Read Online My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean - Free Book Online

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