Here she is, Miss America

Cafe Society
1

For the past month I’ve been watching Miss America, Reality Check on TLC. And lo, it was a good reality show. Week after week of women who fell into the trap of Stepford-wife beauty pageantry being rescued and transformed into good-looking, spunky, honest real womanhood.

Sure, 52 women were learning how to do makeup and walk down the catwalk with some sass, but they were also being guided into answering those ‘challenging’ questions with a little honesty, and not spewing the generic answers given by the stereotypical beauty queen.

So it was with some eagerness that I taped the Miss America pageant on Saturday and watched it last night. It would be the first pageant I watched in years — and I used to watch it often as a teenager. Mostly because nothing better was on, and hey, hot chickes. And O! What a bitter disappointment this show was.

The host? A stumbling idiot who couldn’t make it through his lines. Yawn-o-rama. My favourite moment was when he threw it to his co-host, the far-more-entertaining Clinton from What not to wear with the line “Now to Clinton, somewhere out there,” and the camera paused on the host for what felt an eternity, before zooming out to show Clinton three feet behind the host! Sad, so sad.

The women? Having watched and gotten to know some of these women for the past month, I waited through the announcement of the semi-finalists and proceeded to do my best owl call. Who? Who? Who? Of the 15 judge-picked women, only 1/3 were people who received special notice during the show. The majority were just – typical pageant girls. Boring! Boring!

Then the catwalk events come up. Bikinis! Evening gowns! A vignette showing how the young women had learned to strut their stuff!
And look! All the women completely forgot everything they’d learned previously. They all reverted to the boring pageant walk, with most even assuming the same stiff-legged ‘pageant pose’ at the end to show off a leg. DULLSVILLE!

I fast-forwarded through most of the night. Sheer utter boredom. MrsB and I kept wondering what the hell happened to something that showed so much promise, and all we could come up with is that the pageant owners lost the courage of their convictions.

We think that the owners of the pageant spent the past month watching Reality Check, and thought “we can’t have that!” Modern women with attitude? That’s not Miss America! We want someone pliable and conservative!" And they smacked the hammer down.

One moment during the night summed up this attitude. Co-host Clinton was walking through the crowd, and he introduced the three advisors who have been guiding the girls for the past month (well, 3 of them. Reality Check host Michael Urie was nowhere to be seen). The 3 advisors sat mute as they were introduced, with one of them slumping sullenly, not even bothering to look up as his name was called. And really, I can’t blame him.

Reality Check? Good show. I’d watch another season. The Miss America pageant? Piece of shit. The ball was dropped big time, and I can only believe it was done so deliberately. What a horrid, horrible disappointment.

2

I would have voted for Alaska.

3

Pageants tend to bring out the latent radical feminist in me. I had this on for a few minutes as background noise while I was doing something else, but the whole idea of parading oneself as some sort of role model because you have a butt and a good plastic surgeon irritates me. Plus I know most of those women grew up doing those obscene children’s pageants, and those make me want to start strangling the organizers and the parents.

4

I used to love watching the Miss America pageant for the talent competition. There were always some off-key opera singers or some bizarre combinations of things (nothing, however, as bizarre as this. I think there was a reason the pinacle of this woman’s pageant success was Miss Douglas County.)

5

Miss U.S. America. Heh. What an archaic institution.

6

Ay caramba!

Imagine: She’s trying to become Miss Arizona, so she wants to impress, right? In other words, the trumpet atrocity was her greatest talent.

7

That was the whole point of Reality Check. Bring the pageant, which at one point was watched by 80 million people, into the modern world.

I still think it could be done, just not by whoever is responsible for Saturday night’s crapfest.

8

I hear Miss Michigan won. Now I can tell people I was bangin’ her long before she was Miss America.

9

Thanks, freckafree! Not only have I passed the pain and bewilderment along to three other people, but I’ll be picking up random things all day, making little “pew pew pew” noises. If anybody asks, that’s my Laser Trumpet! Mwuahahahahaha!