Female Eunuch in a Homemade Bikini and Other Pageant Tales

             As you all know, I used to be heavily involved in the Miss America system as a Local Director, State Judge and Trainer.  My last hurrah, if you will, was in 2011 when I was part of the team accompanying my Miss DC to Miss America.  The lovely and talented Stephanie (Williams) Dekom is a pediatrician who used her scholarship money to complete her MD at George Washington University.  We recently reconnected when we realized we both live in LA, and this time I am not referring to Lower Alabama.

                Dr. Gorgeous, her equally adorable husband and I met for dinner and the Miss LA County/Miss Culver City pageants for the Miss America system.  It’s been five years since I was involved in anything pageant-related other than watching Miss America and explaining to my friends and family why some of the winners won.  I was looking forward to experiencing the local talent which is occasionally astounding, dependably horrifying and always entertaining,

                The theatre was a wood-paneled relic of days gone by.  I felt as if we were in a finished basement waiting to join the cast of That 70s Show to play Twister.  This made sense when the Directors were introduced and out walked a couple in late, laaaaate middle age.  The wife had a unique hairstyle; an interesting combo of a Bump-It® for the front bangs, a smaller back-up Bump-It ® and a pony tail almost to her waist.  Her profile was similar to photos of the mythical Monster surfacing in The Loch Ness: bump, bump, tail.

                The contestants were an interesting mix from extremely beautiful but marginally talented future Miss USA contestants, marginally attractive but extremely talented eventual titleholders and those both marginally attractive and marginally talented, a potent combination for last place, to be sure. 

In true LA fashion, there were a couple of atypical Miss America contestants.  The first was a 4’12” young lady of Hispanic origin who came armed with white patent leather stripper heels and a rendition of Peggy Lee’s Fever that wouldn’t feel out of place at a burlesque show, with hair and make-up which would’ve won her RuPaul’s Drag Race. 

The other was the most unique contestant I’ve ever seen and I’m including the young lady I saw at a local pageant in 1992 that sang The Judd’s Grandpa and forgot the words.  This young lady who’s slicked down, parted-in-the-middle bangs made her look like Amy Farrah Fowler’s less attractive, more awkward cousin.  She was bedaubed with heavy blue eye shadow and Chapstick ® but no other attempt at make-up.  She wore pants for the on-stage question.  She seemed to have made her swimsuit at home, with bikini bottoms in a faded earth tone I called Adobe Wall and a moss green/white striped bikini top with some sort of Peter Pan collar flap thingie. 

For her talent she sang a self-composed ditty, accompanying herself on piano, energetically pounding the three chords and cleverly rhyming ‘life’ with ‘life’.  She repeated the same verse several times, singing in a British accent not unlike Audrey Hepburn’s “Flars fer sayul” in My Fair Lady.  At no other point in the pageant did she have an accent of any sort other than Disinterested Scientist, which is what I posited to my companions.  I feel fairly certain this contestant is, at present, putting the finishing touches on a Psychology, Anthropology or Feminist Studies research paper or a missive on gender norms, feminism and the American Beauty Pageant, entitled something like, Female Eunuch in a Homemade Bikini, that is simply begging to be performed at a Slam Poetry reading by a off-duty Barista in a tattered Sleater-Kinney t-shirt, reeking of ennui and electronic cigarettes.

Other contestants were reasonably talented except for some of the singers.  Is it a national rule now that someone has to sing “Don’t Rain on My Parade” every beauty pageant?  This one had two, neither who had anywhere near the singing chops to belt a song that is meant to be belted.  And if you’re going to sing Sia’s “Titanium” and you can’t hit the high notes, you should choose a different song.  You should not suddenly sing in a lower register sounding like Barry White in the throes of puberty. 

Dramatic monologues are a mixed bag.  When I judged Miss Arizona in 2009, there was a contestant who did scenes from Les Miserables and was awarded 1^st Runner-up because she was a talented actress.  At this pageant a contestant did scenes from the movie Clueless.  Yes, you read that correctly. 

The winners were predicted by our little group:   Intelligent-Sorta-Pretty-Like-Meryl-Streep-Piano-Player and Pageant-Ready-Adele-Lite-Diva-in-a-Catsuit.  They will do well at Miss California, although Adele-Lite had a monstrously confusing evening gown which looked like something Ursula the Sea Witch would have worn to Prom had she been on land and enrolled in Jenny Craig. 

In other words, the pageant was awesomeness abounding and I can’t wait for the next one.

I don't care if Casper IS friendly...

                When last we spoke, we had discussed language, stemming from my father’s use of the term “haint”.  That post lead to a conversation with my sister where she reminded me another word we pronounce incorrectly was “mont-ner”; meaning monster. 

                Being a naturally jouvous person, I normally make an effort to avoid all mention of scary things lest I conjure up some creature in my head which will cause me to lose precious sleep.  I don’t know what happened to me during childhood but I have been afraid of the dark since somewhere in the neighborhood of birth and lasting up to and including last night.  I don’t know what makes me skittish in the darkness but if someone were to scare me with, say, a chainsaw, I could outrun any Olympic sprinter regardless if they used steroids or not.  Once, as a teen, I just about outran a car when I thought the Blue Lady of Humble Lake was trying to “git” me.  The unfortunate situation occurred when I attended my first teen bonfire, wearing my best corduroy pants.  I mention the wardrobe choice simply because, during my flight, said pantalones eventually started to smoke from the friction of my chubby legs pistoning me toward safety.  Now where I thought I was going to find safety in the boonies of East Texas with ‘Flock of Seagulls’ bangs and 3 Swatches was beyond me.  All I knew was I wanted to be elsewhere.

