Queen for a Day
In Texas, beauty contests offer girls a time-honored occasion to hone the skills of elaborate preening, discover the intricacies of tactical warfare, and practice the fine art of intense mother-daughter bonding. But at the 2003 Miss Texas Teen USA pageant, contestant number 53 hoped for something simpler: a blueprint for self-discovery.
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The pageant's producer, Al Clark, a jovial man in his early sixties, rose to make a few introductory remarks. (In 1991 he and his wife, Gail, an elegant blonde who was Mrs. Texas 1979, wrested control of the organization away from Richard Guy and Rex Holt, the famed El Paso duo who produced five national winners in a row in the eighties amid rumors of pageant rigging. The Clarks restored order, and in 1995 one of their own protégés, Chelsi Smith, won the Miss USA title and then Miss Universe.) "One of you will be the next Miss Texas Teen USA," Al began, looking out over the room. "Who will it be? You have one chance in one hundred seventeen, and that's not much of a chance. So rule number one is, Have fun. Rule number two is, Don't listen to the gossip. You have a dream, and that's why you're here. Don't let any petty person take that away from you . . . . Rule number five, Don't let the pressure ruin the real you. Personality and warmth are what win these things. Almost all of you are pretty"—to which there were some audible gasps from the mothers standing in the back of the room—"so it takes more than just being pretty to win. And now, let me give you the Creep Speech. There are going to be a lot of men around this hotel who know the prettiest girls in Texas are here. Don't give out your room number or your telephone number, please."
The contestants were handed their sashes and herded down to the ballroom, where they would spend the next five hours learning their dance moves for the pageant's jazzy opening number. "Beauty queens must wear heels at all times!" barked their choreographer, Kent Gregory Parham, as a few girls straggled into rehearsal wearing sneakers. His task was to transform more than one hundred girls of varying dance ability, grace, and coordination into a well-oiled machine capable of performing in perfect rhythm before a one-thousand-person audience—a small miracle he had to work in less than two days. By eight o'clock that night, the girls were weary as he schooled them in how to stride down the catwalk. "Ladies, walk like you're teens, with a bounce in your step," he yelled over the thumping music. "You don't have mortgages yet. Show it!"
ASHLEY SAT IN HER HOTEL room that night, rubbing her feet. She was talking on the phone to her mother. "It went okay, I guess," Ashley said. "These girls are so intimidating. They're really, really pretty. I felt really underdressed. They wore four-inch heels to rehearsal! Gosh, it was long. We practiced doing the whole pageant. I walked around, swinging my hips and smiling at a crowd that didn't exist, and it was very weird. We did imaginary awards and I won Best Swimsuit, and I had to walk an extra lap and smile more. But I'm pretty sure I won't win Best Swimsuit tomorrow!" She laughed and picked up the regulation bikini that each girl had received that evening from the Miss Texas Teen USA organization, holding it out in front of her as if it were a dead animal. She was less mortified by the slightness of the bikini than by its color, which was her least favorite. "Mom, guess what color my swimsuit is," she said. "Pink!"
After Ashley wished her mother good-night, she slipped on her size 12 heels and teetered around the room in her pajamas, demonstrating the exaggerated swagger of a veteran pageant girl. Her Miss Gray County sash hung inelegantly from the lamp shade, where she had tossed it after the rehearsal. "These girls are so prim and proper!" she marveled, laughing as she sprawled out across the bed. All she could do in the face of such competition was throw up her hands and laugh. The girls who were among the pageant's most serious contenders had spent as much as $5,000 on evening gowns with hand-beaded bodices and hoopskirts and trains. Ashley planned to wear a $75 formal from her hometown dress shop—a simple ivory sheath with spaghetti straps—that she had bought two years earlier for her Pampa High School Band banquet. The more experienced pageant girls had sculpted their bodies with the help of personal trainers, diuretics, and strict high-protein diets. They had bronzed themselves on tanning beds and used a self-tanner called Fake Bake. But Ashley had just been Ashley. She was proud to report that her legs had not seen the sun since the summer and that her favorite after-school snack was still an Allsup's chimichanga and a Coke.
This is not to say that Ashley was unconcerned about how she would fare in the pageant. She had worked hard to get there. Her family was of modest means—her mother worked as a teacher's aide, her stepfather as a nurse at the local prison—and so she had raised every cent of the $950 pageant entry fee herself. Fellow parishioners at the Zion Lutheran Church, in Pampa, had taken up a collection for her, and her mother's sorority sisters had chipped in as well; the remainder was donated by two beauty shops, an RV park, a handful of mom-and-pop stores, and Pampa Pawn. Ashley had no local pageant director to guide her, and she could not afford a coach who would instruct her in the finer points of pageant finishing school. Unlike, say, Miss Houston, she had not been taught how to pivot in four-inch heels while smiling at the judges. She had not been drilled for hours on end in the art of answering questions like, If you could ask God one question, what would it be? She had not been taught the tricks of the trade, like how to use duct tape to push up her breasts or the importance of doing lunges before the swimsuit competition so that her calves would appear shapelier. Ashley did only what she knew how to do. "My strategy tomorrow is to be myself," she said.
When her roommate, Miss Grayson County, returned to their room to sleep, I left them to join chaperone Donna Buchanan on her rounds for the eleven o'clock bed check. Mrs. Buchanan, as she was known to the girls, was the silver-haired grande dame of the pageant, whose twin daughters had both been beauty queens; she had watched one twin crown the other. At curfew, she began knocking on doors, giving stern warnings to stay put until the morning. "Girls, we're not running a brothel here!" she chastised two contestants whom she spotted lounging in the lobby in their pajamas. With each door that opened, a different girl stood before Mrs. Buchanan, her face stripped of the day's war paint. Here, in the bright hallway light, the girls appeared as they really were, with frizzy hair and splotchy complexions and crooked teeth in retainers. Girls who earlier that day had walked through the lobby with such womanly sophistication—even a studied sexuality—now stood, barefoot and yawning, wiping the sleep from their eyes, looking for all the world like children who had had a very, very long day.
THE PERSONAL INTERVIEW PORTION OF the pageant—in which the judges were charged with evaluating a girl's "inner beauty, personality, and character," as stated in their handbook—began at nine o'clock the next morning, without an audience, in a chilly hotel conference room. Each contestant had already filled out an official questionnaire, which provided the nine judges with information they could explore further during the interviews. The last question listed was "What makes you special or unique?" Ashley had written, "I can play flute, piccolo, piano, and bass guitar. The piano was self-taught."
Other answers the judges received included: "I was switched at birth" (Miss Aransas), "My expensive smile" (Miss Austin), "I am a spirit-filled Christian and proud to live for Jesus Christ" (Miss Bexar County), "I have never had a cavity" (Miss Colleyville), "I love peanut butter on my pancakes" (Miss Cypress Creek), "Not too many people know it, but I am 25 percent Hispanic" (Miss El Paso), "I consider myself an amateur contortionist of sorts" (Miss Falls County), "I have really tiny feet" (Miss Harris County), "My sneeze" (Miss Paris), "I began community service at the age of three" (Miss South Plains), and "I am an eighteen-year-old virgin and I plan to practice abstinence until I'm married" (Miss Wood County). Under "Other Interesting Information," Miss Wood County had continued: "I love canned spinach. I also have an interesting story about my teddy bear. Ask me."
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