My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (6 page)

To put on a proper pageant, you need trophies and banners and crowns and plaques, and judges who aren’t related to any of your contestants, and a master of ceremonies to run the event, and masking tape to make X’s on the floor showing the kids where to do their modeling turns. If you’re giving prize money, you need your prize money, but otherwise you don’t need anything else—except in Tennessee and Arkansas, where directors need to post a ten-thousand-dollar bond. Tennessee instituted this practice about twenty years ago, after a pageant director in Nashville was shot and killed by her husband the night before one of her pageants and none of the contestants ever got their entry fees back. Some pageants are scams. Some issue bad checks to the winners or promise scholarships and never come through, and others say they will give you your prize money only if you come to another pageant, and by the time you do that, you’ve spent more money than you would have ever won. There have been occasions when a pageant went bankrupt before any of the winners could collect their money, but not before the pageant director had collected a lot of entry fees. Some pageants start late and are run sloppily, and the kids are kept up until all hours and are expected not to complain. Many pageants, though, like Universal/Southern Charm, have been around a long time and are considered quality pageants. Darlene Burgess is strict, and her rules are exacting:

Contestants should stand still in lineup, no exaggerated poses. Mothers should have control of their children at all times. Baby through six years old should wear short dresses. Dresses do not have to be loaded with rhinestones. After thirty-six months of age, no waving or blowing kisses.
Sportswear:
This is a garment of your choice but should be dress sportswear such as a jumpsuit . . . something they would wear when dressing up, but not sports related. Black is a very good fashion color now. It is permissible in all age groups if the color is becoming to the contestant.
Braces and Missing Teeth:
This is just a part of growing up, and as long as the contestant smiles and acts naturally, you are not to count off. . . . This same principle applies to scratches and similar childhood mishaps. We expect our judges to conduct themselves in a ladylike (gentlemanly) fashion at all times. Judges, no drinking at any time while you are at this pageant. No exceptions. You must keep in mind that this is a children’s pageant and conduct yourselves accordingly.

In a stroller in the lobby was Nina from Montgomery, who had a tiny pink face and tiny gold earrings and a scramble of fine red hair. Her pageant dress was still on its hanger. She was napping in a pink sleep suit and a pair of Tweetie Bird shoes. Her mother, Kris Ragsdale, had a long dark braid and a steady, sobering gaze. While she talked, she moved Nina’s stroller back and forth, the way you move a vacuum cleaner. Kris told me that she was eighteen and Nina was eight months old. She’d got into pageants this past winter, when she took Nina to the Jefferson Davis Pageant and the Christmas Angel Pageant in Montgomery at the urging of a friend. Kris had never been in a pageant when she was a kid. She lived mostly in foster homes or on her own since she was little, and she got married when she was sixteen. Her husband, James, was dressed in a loose, heavy-metal-band T-shirt and an Orlando Magic hat, and he said he worked in Montgomery as a saw sharpener. “He’s got a pretty good job,” Kris said, rocking the stroller. “Still, I mean, we can hardly save a penny.” Until recently, Kris and James shared an apartment with James’s ex-girlfriend, James’s little son, David, and James’s ex-girlfriend’s daughter, to save on rent. It cost thirty-five dollars just to enter today’s beauty competition, and there were extra fees to enter the contests for Most Photogenic, Most Beautiful, Best Dress, Dream Girl, and Western Wear. There was also the Supreme Special—fifty dollars for all categories except Dream Girl and Western Wear. The fees for national pageants are higher. It costs a hundred and seventy-five dollars to register for the Southern Charm national, and between fifty and a hundred dollars to enter each special category, like Superstar Baby, Talent, Additional Talent, and Southern Belle. Kris said she’d bought the Supreme Special for Nina today. “You save money with the Supreme,” she explained. “You don’t get the Western Wear, but we don’t do Western Wear with her yet anyway. The hats are too big for her.” She lifted Nina out of the stroller and started changing her carefully into a stiff royal blue dress. “My mom got this for me,” Kris said. “It was guess how much. Sixty dollars reduced to forty.”