                And elsewhere was where I wanted to be recently when The Dad told me he had seen a ghost in my house.  Now, I realize I am a big strong man (well, a man anyway) but I did not need to hear this.  Before he could describe this recently sighted apparition, he turned to me and said, “All this talkin’ ‘bout spirits ‘n’ stuff had put me to mind the stories my mama told me.” 

While he reminisced and I pretended to listen, I thought of several occasions of my own where I lost any shred of coolness I, or my friends, imagined I had by possessing a lack of bravery which would have gotten me banished from most any Disney movie.  While my friends never abandoned me, per se, most certainly my date to the Junior Prom was less than thrilled when I abandoned her, faster than a celebrity breaks their wedding vows, at the breakfast afterwards. The brother (I won’t tell you his name but it rhymes with Scott Holliday) of the hostess decided to dress as Freddy Krueger and casually tap-tap-tap, on the French doors to my immediate right in the den while I was actively pretending to watch “A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part XVXVIII” along with 7-8 of my closest personal friends and their dates. 

When I ever so jouvously turned my head to the doors and saw this particular face, I screamed like a peacock set on fire, shoved past my date (I apologize again, Denise) and ran down the hall to the bedroom of the slumbering parents due, I can only imagine, to the overwhelming belief Mr. and/or Mrs. Holliday would save me through the use of gunfire or fisticuffs.  I don’t believe either of them were the same after experiencing the invasion of their inner sanctum by a chubby tuxedoed youth and a full 1/3 of the remaining guests alert enough to have noticed my flight, quickly following suit.  Now, I may be exaggerating these points; this was, after all, 1987 and it's a bit hazy, not due to alcohol or drug, mind you. I was a good Baptist youth, although I will cop to an addiction to Aqua Net;  something had to keep that hairdo in place, people.  All I know is the the following year, the Prom breakfast was held in a well-lit hotel suite with suitable chaperones and, for me, a mild sedative.

The most recent event I will share happened in Alaska, while camping.  Now, anyone who knows me is aware while I am not a ardent fan of the outdoors at night, I can be shamed into complying with the requests of the nature loving pseudo-hippies I have collected as friends.

This particular outing was Memorial Day weekend in 2003 and, being Alaska, it was a balmy 40 degrees.  As I was much larger then, the lack of heat was a plus.  Precious I may be, but most persons, places and things are not improved by the addition of moisture.  And underarm sweat stains large enough to effect local weather patterns are not a good look for anyone. 

I had watched the movie The Ring just prior to this trip.  Suffice it to say it was not a romantic comedy about a wedding.  Yes, I know, why on earth do I watch scary movies when they actually scare me?  I have no answer other than peer pressure.  What?  I have peers, in theory. 

We get to the campground and as there were 6 of us, I felt my odds of surviving the weekend without being murdered were fair to middlin'.  I wasn’t the slowest, did not have the largest breasts and was never interested enough to investigate the source of random snapping twigs . I felt pretty sure I wouldn’t be one of the first to die, per the typical plots of axe-murderer movies.  Once we scouted out the restrooms, however, I discovered the source of my pain for the weekend.  Even though they advertised toilets, they were actually toilet seats attached to the top of very deep wells.  Like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” deep.  And if you’ve seen The Ring you know that the girl mont-ner, at one point, climbs out of a deep well and comes to git the people.  Well, I can assure you I don’t need someone to git me whilst I am conducting my business.  The psychological repercussions I don’t want to imagine.  Needless to say I spent the weekend avoiding the bathroom which became increasingly difficult while trying to digest elk cooked in a skillet over an open fire.  TGI Friday’s this was not.

I had yet to feel uncomfortable in my new home even when living alone for almost 4 months, but when he told me he had seen a ghost, my first instinct was to flee.  The high cost of real estate in the Bay area held me in place, however, and I asked him to describe this ghost.  When he stated it was a woman with a large hat and veil and a parasol, I was both delighted she seemed fashionable and suspicious of the accuracy of the fashion as my house was built in 1929 and parasols haven’t been used in any manner since My Fair Lady. 

As I left to cleanse the house of evil through the recitation of any song I could remember with the most Jesuses in it, I noticed a figure alarmingly like the woman he described!  Right in my face!  It was the lovely lady in the painting I have over the buffet in my dining room; my first real piece of art.  My Daddy was either all out of conversational topics not involving bodily functions or he was trying to scare me.  Rude.  I told him if the phantom was well-dressed, then we could co-exist quite happily and I strode off to bed with the full knowledge he had simply fabricated the story and I had nothing to worry about.  Dustin does mean “strong hearted leader” according to the book of baby names.  My parents had chosen well.

Full disclosure:  I left the light on in the den for a couple of nights.  You know, just in case.