’s capital.
“Those are happy times,” Cowley-Pendleton told the Tribune this week. “I feel joy whenever I come across those pictures — with a little bit of sadness because that’s all I have.”
