My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (7 page)

When Darlene had a break from the phone, she said that nearly every day since JonBenet’s murder she has been called by some reporter. So have most of the best-known coaches and the owners of the other big pageant systems. Since JonBenet, Darlene has had mothers tell her they weren’t going to come to the pageants if reporters would be there, and some mothers have said they had stopped answering their phones because they were sick of being asked to comment on the murder. She is rankled by how dismissive nonpageant people are of everything that she loves about pageants and of how much they mean to these little girls. Some people in pageants have difficult lives and work hard all the time and lose out on a lot, but on any Sunday at a pageant somewhere they have their chance to win. This seems so obvious that Darlene thinks there must be some other reason that pageants have been so maligned. She has finally decided that people who don’t appreciate children’s pageants probably just don’t have their own pretty little girls.

From all appearances, Darlene has been a very successful entrepreneur. It happens that most of her state directors are women, and many other pageant systems and pageant-related businesses, like the dress shops, are owned by women. Some of the best-known coaches are women, too. It seems odd that these are the very same women who are certain that a girl’s best path in life is to learn how to look good onstage. It’s as if they had never noticed that they’ve made something of themselves by relying on other talents.

The first day I was in Jackson, Darlene and I sat in her living room to watch some tapes of last year’s Southern Charm national finals, while Jerry was in the other room labeling FedEx boxes with Glitz dresses inside, bound for Irving, Texas, and Lawrenceville, Georgia, and Leesville, Louisiana. To me, all the kids on the tape looked the same—cute, awkward, stiff in their frothy dresses, a little uncertain when they got to the X’s on the stage. Most of them stared anxiously at their mothers for directions. Darlene used to judge pageants, and she still has a judge’s eye: As we watched the tape, she pointed out winners and losers and which girls had pushy coaches and which girls were wearing makeup that didn’t do justice to their skin tone. “This girl, she’s beautiful, but her sportswear doesn’t do a thing for her, it’s too boxy,” Darlene pointed out. “I don’t like this one’s hair all sprayed up like that. I swear, she looks like a Pentecostal! Oh, here’s the Southern Belle category. You have to wear something that’s historically accurate. My judges get so ticky about it that they’ll come up onstage and check your dress and make sure you don’t have any zippers. . . . Now, look at this baby with her belt sagging. I don’t know why these mothers don’t realize that a little Velcro under the belt would hold it up. Babies don’t have any hips and they have that little potbelly, and a belt just isn’t going to stay up on its own.”

In her personal philosophy, Darlene doesn’t like too much eyeliner, and this year she’s going to allow only classic Miss America–style modeling in the Swimwear competition. She blames coaches for teaching sexy poses to the girls. “Ten years ago, it wasn’t like this,” she said. “Now, with the coaches, things are getting out of control.” On her granddaughter, Shelby, she likes to see simple makeup and a gorgeous dress, and since Shelby is doing well, this appears to be working. But some girls do need help to be really big in pageants, according to Darlene. They need coaching, they need advice on their clothes, and, in a few exceptional circumstances, they might even need surgery, although as a rule she doesn’t approve. “There was one girl, about thirteen, and it was a special case,” Darlene said. “She was a very pretty girl, except she had a really big old honker and it just killed her in the pageants. Even if she hadn’t been a pageant child, she was actually better off with a new nose.” She has seen kids who are miserable but have been pushed onstage by their mothers, and mothers who yell at their kids when they don’t win, and kids falling asleep on their feet because the pageants went on late into the night. “I don’t compete the kids at night, but some pageants do,” she said. “I remember once Becky had to do her talent at one in the morning. One in the morning! She was exhausted! But the pageant directors insisted on going late. I think that’s child abuse.”

