-by Martini
|
I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you some observations about a subject as American as baseball, apple pie, and fibbing about your golf scores: Beauty pageants. Now, admittedly, most of us have never seen a beauty pageant, unless we "see" it streaking past with the speed of a Blue Angels flyover on our TV screens while we're searching for the latest reality-based special on the Fox network -- no doubt something profound and riveting, such as When Stuff Blows Up III. I am perfectly willing to admit that the only time I sat through one of these televisual extravaganzas was the Miss America pageant that featured a national phone-in vote on whether the viewing public wanted to keep the swimsuit competition as an integral part of the contest. (True to form, Americans voted upwards of 10-to-1 to keep parading the lovelies out every year. My friends and I applauded the decision. Of course, we were a mite inebriated at the time -- why else would we be watching this? -- and probably would have thrown the entire cast of The Golden Girls in for good measure, but that's another issue entirely. Come to think of it, we would have applauded the voting results stone-cold sober, too.) My point is, few of us have seen a bona-fide beauty pageant live. And fewer of us have observed the amount of preparation and sacrifice that culminate in the gala evening. Except me. Which is the reason for this article. Call it an up-close and personal look into the world of beauty pageants, from the perspective of an outsider. And I do mean outsider. Normally they'd sic security on me if I ever showed up at one of these things. (Oh, and before all you politically-correct freaks start carpet-bombing this webzine with long, turgid, poorly-grammaticized invective about how exploitative beauty pageants are; how they simply reinforce the myth that the sole aspiration in life for young, impressionable females is to look pretty and smile vapidly; and how beauty pageants are the primary reason why women get paid an average of 30 cents less than men and periodically hit corporate America's glass ceiling with the velocity of an aquarium full of aggravated piranhas; consider the alternative. I mean, who would you rather America's young women model themselves after? Ally McBeal? Have you seen what she wears? In New England weather, for God's sake?) |
Ahem. Sorry. Where was I? Ah, yes. Beauty pageants. I have a friend, whom I'll call Ashley, who is a real live beauty queen. She's worn one crown or another for the past few years, doing all the things you see beauty queens do: speaking at elementary schools, hosting charity events, etc. Ashley is a very intelligent, confident woman, glamorous in a 1940s-movie sort of way, with raven-black hair and deep brown eyes and a body that could not only stop traffic but make it roll over and beg. (And if she EVER finds out about this article, I'm in serious trouble. Finished. Toast. Nineteen different kinds of dead.) Over the past few months, I've assisted Ashley in little ways to help get her ready for the big event. I agreed to do this mostly out of friendship, but a significant amount out of guilty curiosity. Let's face it; how often do you get to learn about the inner workings of one of these things? I figured it'd be simple. Run an errand every so often, walk around behind her as she goes shopping for gowns and what-not, maybe get to meet Regis Philbin and punch his lights out on general principle, that sort of thing. Apparently I did not notice the word "sucker" tattooed across my forehead. Before I go any farther along, let me say this much. I, and doubtless most of us, hold certain stereotypes regarding beauty pageants: catty, insipid, voyeuristic, pointless, what have you. It ain't necessarily so. The women who participate in these events -- Ashley included -- compete for a good deal of scholarship money and meet and connect with influential local politicians and celebrities. It takes a significant amount of poise, intelligence, and cast-iron guts to get up on stage and do this, a level of guts that I doubt most of us, myself included, possess. But having been through this particular wringer, I cannot help but make a few observations.... |
|
I. Prep Work First, the videos. 
Beauty contestants can purchase videos of past pageants from the national organizations, apparently to aid them in improving their technique. (Or at least I hope that's why they buy these things. I'm loath to call them "entertainment" in any sense of the word.) The particular set of videos Ashley asked me to watch with her came from a pageant from two years ago. It was a 3-tape box set of the "talent" portion of the contest. Picture, if you can, four hours of women from all 50 states (plus Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, etc.) singing, dancing, juggling chainsaws, and motorcycle-jumping over 20 flaming schoolbuses, all in that unmistakable Dad-with-a-HandyCam level of cinematography, and you're coming close to how my day went. (Twice, mind you, because you obviously can't absorb every single nuance of Miss Nevada tap-dancing -- I'm not kidding -- to "Greased Lightning" -- I'm still not kidding -- in only one viewing. What was I thinking?) But those aren't the only videos the national organizations offer; after all, why waste one of my afternoons when I can waste several? There are also interview videos, where you can listen to these same young women in business suits, who are all fielding questions about their platform statements from the national judges. I would have thought that after my comments on the talent videos ("Nice fire-eating, Miss Idaho. Talented. Not very practical, but talented nonetheless") that I would get a reprieve from the governor and not have to watch the interview videos as well. Foolish mortal! No, I was asked to become an active participant in prepping Ashley for her interview, which essentially consisted of reading her platform statement and her bio sheet and lobbing up these Barbara Walters-level if-you-were-a-tree questions for her to smack into the proverbial center-field bleachers. The conversation went something like this:
Obviously, she didn't think this through as well as she might have. Hell, I have enough trouble thinking up essay exams for my students to fail. And mean? I wish I could be a pageant judge for one evening, Ash. I'll show you mean:
But I didn't do that. After all, I don't know for a fact that you can kill a man by shoving a tiara down his throat, but I didn't want to test the hypothesis. |
 |
