My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  George W. Bush has said that he would like to be buried in Midland. This will not necessarily be easy to do. When you first see it, the soil here looks loose and crumbly, and you’d think digging a hole in it would be as easy as sticking a knife in a cake. But nothing in Midland, not even burial, is as simple as it first seems. The tender soil conceals a calcium deposit called caliche that is as thick and hard as bone, and it takes a tempered-steel drill bit to break through.

  Beautiful Girls

  The Holiday Inn in Prattville, Alabama, is on a grassy rise beside a wide gray highway across from a Waffle House and a McDonald’s and several different places to buy gas. One Sunday this spring, the hotel lobby was especially crowded. Some of the people had come straight from church for Sunday lunch: mild-faced women in pastel dresses and men in gray suits and dull blue ties; boys in white shirts and oxfords and girls in Sunday school dresses and black Mary Janes. The rest of the people had come for the Universal/Southern Charm International Children’s Beauty Pageant being held at the hotel. They were wearing stonewashed jeans or leisure outfits, and they were carrying babies or pushing strollers or rushing around leading little girls by the hand, and with a spare finger some of them were balancing hangers that held tiny dresses with ballooning skirts covered by dry cleaners’ plastic bags. A few of the littlest babies were fussing. Mothers hurried through the lobby and bumped their strollers into other mothers’ strollers. A miniature dress of green chiffon slid off its hanger and settled onto the carpet with a sigh, and as soon as the woman holding the empty hanger noticed it she yelled, “Nobody move! Don’t step on that dress!” Then a few three-year-olds started horsing around and squealing, and a cosmetic case slipped out of someone’s hand, and, when it landed, out shot a dozen cylinder-shaped things—hair curlers, hairbrushes, lipstick tubes, eyeliner brushes—that rolled in every direction across the floor. A few fathers were sent back to the parking lot to retrieve the shoes or hat or Wet Ones or entry forms that had been left in the car by accident. One mother had spread her baby out on the lobby sofa and was changing her into a lavender Western outfit. In the ladies’ room, small dresses and hats were hanging from every ledge they could hang from, and white anklet socks and white shoes and pairs of children’s size 2 rhinestone-studded cowboy boots were scattered on the floor, and there was the tangy metallic smell of hot curling irons in the air. In the middle of the room, four women were adjusting the bows in their daughters’ hair and smoothing blusher on their cheeks. Across from them, three other women were lined up elbow to elbow. Each one held a Great Lash mascara wand poised like a conductor’s baton, and each was facing a lovely little girl in a glittering pageant dress sitting quietly in a sink.

  I had never been to a beauty pageant before I went to Prattville. For the longest time, the world of children’s beauty pageants was invisible to millions of people like me, who don’t read Pageant Life and Pageant World, and don’t plan their vacations around the big state finals, and don’t have a little girl who has dozens of trophies and crowns and pageant banners in her room. Probably all of that would have remained invisible if someone hadn’t murdered JonBenet Ramsey. Once the footage of her in pageant clothes and wearing makeup appeared on the TV news, the world of children’s beauty pageants came into sight and a horrible association was made—not just that a beauty pageant girl was murdered, but that the pageants themselves were depraved and had maybe even contributed to the murder in some way. It was as if you’d never heard of the game of football until the O. J. Simpson trial, and then you’d never be able to separate the crime from the game.

  But pageants have been taking place all over the country for decades, and in the South, especially, they are as common as barbecue. Pageants are held nearly every Sunday—Sunburst Pageants and Moonbeam Pageants and Miss American Starlet and Glamour Dolls USA Pageants—in meeting rooms at Holiday Inns and Comfort Inns and Best Westerns in places like Florence, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, and Jackson, Tennessee. Every Sunday, pageants have been making winners and losers, inspiring and dashing hopes, wasting some people’s money and making some little girls rich. As I left for Alabama, I guessed that I would see some overcompetitive parents and some parents who would insist on winning even if their kids didn’t want to be in a pageant—the same bad things you sometimes see at junior tennis matches and gymnastics meets. I knew that I wasn’t going to enjoy seeing three-year-olds wearing eyeliner and crying when they weren’t named Supreme Queen. But in spite of what most of the stories that followed JonBenet’s murder led me to expect, what I saw in Prattville were not people like the Ramseys, with lots of money and mobility. They were ordinary people: They were dazzled by glamour, and they believed truly and uncynically in beauty and staked their faith on its power to lift you and carry you away. It may be embarrassing or naÏve to believe that being Miss America will lead you somewhere in life, unless it happens to be your life, or your daughter’s life, and the working-class life that has been assigned to you and your baby feels small and flat and plain. There are only so many ways to get out of a place like Prattville. The crown you win on Sunday might be the chance for your beautiful baby to get a start on a different life, so that someday she might get ahead and get away.