While we talked, Darlene got up to check the chicken in the oven and the fresh bread rising in her bread maker for lunch. Before we ate, she wanted to show me the winners’ speeches at last year’s Southern Charm nationals. On the tape, a knock-kneed girl with tawny curls placed a rhinestone Supreme Queen crown on another girl’s head. Then the new Supreme Queen started her speech: “I want to say thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ, and thanks to Jerry and Darlene, the directors of the pageant. . . . I want people to know that pageants are about the whole girl, not about who has the best makeup and hair.”

BY THE TIME
the Western Wear competition began in Prattville, it was the end of the afternoon. The room was chaotic: People were coming in and out with snacks from a vending machine outside; a lot of the babies were fretting, and a few were yelling as if it were the end of the world. Stacie cast her eye on one of the loudest babies and said into her microphone, “Sounds like we got someone who’s not ready for Western Wear!” I was sitting next to this particular loud baby, who was on her mother’s lap, and a man behind us was the loud baby’s grandfather. He tapped me on the shoulder. “What do you think of this?” he said. “I mean, they’re exploiting these kids! Dressing them up, keeping them up all day!”

“Daddy, you’re supposed to be supporting me, not criticizing me,” the baby’s mother said. “Look, it’s our first pageant and probably our last, but I think it’s good to try things. I don’t know how I feel about spending so much money. But I like it. It’s fun. It’s just . . . maybe she’s not ready.”

She glanced at her daughter, who was about a year old and was dressed in a satin cowgirl outfit. The outfit looked scratchy. The baby was squirming and weeping. The man said, “Come on, look at her crying, Jeannie! I think it’s crazy. And it’s a waste of money besides.”

Stacie Brumit had told me that she’d seen “a lot of mamas dragging their babies kicking and screaming onto the stage.” She doesn’t like that sort of thing, but she says that some children need extra encouragement. Even Brianna Brumit, who is a veteran, pulls back a little before she has to go onstage. “Once I get her up there, though, she’s totally different,” Stacie said. “She’s just in another world. And it’s special for me. For Brianna to go up and win Queen, that’s the best thing in the world to me.”

Nina Ragsdale didn’t win Most Photogenic; when Kris asked the judges later, they told her that Nina’s pictures needed to show more personality. Nina didn’t win Dream Girl, which is based on pure facial beauty; that went to a baby with a peachy face and dark, sleepy eyes. She didn’t win Most Beautiful, which is subtly different from Dream Girl, and she didn’t win Best Dress; the judges said that blue didn’t work for her and that Kris should get her something in turquoise or white. Then the final categories were announced. Nina didn’t win Queen or Supreme Queen, and when there were hardly any prizes left to be given out, my heart started sinking, but then Nina was named first runner-up and got a medium-size trophy, and Kris had a moment in which to display her with the trophy on the stage. The baby who won Supreme Queen got a trophy that was taller than any of the children at the pageant. Someone called out, “Honey, if you live in a trailer, you’re in trouble! You won’t be able to get that into your home!”

I went back to Alabama a few weeks later to see Nina in another pageant. This one was also at the Prattville Holiday Inn. The pageant was called Li’l American Beauty, and the trophies and the crowns and the backdrop were different, but the feeling in the air was the same. I recognized some of the kids from Southern Charm. There were only about a dozen girls, so the judging went fast, and just as at the first pageant, I could hardly bear to watch the crowning. Kris Ragsdale stood up there with Nina, who was asleep, her bow sliding out of her hair. The other mothers were also lined up with their babies, shifting them around in their arms like bags of groceries, and they had a little tightness in their faces as they waited to hear what the judges had to say. Most of the babies had curled up and were lost in the folds of their puffy dresses, and suddenly all I could really see were the mothers, wearing their plain outfits and their plain makeup, their husbands and parents standing a few feet away, ready to take the picture they were all waiting for, of their beautiful daughters being crowned.

Party Line

If you’re one of those people who have three phone lines at home, plus a pager, plus a CDMA trimode cellphone with a Web browser and SMS, and you still want to upgrade your telecommunications system, you should meet Pat and Jim Bannick. Better yet, you should give them a call. Chances are they won’t be on the phone.

