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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That night, Ashley strode confidently down the runway, smiling, and she did not trip. She was not the most graceful girl in the pageant nor did she have the most elaborate dress, but she stood out onstage; in pageant parlance, she "sparkled." Her mother watched her and wiped away tears. After the show, when Ashley stood in the lobby with the other girls, waiting for the elevator, a little girl who had been sitting in the audience approached her, holding out a Miss Texas Teen USA 2003 program. "Excuse me," the girl said to Ashley. "Can I have your autograph?"
AT NOON ON THE LAST day of the beauty pageant, one hour before the final competition was slated to begin, Bria Wall was being attended to by her hair and makeup specialists in a suite on the hotel's tenth floor. Her blond hair had been washed that morning with bottled water, and her makeup had been applied with the same exacting attention to detail. ("We work hard to make the girls look natural," her coach, former 1990 Miss Texas Teen USA runner-up Melissa King, explained.) The previous night, Bria had won the Most Photogenic award, which carried no points but was sometimes awarded to the future winner. It seemed like a good sign, and when it was time for Bria to go downstairs for the finals, her coach gripped her hands and stared at her intently. "I know you're going to win," Melissa said. At the precise moment at which Bria's eyes began to water, her makeup artist darted across the room, where she tilted Bria's head back, pressed her false eyelashes with her thumbs, and blew on her tears. Her father, Rick, watched from the couch in amazement. "I always thought I would be going to high school football games," he told me.
Downstairs in the dressing room, Tye Felan sat in the corner in a hot-pink strapless dress, alone, her head bowed in prayer. She had the placid air of a competitor who is in the zone; her eyes shut, she silently mouthed the words for divine assistance. Around her, the room was frantic with girls stuffing their bras and practicing their dance moves and slicking Vaseline across their teeth. Ashley stood in front of a mirror in a red cocktail dress, professionally made-up again, smoothing her hair. When I asked her how she was, she held out her hands, which shook. "Nervous," she said. The show was about to begin. Girls lined up by contestant number in the hallway that led to the stage, their high heels clicking against the linoleum. Cheers drifted from the ballroom down to where the girls stood listening in the wings. "And now, Miss Texas Teen USA 2003!" roared the announcer. The contestants paraded onto the stage, and as the song "The Rhythm of the Night" swelled, the girls performed the opening dance number without a hitch. The "parade of cities" was next, in which each girl was introduced by title as she strode down the catwalk. The audience—mostly family and friends—clapped and shrieked appreciatively. Then it was time to announce the top fifteen (or the top sixteen, as it turned out, because there was a tie).
"All right, may I have the envelope, please?" said the master of ceremonies, an ebullient man named Dan O'Rourke. "Let's get started with our semifinalists, in no particular order." All 117 contestants stood on risers behind him. One girl's heart beat so furiously that her pulse was visible beneath her dress; other girls' sashes trembled. O'Rourke called out the top sixteen's names—"Semifinalist number ten, Miss Bayou City, Bria Wall! Semifinalist number eleven, Miss Houston, Tye Felan!"—until he reached the end. "Sorry, girls, just one name left. That's the way it goes. And it's you, Miss South Shore, Veronica Grabowski!" Ashley Swanson's name was not called. She and one hundred other girls filed off the stage in silence, looking wobbly. Most kept their composure until later, when they could disassemble in the privacy of their mother's hotel room. A few girls broke down backstage. A sixteen-year-old girl from Lubbock sat in a white ball gown, sobbing, inconsolable even as two girls bent over her, offering encouraging words. One of the pageant's few black contestants sat in the back of the dressing room, shaking her head. "Every year, they pick a blonde," she said.
Ashley kneeled on the dressing room floor in front of the closed-circuit TV, watching the pageant unfold. "Well, that's that," she said. "I was dead-set on not getting it, but after everything that happened—" For a moment, her eyes watered and she looked as if she might cry. She sucked in her breath. "I'm just glad I can take these off! Phew," she said, slipping off her heels.
Inside the ballroom, the top sixteen were soon winnowed down to a top five, with Bria and Tye still standing. Each of the five finalists was instructed to pick a question out of a fishbowl. Bria went first, selecting, "What's the first thing you notice about a person?" She wore a sophisticated evening gown—a black, boned duchess-satin bodice, with a metallic skirt embroidered with black vines—but when she spoke, her voice was tremulous. "Definitely first impressions count for a lot," she said. "I definitely notice their personality. I think personality counts for everything." Bria had been much better offstage, face-to-face. Standing next to Tye, she seemed diminished. Tye stepped up to the microphone in an elegant white tulle and satin dress trimmed in crystals. She had the kind of stage presence that made it seem as if the lights shone more brightly on her. She picked the question, "If you could go back and be any woman in history, who would it be and why?"
"Probably Patsy Cline, because she was one of the first women pioneers of country music, and country music is my love," Tye said with serene self-possession. "And I think she did a lot for women in general, not just the country music industry. She set a standard, and women are still trying to go over that."
The judges would finally narrow it down to Bria and Tye. The two girls stood onstage, hands joined, heads bowed—just as they had eight months earlier, at the Miss Houston Teen USA pageant. They both looked as if they might faint. "The first runner-up is Miss Bayou City!" yelled Dan O'Rourke. "Tye Felan, Miss Houston, you're our Miss Texas Teen USA for 2003!" And there she was, the girl who looked—especially once the crown rested on her head—like the womanly ideal. In a beauty pageant, it is hard to beat myth. Standing before the crowd that night, Bria's game face crumbled. Her shoulders sank, and her blue eyes, usually so full of vitality, went flat. She posed for a few photos and congratulated Tye, but her smile was strained, and she finally broke away to see her mother. The last time I saw her, Bria was walking down an empty backstage hallway, crying, her mother's arms wrapped tightly around her. As they walked, her mother smoothed her hair and kissed her, over and over again. Bria sounded as if she were in physical pain. She had been coached to win. No one had told her what it would feel like to lose.
THE DAY AFTER THE BEAUTY pageant, Ashley returned to Pampa. Life went on as usual. She wrote an essay on the significance of the color red in The Scarlet Letter for her AP English class, and she played her flute in the Pampa High School Band. To kill time on the weekends, she and her friends cruised the main drag of Pampa and watched the mud- bogging competitions down by the lake, where kids plowed through the muck in their jacked-up Jeeps and 4x4's. If the sky was clear, they drove out to the oil fields, where they lay in the back of their pickups and stared up at the stars. Later, I asked Ashley what she thought about the beauty pageant, in retrospect. "It doesn't bother me at all that I didn't make the top fifteen," she wrote in an e-mail. "All that meant was that I didn't have to go out in front of those people again in my swimsuit! I think I'm going to go back next year. I've convinced my best friend here, Melissa Scobee, to go with me. I was thinking on the way home about the whole learning to be a girl bit, and it was almost insulting to me in a way, because I do know how to dress nice and put on makeup and do my hair and all that good jazz, but when I got there, it didn't seem like that was enough. I needed to be more, if you know what I mean. A lot of those girls were, like, flaunting their money, I guess you could say, by all the really nice and expensive clothes they wore during rehearsal. I don't really have the money to do that, but I'm still very picky about how I look. Everything has to match, and my hair has to be perfect. The only reason why I don't wear makeup is because it's time-consuming and it's a pain in the butt to get off, and besides that, I know that I don't need it."
Ashley explained that it had been a long drive back to Pampa. "Before I knew it, we were six hours from Houston, and six hours from home," she wrote. "Anyway, it's almost 11:00 and I need to go blow-dry my hair."
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