Back in the day, the Biscuit and I produced our own public-access television show. One of these days, I’ll write a column about the “Moist Towelette” era, but in order to avoid meandering off into a pseudo-analytical sidebar on the perils of working with one’s significant other, and more particularly the perils of working with one’s significant other when, as an unfortunate side effect of firstborn birth order, neither party has mastered advanced skills like compromising, listening calmly to constructive criticism, and employing a non-bossy tone of voice during the editing process, not to mention the complete breakdown of tact which leads to comments like “excuse me, Martin Snore-sese, but I called everyone in the world to ask if they gave a crap whether you employed a ëfocus pull,’ and THEY ALL SAID ëNO’” and “no, pardon me, Chinny Chinny Bang Bang, but I think you’d better re-position your feather boa, because you look SORT OF FAT in that last shot” – well, anyhow, back to the point, namely that we aired all sorts of scary, pathetic, and unsuitable-for-network clips, including snippets of the 1993 Miss Teen USA pageant. Why the Biscuit decided this event merited a space in his video library to begin with, I haven’t the foggiest idea, and I objected on general principles before I’d even seen the footage. Then the Biscuit screened it for me, and I can safely say that no single televised event has deprived me of more faith in the human race than that hour of videotape.

The Biscuit had hit “record” in the middle of the group dance number, in which all the contestants participated. The piece, choreographed with a physical-fitness theme (read: low-impact aerobics) in mind, had about as much relevance as the interpretive-dance portion of the Academy Awards telecast – in other words, none whatsoever. Next came the swimsuit portion of the program, during which the girls – their bony bodies kitted out in dowdy World-War-II-era one-pieces or Funicello-esque bikinis, with their state sashes slung over the whole affair – pranced past the judging table. The camera panned up each contestant’s body, past her coltish legs and undeveloped hips, and stopped at her face. Enter the cognitive disconnect: the bodies, young and probably still growing, looked fifteen or sixteen years old, but the faces looked easily twenty years older. Each head sported the same trademark pageant rictus of grotesque enthusiasm, the same “evening” makeup applied with a trowel, the same half-pint of Vaseline on the lips and teeth, and the same Junior-League-Of-Lubbock coronet of long teased-out hair (in which, depending on the angle of the light, the audience could see Aqua Net sparkling like dew on a spider web). I kept thinking of that scene in Dazed & Confused when Sabrina has to propose to Tony with oatmeal and mustard caked in her clothes and hair, and after she walks away, Mike elbows Tony and says, “I bet she’s pretty cute once you clean all the shit off her” – the girls looked forty. The girls looked dead. The girls looked downright miserable.

The girls did not evince much in the way of ambition or intelligence, either. I suppose an on-camera interview with one of Satan’s minions – known to much of the world as “Dick Clark” – would fluster even the most well-spoken adolescent. Still, most of the things that came out of the mouths of these girls did not exactly lead to speculation about a Rhodes scholarship. Miss Teen Hawaii, when asked how many letters the Hawaiian alphabet has, responded glumly, “A lot – about thirteen.” Later, she asked Mr. New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with great fanfare, “What is your favorite – animal cracker?” The contestant from Texas faced down a question on handgun-related violence by observing that fewer accidents would happen if American children learned how to use handguns. Most of the competitors wanted to become lawyers, spokesmodels, and news anchors when they grew up; one wanted to appear on America’s Most Wanted, but, she took pains to add, “not as a criminal. As the host. Of the show. Who didn’t do anything bad.” Another wanted to work with children, “because babies are so cute.” Many of the contestants had to respond to a query on what single thing they would change about themselves if they had the opportunity, and every last one of them wanted to change something about her body. In all fairness, I’d have chosen “smaller waistline” over “good at math” in a flash at that age (and probably still would, come to think of it), but I thought beauty queens would have higher self-esteem.

At the end of the twentieth century, the pageant world probably doesn’t have quite the allure it once did. Most girls – and, more to the point, most mothers – have better things to do these days; besides, the supermodel era may have passed its zenith, but nowadays the truly beautiful girl who wants to make a career out of her looks becomes a model, not a pageant princess. The whole pageant enterprise seems hopelessly out-of-date and pitiable, reinforcing as it does a host of feeble stereotypes about women and about the things we supposedly do best; it rewards the contestants for perfecting the shallowest so-called skills in a woman’s repertoire. The average pageant looks for women who can apply makeup; walk modestly in floor-length gowns and in demure beachwear; make small talk with strangers; work with the less fortunate; and play the piano well enough to start a sing-along at the sorority house. The list sounds like something out of the mid-century “Pleasing Your Husband” tract that made the rounds of the Internet a year or two ago, which consisted of helpful hints like “freshen up before the breadwinner gets home – he likes you looking your loveliest” and “don’t complain about your day, but ask him about his instead.” Every last girl on the stage at the Miss Teen USA pageant had “future embittered first wife” written all over her, because every last girl had perfected the complement of inconsequential talents required of a docile hostess, and every last girl seemed destined to become just that – sparkly dilettantes with pleasant singing voices and absolutely no career skills or aspirations at all. Worse, they’d entered into it willingly. The girls actually wanted to win. The girls had no sense of irony about the pageant – no insight into the Stepfordian creepyness of pageant culture – at all. The cutaway shots to the weepy, leathery, frantically applauding mothers of the participants revealed an even more unsettling lack of perspective, and just thinking about the “pageant moms” makes my gorge rise, so I will confine myself to remarking that Miss Teen Vermont’s mother must have single-handedly precipitated an international sequin drought.