“We’re not really phone people,” Pat said when I called her the other day at her home in Dimondale, Michigan. “By the way, I couldn’t believe Jim answered when you called. He never answers the phone. Once, I bought him one of those nice phones that you can walk around with—”

“A cellphone?”

“Yes, I think that’s it. The kind so you don’t need a long cord on it?”

“Oh, you mean a cordless phone?”

“That’s right. The kind without a cord. Anyway, a while ago I got Jim one of those, but he wouldn’t even look at it, so I ended up returning it.”

The Bannicks are among the last people in the state of Michigan, and possibly in the entire known universe, who still have their telephone service on a party line. A party line is not a current telecommunications option. SBC Ameritech, the Bannicks’ phone company, has only a handful of them left, all of them in Michigan. (The Nevada division took its last party line out of service in 2001; the Southwestern Bell division shut down its last one in 1996; and Pacific Bell took all but one of its party lines out of service in 1997.)

Party lines are not to be confused with chat lines, party planners, or escort services: They are a prehistoric phone technology of copper-loop circuits that can be shared by as many as twenty telephones in separate locations, predating by several decades such advancements as three-way conferencing and the quack-ringing Mallard Duck Phone. On a typical party line, all the phones in all the houses sharing the line have the same phone number, and all the phones in all the houses ring whenever a call comes in for any one of them. Each household would be assigned a distinctive ring, so you could tell if the bell was tolling for you or for another one of the houses on your line. “Ours was a three-ringer,” Pat said. “Or was it first a two-ringer? No, I think it was a three-ringer, and then we were a two-ringer.”

“What year did you get your phone?”

“It was 1955,” Pat said. “It was the year that we built the house.”

“In 1955? That was the year Mary L. Kayes, of Dutchess County, New York, was convicted of refusing to yield her party line to someone wanting to report a fire.”

“My goodness.”

“What was it like sharing a phone?”

“Well, honestly, it was awful. We’d never get to use the phone, because someone was always on it. Plus, the phone rang and rang and rang all the time, since you had ten families sharing it. We did get into counting the rings, though. You’d hear the phone and you’d stop and wait and count to see if it was for you. That was kind of fun.”

“Did you know that in 1950 three-quarters of all the phone service in the United States was by party line?”

“No,” Pat said.

“Pat, can you hold on a minute? I’ve got a call on my other line.”

“I suppose so.”

“Okay, I’m back. Sorry. So you were saying it was hard to share the phone.”

“Well, it was a pain. When we were on a ten-party line, you could hardly get a word in. And whenever we would pick up the phone to use it, there would already be someone on it. We would pick up the receiver and hear voices—”

“I’m sorry, I have another call again. Can you hold for one second?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, I’m back. So you were saying you’d pick up the phone and listen sometimes.”

“Sure,” Pat said. “I wouldn’t listen a long time, just for a minute or so. But the same thing would happen to us. We’d be on a call and suddenly someone would pick it up and hang up a bunch of times, so there would be click-click-clicking the whole time you were on the phone. This one lady would listen for a long time before she’d hang up.”

“Did people observe any kind of etiquette about party lines? Did they observe the Emily Post suggestion that if you share a party line and you have an emergency, you should pick up the phone and first say, ‘Emergency,’ in a loud voice and then say, ‘Our barn is on fire’?”

“No, nothing special like that,” Pat said.

“Did you know who any of the other people on your line were?”

“We called once and tried to find out who they were, but the phone company wouldn’t tell us. We could tell that a lot of the families we shared the line with had teenagers. We were getting pretty disgusted, because they would never get off the phone. Sometimes we’d have to make an important call and they’d be on for ages, and finally we’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you please just get off for five minutes and let us make the call, and then you can have the phone back?’ And usually they’d say no. This one lady in particular, she would say,‘Well, I can’t get off. I’m in the middle of a long-distance call.’ ”

“You said that the number of people on the line went from ten to four or five?”