A woman nearby who heard us talking came over and said to Kris, “Honey, you have to meet Joni Deal. She rents out all sorts of dresses and Western clothes and everything. She’ll rent you something nice for the pageants.” The woman was here with her granddaughter Rhiannon, who was named for a Fleetwood Mac song and was three years old and big for her age. Rhiannon had been in dozens of pageants and usually won everything except fashion. “We’re doing something about that, though,” her grandmother said. “We’ve got something really nice now for her dress. We’re not talking about a Kathie Lee off-the-rack-from-Wal-Mart dress, either. I bought her a plain old dress, and then I went to the bridal section at a fabric store and bought a whole lot of trim and beading, and I got out that glue gun and did it myself.” She looked at Kris and then said, “For us, losing is not an option.”

“If we take Nina to the nationals, we’re going to have to get her something that’s more elegant,” James said. “Something more frilly. The judges kill for frilly.” In the meantime, Kris said, they had to save for future entry fees, although James hopes they will be able to find a local business that will sponsor Nina; someone told him that a business could claim beauty pageant fees as a tax deduction. He mentioned that both Nina and David, his little boy, had been offered modeling contracts. “It sounded good,” he said, “but it cost about six hundred and fifty dollars just to sign up, and then you had to buy all the makeup and the modeling kit, too, so we decided not to do it.” He brightened for a moment. “Something good is definitely going to happen for Nina and David, I think,” he said. “Nina’s got the pageants, and my ex-girlfriend’s talking to some guy right now at Extra Model Management who says he thinks he might be able to get a sitcom for David. That would really be great, but I think it would mean moving to New York, and I don’t know how I feel about moving.”

“It’s hard doing pageants, because of the money, but it’s worth it,” Kris said. “I mean, everybody likes to show off their daughter, right? It’s fun for us, and she really enjoys it. It’s mother-daughter time, and I know someday we won’t have that as much. We’re putting all her pageant pictures and scorecards in a scrapbook so she can have it, and someday she’ll be able to see it and all her trophies and say, ‘Gee, I did that!’ It gives her something she can be proud of.”

The pageant was about to start, and Kris stood up and attached a bow to Nina’s wisps of hair. Nina didn’t have enough hair to hold a regular barrette, so Kris had devised something clever with a piece of a zipper she’d cut from a Ziploc bag. She said she realized that some people might not like pageants, because they thought children shouldn’t be exposed to competition this early in their lives, but she and James thought it would be good for Nina—it would give her a head start, especially if Nina wanted to try for Miss America someday. Kris said, “I know it’s a lot of pressure, but, I mean, you know, you’re under some kind of pressure your whole entire life.”

DARLENE LIKES HER PAGEANTS
to start with the babies, because they’re at their best in the morning. “You have to do it that way,” she said. “Babies just will not put up with an all-day pageant.” The room for the competition looked festive. A blue-and-white Southern Charm banner was hanging on the back wall, and beside it was a table loaded with crowns and trophies of all different sizes. The crowns were as big as birthday cakes and were studded with rhinestones. The biggest ones cost almost two hundred dollars apiece. “When Becky was in pageants, she was always getting these so-so crowns,” Darlene had complained to me. “I don’t want that reputation, so I spend a fortune on my crowns.”

The judges were two big-boned women with layered haircuts and soft faces. For a few minutes, they murmured to each other and then looked at Stacie with solemn expressions and nodded. The mothers brought their babies forward one by one and held them facing out toward the judges, fluffing the babies’ skirts into meringues of chiffon that billowed up and over the mothers’ arms and the babies’ dangling legs. Displayed this way, the babies looked weightless and relaxed and sublime, suspended in midair. The judges studied them and scored them in the individual categories while Stacie read introductions: “This is Cheyenne. Her hobbies are playing and cooing. . . . Her favorite food is pears. . . . Her favorite TV show is
Barney.
She is sponsored today by her friends and family. . . . This is Kayle. . . . Her favorite food is macaroni and cheese. . . . Her hobby is exploring newfound things. . . . This is Taylor. . . . She loves horseback riding and taking her baby cat, Patches, out for walks.” One baby picked her nose during her moment at the judging table. Another flailed her arms at the balloons floating above the judges and started to cry. Kris bounced Nina and clucked at her until she finally cracked a gummy smile, but just at that moment both judges happened to look away. Everyone in the audience was standing and waving and aiming toss-away paper cameras at the babies onstage, and every time a camera flashed, the crowns on the table flashed, too.

