After countless hours of video-watching and question-asking and nodding supportively and wondering when Ashley's going to start referring to herself in the third person, the big day finally arrived. So, for her, I put on a coat and tie and slogged off to a rather small auditorium, camera in hand, to experience first ever beauty pageant.

Holy mother of pearl.

First of all, the place was jammed with relatives and friends and other well-wishers of these contestants -- the type of crowd in which I do not normally circulate. And a lot of them, particularly mothers and aunts of the girls on stage, are dressed -- and I mean this in every sense of the word -- fit to kill. Now, normally I'm not a big fan of government interference in Americans' private lives, but after sitting in that audience am passionately convinced that Congress should make it a prohibition -- no, a capital offense -- for all women past a certain advanced age to wear anything with sequins. Truly. The place looked like a convention of retired Vegas showgirls gone to seed. Madam, just because your daughter/niece/cousin/babysitter is traipsing around the stage in this gooey formal number, doesn't mean you can. Just because she looks like Cindy Crawford, it does not follow that you do. (Hell, most of these women didn't even look like Joan Crawford. A few of them looked like Broderick Crawford.)

I sat there waiting for the festivities to start, thumbing through the pageant's official program (yes, it had a program -- just like at a sporting event. I was half-expecting to see injury reports, plus-minus ratings and penalty-minutes statistics). While perusing the photo gallery of last year's contestants in the national pageant -- and noting to myself that, Man Alive, they grow 'em niiiiiiice in those polygonal Midwest states -- it occurred to me, however briefly, how odd it was that Ashley had not asked me to sneak backstage and commit a Tonya Harding on any of her opponents. Then again, Ashley's not the sort of girl to do that -- or at least, she's not the sort to pawn the job off on hirelings. If anyone's gonna shove anyone else down a flight of stairs, Ashley's gonna do it herself. She's rather hands-on that way....

First, the swimsuit competition.

For someone like myself, who regularly anticipates that weekend in February when Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue and Drool-apalooza hits the newsstands, I considered this to be at least one area where I qualified as a connoisseur. (And yes, the socially-conscious part of my brain did raise its wet-blanket head for a moment and wonder why, in something touting itself as a "scholarship pageant," we needed to parade these young women out in bathing suits. I asked Ashley this once, and she told me she had asked the organizers the same question, and had received a suspiciously enigmatic response. Having thus absorbed the fact that the problem obviously lay in the upper echelons of the pageant system and not with me, I then locked my social guilt back in the steamer trunk of my psyche and ogled away with a clear conscience.)

To review for a moment, the point of this gawk-o-rama is to show off the "poise, health, and athleticism" in the contestants. Really, I mean it. And while soaking in the irony of these young women parading around the stage in beachwear when the temperature outside barely cracked 35 degrees Fahrenheit, two things came to mind:

1. Beauty contestants come in all shapes and sizes.
2. Beauty queens, however, come in only one. If you get my drift.

We then moved on to the talent portion of the show. This little open-mike fest featured:

6 dancers (and they ran the gamut, from ballet to Bob Fosse to some godawful Laker Girls cheerleading number to interpretive dances so abstruse they would have confused a truckload of comp-lit PhDs)

4 singers (sampling everything from Celine Dion to Walt Disney to The Sound of Music -- is this the sort of thing the North Korean police use to elicit confessions?)

3 monologists (don't ask)

2 flutists (or flautists, as the case may be)

2 baton twirlers (neither of whom set their batons on fire, might I add).

I sat through it all, like a parent at a grade school recital, at least clinging to the self-delusion that the night couldn't possibly get any more surreal.

Actually, this last part of the evening combined the evening-gown and interview portions of the program. This part of the evening operated just like it does on TV -- that is, the real, in-depth interviews (i.e., the stuff I had sat through in that second batch of videotapes, lest you'd forgotten) took place the previous night. What we audience members saw was a truncated version of the same questions that had been asked of Ashley and her fellow contestants. In other words, there were no surprises -- just the host (the weatherman from the six o'clock news) asking a broad enough question of each contestant that allowed them to spout off on their platform for a minute and a half.

And just like in national politics, they ranged from burning social issues to the sort of bleeding-heart why-can't-we-all-just-get-along screed you usually hear espoused on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Of course, several of the women chose some rather important (and often overlooked) topics: breast cancer, teen pregnancy, youth suicide prevention, AIDS awareness, etc.

• "empowerment of youth" (if you ask me, the youth of this country are already too damned empowered as is -- I'd've preferred one of the platforms tried to counterbalance all this self-esteem hooey and talked about "putting the little b*st*rds back in their place")
• "family values" (do they include allowing your daughter to parade around like a Victorian-era streetwalker at one of these things?)
• "volunteerism" (whatever happened to "getting a job," anyway?)
• "community awareness" (which means, I gather, that one should be cognizant of others in their neighborhood and refrain from doing housework naked with all the curtains open).

At the rate things were going, I was bracing for topics even less defined than these, such as "Do Good Things," "Mean People Suck," "Don't Kick Puppies," and others equally resonant with sociopolitical profundity. Moreover, the public-speaking skills of some of the contestants left a lot to be desired. Some were eloquent, some were adequate, and some seemed to have about a 40-word active vocabulary and were struggling to recombine those 40 words in as many different sentence structures as possible. (I know, maybe they were nervous. Maybe they got a bit of stage fright. Maybe they should have picked a more multidimensional platform, too....God, I'd make a really evil judge, wouldn't I?)

And, in short, that was how the evening went. Three-hours-plus of everyone saying what an honor it was to be here while looking daggers at each and every contestant around them. And as they announced the winners, I let out a sigh of relief that I wouldn't have to go through this again anytime soon....

...Oh, and the winner? Ashley, of course. She's never lost one of these things.

Now it's on to the state finals in a couple of months. Say a prayer for me, willya?