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"Saturday Sequins"
Blair Hance '05, winner of the 2005 Charles Lloyd Award for creative non-fiction writing.
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4/4/2005
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Blair Hance ' 05
First Prize Winner, 2005 Charles Lloyd Writing Award
My wooden seat squeaked as I strained to see the stage, which was obstructed by the bobbing crowns of visiting Queens at the Miss and Miss Teen Mount Holly Pageant. Rhinestones fractured the dim light, but I saw a world unfold while months of preparation culminated in a three-hour pageant. I arrived as an undercover observer expecting to find juice for a witty review, and I left with gallons of it sloshing around in my mind. Yet I also left with a form of the pageant bug that former Miss North Carolina contestant Teresa Strawser Sharp described while retelling her days as a contestant. She had the bug to compete; I had the bug to dig into small-town pageant society and planned to uncover retractable claws attached to long legs, large breasts, and bouffant blond hair. I found a culture of driven, service-minded female leaders—with résumés that should be framed—involved in the country’s largest women’s scholarship program, to which I would never want my own daughter to apply.
The pageant began at 7:00 on a brisk Saturday evening. My Mapquest directions led me off of Interstate 85 to the town of Mount Holly, North Carolina, where a hand-written poster tacked to a promotional Sun Drop sign propped against a light post announced in bubble letters, “Miss Mount Holly and Miss Teen Mount Holly Pageant TONIGHT,” and pointed me to the Mount Holly Middle School auditorium with a big black arrow. I arrived at the front door anxious that I was underdressed; as I rounded the corner from the parking lot, I faced two black stretch limos from which emerged men and women in suits and gowns. They were, however, followed by families clad in jeans like mine, so I climbed the stairs into the lobby, paid for my ticket, bought my program, and found a seat in row U.
In the lobby, pageant dads served hot dogs heated in crock pots and snow cones made from ice shaved in a kitchen blender. Inside the auditorium, the formally dressed judges, whose limo transportation, according to the program, was provided by the local funeral home, took their seats at the edge of the stage. Four- and five-year-old Little Princesses in elaborate gowns and make-up pranced up and down the aisles as their mothers chased them and warned them not to crack their rigidly hair-sprayed curls. A few rows behind me, a technician fiddled with the spotlight, which had been propped on top of a row of seats. On stage, dueling podiums sported cardboard signs with “Miss Mount Holly” and “Miss Teen Mount Holly” in the silver cutout letters that elementary school teachers use to decorate bulletin boards. When the lights finally dimmed and the spotlight director behind me was called into action, I wondered what I was getting into.
After a prayer and an operatic version of our National Anthem, replete with full-length ball gown, painfully long musical interludes, and extra verses I had no idea existed, the six Miss Teen contestants came out on stage strutting—not quite in unison—to a Grease song. They were equipped, though, with the unmistakable pageant smile, pink lips encircling white shiny teeth, and joined by their model, the reigning Miss Teen Mount Holly 2004. Immediately, the strong competitors shone through. Thirteen-year-old Tiffany took control of the stage as she bobbed her side-ponytail and swung her narrow hips. The Miss Teen contestants were followed by the Miss Mount Holly hopefuls and their Queen, all of whom entered with the palpable air of more mature, more polished contestants. For the final few seconds of the opening act, the contestants were joined by their pageant Little Sisters, young pageant hopefuls who were ushered on stage in miniature pink satin jackets with scarves around their necks. The tiny bee-boppers grinned at the thought of being on stage and hand-jived with intensity despite brief breaks to wave to their parents.
The evening progressed with the help of two emcees: Lane Ragsdale for the Miss pageant and our operatic national anthem vocalist, clad in a different floor-length gown, for the Miss Teen. Lane, who closely resembled Drew Carey despite his Southern drawl and effeminate speech habits, commanded the podium on the left and kept us occupied during costume changes by chatting with his co-host. The first hour flew by while we watched visiting Queens, as well as the reigning Miss and Miss Teen Mount Hollys, perform. Miss Teen North Carolina—denoted by her four-inch crown—sang in a bubble-gum pink taffeta dress with an organza skirt five feet in diameter. The reigning Teen Miss Mount Holly danced—sort of—while her parents beamed a few rows in front of me. Miss Mount Holly, Julie Huddle, impressed us all as her thin fingers pressed the piano keys.
