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

by Susan Orlean

  “It’s hard doing pageants, because of the money, but it’s worth it,” Kris said. “I mean, everybody likes to show off their daughter, right? It’s fun for us, and she really enjoys it. It’s mother-daughter time, and I know someday we won’t have that as much. We’re putting all her pageant pictures and scorecards in a scrapbook so she can have it, and someday she’ll be able to see it and all her trophies and say, ‘Gee, I did that!’ It gives her something she can be proud of.”

  The pageant was about to start, and Kris stood up and attached a bow to Nina’s wisps of hair. Nina didn’t have enough hair to hold a regular barrette, so Kris had devised something clever with a piece of a zipper she’d cut from a Ziploc bag. She said she realized that some people might not like pageants, because they thought children shouldn’t be exposed to competition this early in their lives, but she and James thought it would be good for Nina—it would give her a head start, especially if Nina wanted to try for Miss America someday. Kris said, “I know it’s a lot of pressure, but, I mean, you know, you’re under some kind of pressure your whole entire life.”

  DARLENE LIKES HER PAGEANTS to start with the babies, because they’re at their best in the morning. “You have to do it that way,” she said. “Babies just will not put up with an all-day pageant.” The room for the competition looked festive. A blue-and-white Southern Charm banner was hanging on the back wall, and beside it was a table loaded with crowns and trophies of all different sizes. The crowns were as big as birthday cakes and were studded with rhinestones. The biggest ones cost almost two hundred dollars apiece. “When Becky was in pageants, she was always getting these so-so crowns,” Darlene had complained to me. “I don’t want that reputation, so I spend a fortune on my crowns.”

  The judges were two big-boned women with layered haircuts and soft faces. For a few minutes, they murmured to each other and then looked at Stacie with solemn expressions and nodded. The mothers brought their babies forward one by one and held them facing out toward the judges, fluffing the babies’ skirts into meringues of chiffon that billowed up and over the mothers’ arms and the babies’ dangling legs. Displayed this way, the babies looked weightless and relaxed and sublime, suspended in midair. The judges studied them and scored them in the individual categories while Stacie read introductions: “This is Cheyenne. Her hobbies are playing and cooing. . . . Her favorite food is pears. . . . Her favorite TV show is Barney. She is sponsored today by her friends and family. . . . This is Kayle. . . . Her favorite food is macaroni and cheese. . . . Her hobby is exploring newfound things. . . . This is Taylor. . . . She loves horseback riding and taking her baby cat, Patches, out for walks.” One baby picked her nose during her moment at the judging table. Another flailed her arms at the balloons floating above the judges and started to cry. Kris bounced Nina and clucked at her until she finally cracked a gummy smile, but just at that moment both judges happened to look away. Everyone in the audience was standing and waving and aiming toss-away paper cameras at the babies onstage, and every time a camera flashed, the crowns on the table flashed, too.

  The older girls were divided into age groups of twelve to twenty-three months, twenty-four to thirty-five months, three- and four-year-olds together, five- and six-year-olds, and so on. Southern Charm accepts girls up to twenty-one years old, but the oldest girl at the Prattville pageant was probably seven. These older children walked onstage by themselves, and some of them even turned the way they were supposed to when they got to the masking-tape X’s, and a few remembered to do “pretty hands” and “pretty feet” and the grimacing pageant-girl smile. The two-year-olds tended to wander. A blonde from Eclectic named Kendall stood twirling a piece of her hair around her finger and then roamed off the stage. Her mother was standing next to me, and she said that this would probably be Kendall’s last pageant because she hated wearing dresses and was much happier barrel-racing her pony at home.

  The Southern Charm rules say, “Remember, if you coach from the audience, the child will not have eye contact with the judges and they will deduct points for not having eye contact.” In spite of that, nearly all the parents were on their feet during the rest of the pageant, making wild hand signals to their daughters that meant “Smile” and “Blow a kiss at the judge” and “Smile much bigger.” They pushed to the front of the room, nearly leaning over the judges’ shoulders. It was as if someone had set them on a table and then tipped it forward. Just a few minutes after the pageant started, hardly anyone was left sitting in the back of the room.

  Darlene has forty thousand people on her mailing list, and they are spread out all over the nation. JonBenet Ramsey was one of those names, although she never particularly stood out. Darlene says that in spite of what the papers have said, not that many people in the pageant world had heard of JonBenet until she got killed. Right after the murder, Darlene looked up JonBenet’s name on her computer and deleted it, so that the Ramseys wouldn’t get any upsetting Southern Charm mail.

  Darlene and Jerry Burgess live about ten miles from downtown Jackson, in an old farmhouse that has been renovated since the days when their daughter, Becky, was at home. (Becky is married and lives in Nashville, where she is studying to go to medical school, and she has a two-year-old daughter, who is just starting on the pageant circuit.) Now the Burgess house is pure pageant. In the outbuildings is a trophy shop and a silk-screening shop where the banners are made and a photography studio where Jerry shoots portfolios of contestants. In the basement is Glitz & Glamour, Darlene’s mail-order pageant dress business, and in the front room are four computers containing all the mailing lists, and eight video machines for copying Jerry’s official tapes of the pageants, and Federal Express labels and boxes for the dozen or so Glitz & Glamour dresses and Southern Charm videos they ship out every day.

  The phone rings all day without stopping, so it is nearly impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation with Darlene. One of the days I was in Jackson, I asked her why she thought people outside the pageant world objected to it so adamantly. “I don’t know why they even have an opinion about it at all,” she said. “I look at pageants like I look at any other hobby, like golf. I sure wouldn’t hit a little white ball around on a lawn, and I don’t know why anyone else would want to, but that’s their business and not mine. Hold on a minute.

  “Hello, Glitz. . . . Yes, this is Darlene Burgess. . . . Okay, I can send you an entry form. How’d you find out about us? . . . Well, if you want to go to New York, that’s a mininational. Who’s crowning in New York? . . . Let me think. . . . Oh, fiddle! Jerry, who’s crowning in New York? Well, I can’t remember. . . . So now give me your name and address.”

  Vicki Whitehead, who works at Glitz & Glamour part-time, came upstairs. “Darlene, I have a lady on the phone who has an eight-month-old she says is really tiny and she needs something very dainty for her to wear. And do we have any Ultrasuede in an animal print in pink and black? Because I have a lady who’s dying for some.”

  Another call for Darlene: “I see. . . . Do you have videos of her in pageants? . . . Okay, send it and I’d be glad to critique it for you.” Darlene covered the mouthpiece and said to me, “I’m offering to do it because this lady’s up in Illinois and really needs help. They’re not too pageant wise up in places like Illinois. I really think the kids up north are afraid to compete with the kids down south. I remember once Becky said to me, ‘Mom, the New York kids are beautiful, but they don’t know how to model and they don’t know how to dress.’ ”

  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 lo
ves 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 cellphon
e 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.”