  Darlene Burgess, who founded the Universal/Southern Charm International Pageant seventeen years ago, told me that ever since JonBenet, people who don’t know anything about pageants are peering into the pageant world and then condemning it because they’re shocked by the makeup and the dressy dresses and the sexy sophistication of some of the girls. There have been magazine stories and television shows about children’s pageants before, but most of them have been for foreign press and TV, so this has really been the first time that the pageant world has been shoved into view. It’s not that anyone has anything to hide; it’s just that they feel scrutinized and criticized by people who haven’t been to a single pageant—people who can’t see how proud mothers are when their daughters win and don’t see how pageant people are practically a family, in which everyone knows one another and watches out for one another.

  Darlene got into pageants purely by accident. She grew up on a farm in Arkansas in the fifties; her mother drove a grain truck, and Darlene lived on her own in town starting at the age of fifteen. She didn’t know a thing about pageants and wouldn’t have had the money to compete in them even if she had. When she got married, she and her husband, Jerry, who was a pilot for Oral Roberts University, lived in Tulsa. They started their little girl, Becky, in dancing classes at the age of three. Becky was a natural onstage, and Darlene learned to coax out her best performances by waving a flyswatter at her. After a while, Becky’s dance teacher entered her in a competition that turned out to be part of a children’s pageant. Becky came home that day with a trophy, and Darlene was hooked.

  Darlene learned about pageants as she went along. One thing she learned was makeup. The dance teacher used some on the girls in their recitals, and Darlene didn’t like it at first, but then she agreed that for pageants Becky needed it. “She was just so pale,” Darlene said to me recently. “I just had to cake her. Otherwise, she would have been invisible onstage. If you have a baby who’s a true blonde, not a browny blonde, and you put her under those lights, it’ll kill her.” Darlene herself is tall and substantial and has fair skin and clay-colored hair. She wears big rimless glasses and warm-up suits. She has an Arkansas accent, rolling and drawly, and a light, chiming laugh that can put you in an instant good mood. She is self-possessed and capable in a way that is slightly intimidating. When she needed a dress for Becky, she sewed one; when she saw that there was no good pageant dress business in the area, she started one; when she discovered that no one manufactured mannequins small enough to use for her clients, she built one; and then, when she decided that the pageants Becky was entering were poorly run, she started her own. “I’d hear talk in dressing rooms,” Darlene told me. “Like ‘If they know you, you win; if they don’t, you don’t.’ And then I was at a pageant and found out that
one of the judges was the grandmother of one of the babies, and I thought, I’m going to do my own pageant and do it right.” She picked a date, made up flyers, and rented a room. To break even, she had to attract at least fifty kids. She ended up with a hundred and twenty. After a few years, she was able to expand Southern Charm into North Carolina, Mississippi, New York, and Maryland, and she told me that she might soon be adding Virginia and Florida. In each state, Darlene appoints a director to run preliminary pageants and the state finals, and she herself takes care of the national finals. All beauty pageants are owned privately, and most use state directors, as Darlene does. State directors can make money running a pageant, but unless they own a pageant system they need a full-time job. Recently, Darlene’s Tennessee directors, a married couple, had to resign, because the man, a Baptist minister, had just got his own church and wasn’t free on Sundays anymore.

  Stacie Brumit, Southern Charm’s Alabama state director, arrived at the hotel around noon, loaded down with boxes and bags. The mothers in the lobby hurried with their daughters into a line that started in front of Stacie’s registration table and curled down the hall and out the door. Stacie is round faced and round shouldered and has a bleached blond pageboy. She was already heavily into pageants when she signed on to be Darlene’s Alabama director—she had competed herself when she was little, and so far she has entered her two-year-old daughter, Brianna, in thirty pageants, starting when Brianna was five months old. “I see how much being in them is giving Brianna, even at her age,” she said. “I think she’s going to be a great public speaker because of her pageant experience. She’s learning poise. She’s going to end up being . . . being like the president! I mean, he’s not shaky when he’s up there speaking.” Before becoming a pageant director, Stacie worked at Wal-Mart. This was when she was expecting Brianna, and she says that even though directing a pageant is hard work, it’s nothing compared with sitting on a stool out in the cold in front of a Wal-Mart greeting shoppers when you’re six months pregnant and sick as a dog.

  The kids in line to be registered ranged from six months old to almost but not quite four, and they were beautiful or cute or plain, and they were wearing white satin dresses covered with matching satin capes trimmed with feathers, and peach dresses with beaded bodices and heart-shaped cutouts in the back, and powder blue dresses with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. The girls who were old enough to have some hair had it swept up, prom style, or left loose and sprayed into curvy shapes, and the bigger girls wore foundation, blusher, eye shadow, and mascara, and the babies wore no makeup except maybe a little pink gloss on their lips. Some of the mothers wore attractive clothes and had their hair blown smooth, but many were too fat or too thin or looked tired and frayed next to their dazzling daughters. While the mothers were waiting to register, the fathers dawdled in the parking lot, having a smoke. The babies napped, and the bigger girls practiced pageant modeling: eye contact with the judges; a wide smile showing one row of teeth; “pretty hands,” which means holding your arms straight and slightly lifted, with your hands bent at the wrist and parallel to the floor; and “pretty feet,” the pose for the beauty lineup, right heel pressed to left instep, toes wide and apart.

  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.”