Through the contestant competitions we got to know the girls behind the smiles and the sparkles, or at least the girl they wanted us to know. Talent was my favorite segment. Most Teen contestants sang, while most Miss contestants danced. Teen contestant number one, Stevie Brooks, belted, “It They Could See Me Now,” complete with a Brooklyn accent, through which peeked her own Southern one. The highlight of the entire evening was Teen contestant Kaitlin Williams, whose gift for modern Latin clogging stunned the whole auditorium. We clapped to the beat of remixed Latin music while her legs spun, tapped, and twisted as if detached from her body and her torso hovered above. Kaitlin’s display was matched only by the performance of Miss contestant Jessica Ballard’s mother. Jessica pirouetted across the stage to Celine Dion’s “I Want You To Need Me” while her mother, a rather large woman who sat behind my left ear, punctuated her moves with screams to the audience, “That’s my baaaa-by!”
The swimwear portion of the evening followed the talent. Teen contestants do not participate in a swimsuit competition but instead walk the runway in sportswear. Miss contestants, however, endure the “lifestyle and fitness competition” in swimsuits, which for Teresa Sharp was, “the most naked you will ever feel in your life.” None of the Miss Mount Holly contestants fit the pageant mold that we see on television each September in the Miss America contest. They held themselves with poise, though, as they swaggered—or stumbled—up and down the runway in neon-colored one-pieces and bikinis that accentuated their complimentary orange Sun Tanz. During Teresa’s pageant days, swimsuit preparation other than fitness was limited to trying to sneak in “falsies” (gel breast inserts) or slathering on hemorrhoid cream to eliminate thigh jiggle. Now, pageant coaches counsel liposuction, breast implants, and even rear-end implants. The Miss Mount Holly girls wore nude hose and probably taped their breasts together, but they let themselves shine through.
The competition concluded with the evening gown segment. One young woman waddled down the runway with her legs lassoed together by a white satin dress that was surgically applied from her shoulders to her knees, at which point it bloomed into a cone, making her resemble an upside-down martini glass. Another contestant’s breasts sat almost on top of the corset section of her dress instead of inside of it. My jaw dropped not at the fashion show I saw—although the Carolina Panther themed gown must be mentioned—but the résumés that provided background to their trips up and down the runway. I felt somehow inadequate for having failed to start a Lupus awareness fund or spend every Sunday reading to a blind 102-year-old man. It was no wonder that a few of the girls sang off key; voice lessons do not fit into the schedules I heard. Every contestant was highly active in church, student government, sports, and her service platform, which she chooses at the start of her pageant career, but each had her own focus, her own passion.
After the competitions were completed and I had waited through twenty minutes of pageant chatter and predictions in the ladies’ room line, the pageant shifted into arduously slow motion. Our fearless leader Lane took the stage in a series of blues numbers and updated us on both his show business career and his personal life in New York. Lane is a Gemini and a pageant legend who dedicates fifteen Saturdays of his year to hosting pageants around North Carolina. His heart remains in Mount Holly, though, where he considers himself an honorary resident. Miss and Miss Teen Mount Holly 2004 both took plenty of time to thank those who helped make their reigning year glorious. From Mama and Daddy, to Sugar the dog, to the Little Sisters that accompanied them to the Miss North Carolina pageant, to each and every audience member, no one was left out of the thanksgiving as the contestants’ heels clicked across the stage to the beat of their own pre-recorded voices. Finally the grand finale came: the crowning of Miss and Miss Teen Mount Holly 2005, after the naming of Miss Congeniality, Miss Photogenic, the swimsuit, talent, and evening wear winners, and the first and second runners-up.
At every pageant level, the newly crowned winner has a busy year of appearances and further pageants ahead of her. Teresa Sharp’s year as the Miss Rhododendron Queen, one of North Carolina’s top titles, was a difficult one; at age eighteen, she was forced to drive her prize, a car on the door of which had been painted her name, outlined in the state of North Carolina. Pageant queens are always working, though. Like Teresa did as Miss Rhododendron Queen, Miss Mount Holly will compete in the Miss North Carolina pageant for a chance to travel to the Miss America pageant in September. Whether they are visiting nursing homes or, in Teresa’s case, appearing at North Carolina furniture shows, pageant queens become a symbol not just of beauty but of the small town they represent. For that reason, “you don’t just pick anybody,” Teresa explained.
The small-town pageant world that Teresa, a 1983 Davidson College graduate, described took place behind the red velvet curtain and off of a middle school auditorium stage. For Teresa, pageants were a chance to leave rural Vale, North Carolina with a piece of the $45 million scholarship pie that the Miss America organization offers annually in its feeder pageants. She was stunned and slightly horrified when she won the first pageant her mother made her enter, the North Carolina Cinderella Teen Pageant; her crowning would be announced in the paper. “I didn’t want [my friends] to think that I thought I was hot stuff,” she explained.