Fast forward to last week, when the Miss America pageant aired. I didn’t watch the telecast, but for reasons too convoluted to get into, I did visit the official site. Mere words cannot convey the pathos contained therein. Two words will, however, serve to describe the contestants themselves: “not pretty.” Needless to say, I don’t approve of beauty pageants, but if they must continue to exist, it seems to me that the entrants should be beautiful – not “beautiful, not counting the harelip” or “beautiful for a girl whose face God carved out of a turnip” or “beautiful if you don’t look directly at her,” but beautiful. How many beauties did I see on the Miss America Web site? Exactly one (Miss Illinois), and she only made it as far as runner-up. The recent kerfuffle over the qualifications to compete – women who had gotten divorces and/or abortions might have the prohibition against them lifted – ignored a very important issue, namely that the contest can’t afford to turn too many women away, because fully one quarter of this year’s crop could have scared the paint off a Buick (and onto their faces). Miss Delaware had apparently forgotten that she had a pageant coming up, because if she had remembered, she surely would have touched up her three-inch black roots. Miss Connecticut bore a suspicious resemblance to a flounder, and I kept looking for the dialogue bubble over Miss Louisiana’s head that read, “Ribbit!” Other Misses looked like inanimate objects: hatchets (Miss Missouri), trampled pastries (Miss Oregon), and Cabbage Patch Kids (Miss Vermont). Miss North Carolina sported the worst uncorrected overbite I’ve ever seen in my life. Miss Florida represented most of the residents of her home state quite accurately by appearing roughly seventy years old. Miss Wisconsin chose sexual abstinence as her pet “issue,” and with that face, she shouldn’t have any problem setting an example in the no-nookie department. And as for Miss Rhode Island – well, clever similes fail me, but let’s just say she got the business end of the ugly stick and leave it at that. You won’t see me on a catwalk near you any time soon, but on the one hand you have subjective definitions of beauty, and on the other hand you have a severe case of wandering eye (don’t think I didn’t notice, Miss North Dakota).

According to the rules page on the site, beauty doesn’t count for much anyway in the overall scoring. The judges rate the contestants on talent (it counts for forty percent), “interviewing” (thirty percent), “on-stage personality in evening wear” (fifteen percent), and “physical fitness in a swimsuit” (also fifteen percent). In other words, taping up the old boobs won’t give competitors much of an edge. Of course, with eighty percent of the contestants devoting their talent portion to overwrought renditions of “My Heart Will Go On” or plonking stiffly through “The Moonlight Sonata” on the piano, I don’t know how the judges stayed awake long enough to differentiate between them (Miss Alabama, who tried to liven things up with the marimba, didn’t even make it to the semi-finals), or to figure out what in the hell “character ballet” means (whatever it meant, it didn’t work for Miss Maine). The list of “career ambitions” didn’t have much more variety; most Misses wanted to become actresses, news anchors, or lawyers. Miss Hawaii wanted to do voice-overs for animated Disney films. Miss Texas wanted to become a motivational speaker. Miss North Carolina wanted to open a gym for babies. And they’d all chosen safe, traditional, non-threatening issues like asthma awareness, breast cancer awareness, and “virginity’s value.” Nobody had any interest in running for President, or in any creative arts not undertaken in front of a camera; nobody mentioned gay rights or civil rights as issues, or feminism for that matter. A few of them haven’t finished school, but almost all of those who have graduated currently work in places like Kinko’s and the Gap, usually as assistant managers. I don’t have anything against chain-store employees or anything, but if you want to become an anchorwoman for ABC, you have two choices: you can either try to win a beauty pageant and get the job handed to you; or you can get work related to television news, start working your way up like everyone else, and rely on yourself instead of on a one-in-fifty shot at a tacky-ass crown. I mean, duh. Life is not a Cosmo article, girlfriend, so use the spine God gave you, and I don’t mean to practice walking around with books on your head, either.

Pageants make me sort of sad. Everything about them – the intense, yet strangely ovine, demeanor of the contestants; the rabidity of the pageant moms; the washed-up “celebrity” judges (how does Tia Carrere qualify as a celebrity?) – seems strange and phony, like some kind of hallucination or delusion on the part of the participants. The girls feverishly pursue these pageant crowns (or, again, their mothers do – somehow, I don’t think JonBenet Ramsey had as much interest in vamping it up for its own sake as she did in pleasing her mother, and we all know where that led), and at the same time ninety-nine percent of the female population at large not only doesn’t care about the pageants but views those who do with outright contempt. Beauty queens don’t get any respect, and even though Miss America travels around the country raising money for her favorite cause, I don’t know that beauty queens deserve any respect. I respect people who volunteer, but I don’t respect people who volunteer in exchange for getting to wear a rhinestone tiara, and I don’t respect people who waste their lives striving for crap.

Hit it, Bert.

Forty-year-old heads on fifteen-year-old bodies, anyone?

And the aftermath.

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