The older girls were divided into age groups of twelve to twenty-three months, twenty-four to thirty-five months, three- and four-year-olds together, five- and six-year-olds, and so on. Southern Charm accepts girls up to twenty-one years old, but the oldest girl at the Prattville pageant was probably seven. These older children walked onstage by themselves, and some of them even turned the way they were supposed to when they got to the masking-tape X’s, and a few remembered to do “pretty hands” and “pretty feet” and the grimacing pageant-girl smile. The two-year-olds tended to wander. A blonde from Eclectic named Kendall stood twirling a piece of her hair around her finger and then roamed off the stage. Her mother was standing next to me, and she said that this would probably be Kendall’s last pageant because she hated wearing dresses and was much happier barrel-racing her pony at home.

The Southern Charm rules say, “Remember, if you coach from the audience, the child will not have eye contact with the judges and they will deduct points for not having eye contact.” In spite of that, nearly all the parents were on their feet during the rest of the pageant, making wild hand signals to their daughters that meant “Smile” and “Blow a kiss at the judge” and “Smile much bigger.” They pushed to the front of the room, nearly leaning over the judges’ shoulders. It was as if someone had set them on a table and then tipped it forward. Just a few minutes after the pageant started, hardly anyone was left sitting in the back of the room.

Darlene has forty thousand people on her mailing list, and they are spread out all over the nation. JonBenet Ramsey was one of those names, although she never particularly stood out. Darlene says that in spite of what the papers have said, not that many people in the pageant world had heard of JonBenet until she got killed. Right after the murder, Darlene looked up JonBenet’s name on her computer and deleted it, so that the Ramseys wouldn’t get any upsetting Southern Charm mail.

Darlene and Jerry Burgess live about ten miles from downtown Jackson, in an old farmhouse that has been renovated since the days when their daughter, Becky, was at home. (Becky is married and lives in Nashville, where she is studying to go to medical school, and she has a two-year-old daughter, who is just starting on the pageant circuit.) Now the Burgess house is pure pageant. In the outbuildings is a trophy shop and a silk-screening shop where the banners are made and a photography studio where Jerry shoots portfolios of contestants. In the basement is Glitz & Glamour, Darlene’s mail-order pageant dress business, and in the front room are four computers containing all the mailing lists, and eight video machines for copying Jerry’s official tapes of the pageants, and Federal Express labels and boxes for the dozen or so Glitz & Glamour dresses and Southern Charm videos they ship out every day.

The phone rings all day without stopping, so it is nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation with Darlene. One of the days I was in Jackson, I asked her why she thought people outside the pageant world objected to it so adamantly. “I don’t know why they even have an opinion about it at all,” she said. “I look at pageants like I look at any other hobby, like golf. I sure wouldn’t hit a little white ball around on a lawn, and I don’t know why anyone else would want to, but that’s their business and not mine. Hold on a minute.

“Hello, Glitz. . . . Yes, this is Darlene Burgess. . . . Okay, I can send you an entry form. How’d you find out about us? . . . Well, if you want to go to New York, that’s a mininational. Who’s crowning in New York? . . . Let me think. . . . Oh, fiddle! Jerry, who’s crowning in New York? Well, I can’t remember. . . . So now give me your name and address.”

Vicki Whitehead, who works at Glitz & Glamour part-time, came upstairs. “Darlene, I have a lady on the phone who has an eight-month-old she says is really tiny and she needs something very dainty for her to wear. And do we have any Ultrasuede in an animal print in pink and black? Because I have a lady who’s dying for some.”

Another call for Darlene: “I see. . . . Do you have videos of her in pageants? . . . Okay, send it and I’d be glad to critique it for you.” Darlene covered the mouthpiece and said to me, “I’m offering to do it because this lady’s up in Illinois and really needs help. They’re not too pageant wise up in places like Illinois. I really think the kids up north are afraid to compete with the kids down south. I remember once Becky said to me, ‘Mom, the New York kids are beautiful, but they don’t know how to model and they don’t know how to dress.’ ”