The progression happened easily and quickly for Teresa. While some girls spent their parents’ savings on professional photos and custom-made gowns and swimsuits, Teresa and her mother bought second-hand dresses and doctored them up with the pageant essential: sequins. Her talent, piano, came naturally and had been developed by eight years of practice before she ever took the stage. The little girl who once thew a towel over her head to fake long hair and playfully pranced down and back her grandmother’s front porch soon found herself in poise classes with books on her head. By the time she reached Davidson College, she had earned enough to pay for her first year of tuition.
Before long, Teresa explained, her mother had developed signs of entering “the ugly side of pageants” as a “pageant mom.” The pageant mom spends her days obsessing over her child and prodding her little princess on to the success her mother never achieved. These are the women who gang up on judges after pageants to berate them about their daughter’s second-place finish. These are the women who tear the dresses of their daughter’s competition. Or so Teresa told me, though she never witnessed it. Horror stories about them are legendary, but for Teresa and many other girls the pressure they apply is invisible. Teresa aimed to please. She saw her father, a Marine who never cried, with glossy eyes after she was crowned. And she saw the satisfaction of a mother who, when Teresa was twelve and chipped a tooth, had burst into sobs of, “Now you’ll never win a …” Ultimately, though, the pressure came from the overachiever within.
Perhaps the most intense pressure to perform comes during the interview segment. At the Miss Mount Holly competition the interview portion we saw was minimal. Each girl was asked a question about her service platform and given time to explain her work and how it had made her life worth living. On stage, the contestants said only a few words, but earlier that day the girls had been marched into the judges’ room to endure rapid-fire questions. Teresa Sharp, the expressive, articulate woman with bright eyes, berry lipstick, and a Happy Holidays sweatshirt that I met for coffee had once shined in the interview room. She could explain her early success only as the result of a “fresh approach.” Poise coaches and pageant guides remind girls to sit with their legs correctly angled and to wear the appropriately flattering yet serious suit, but none of them can pinpoint the secret of the pageant interview, which accounts for 40% of a contestant’s score. It’s the “realness inside,” Teresa explained as her voice softened and slowed. The judges have a “sixth sense,” she said.
Females have a sixth sense as well: “The more competitive a contender you are the less friendly others are with you,” Teresa explained. I was hoping she would tell me stories of sabotaged ball gowns and severed blow-dryer cords yet, for her, pageants were a source of short-lived camaraderie. She doesn’t keep in touch with anyone from the pageant world, but flipping through her old pageant programs, she muttered, “Oh she was lovely,” or, “Oh this was a vicious one here.” Despite the occasional tale of a Swiss-army-knife-toting runner-up, the tiny pageant world is bathed in a spirit of camaraderie. For the longer pageants, like the more advanced ones, the girls eat together—or don’t eat together—sleep together, and practice dance numbers together. They do it all year long and see the same girls each weekend of competition.
Teresa’s pageant career culminated at the Miss North Carolina pageant. In response to her mother’s increasing pressure, the college student had embraced the “freshmen fifteen” and even topped it. She headed into the Raleigh pageant twenty pounds “overweight,” which stretched her custom-fit clothes and her mother to the breaking point. A few weeks before the pageant, Teresa’s mother sent her plump college daughter an emissary, her husband, with gifts of fresh green beans, tomatoes, and apples. The overachiever and pleaser in Teresa drove her 5’4” body to a meager 110 pounds and dropped her into exhaustion after her victory slipped by, despite having won both the swimsuit and interview competitions. After twenty-four hours of sleep, she awoke to her Valium-sedated mother’s continued sobs. Teresa was never going to be a “repeater.” When “I left the pageant world, I really left it,” she explained, but she left it more mature, more confident, and more prepared for her career. Instead of becoming Miss North Carolina, she became Mrs. Sharp and was married three months later on the night of the Miss America pageant.
Teresa Strawser Sharp laughed when I first called her for an interview; she laughed at the life she left behind two decades ago, a life she never even included on her college résumé. She looks back at the days reverently and with an appreciation for the caliber of talent and character she encountered as a contestant, but she admits that, if she had had a daughter, she would never have put her in the pageant world. “It’s intense,” she said in an effort to summarize, “a lot like Davidson.” For many women, pageants are who they become. Scholarship competitions lead to careers in television and radio production or show business, where pageant-perfected plastic smiles carry former contestants from day to day. They glide forward, though, with a combination of natural and trained poise. “It’s a lot about goal setting,” Teresa remarked. For some, the goal is Atlantic City, home of the Miss America pageant; for most, it’s an opportunity for scholarships, a time to perform in the spotlight, and the chance to indulge in the girlish fantasy of being crowned a beauty queen.
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