I. January 15, 2006—American Kennel Club/Eukanuba National Championships from Tampa Florida via Animal Planet TV.
They're down to Best in Show; we've already watched the individual contests for hounds and terriers and other categories; they've got the best of the best lined up here on our TV. I have learned, in the course of watching this broadcast hosted by affable, gayish Ron Reagan, that what matters is not simply who's cutest (the English springer spaniel, in my book), but a number of other specifics only the die-hard pageant-watchers would know: Judges thus far have inspected butts and gums, watched for "the glide" of the dog rather than a bouncy trot, felt the shampooed coats and yes, somehow, in the few moments the dogs and their handlers stand and walk in front of the judge, determined the dog's personality.
For Best in Show, a special veteran judge is escorted out by a tuxedoed man to make the call; she's very old, this woman, and now a smidge of the drama seems to shift to whether she will be able to stand on her own when her escort leaves her side, much less assess dogs—inspect the ears of a bull terrier and handle the jowls of an Alaskan malamute. She's wearing a formal gown, but her slip is showing, she's wobbly on the heels, it's definitely precarious and I am on the edge of my sofa hoping she makes it long enough to pick my dog, my dog as of 10 minutes ago, the springer spaniel. The springer spaniel is way better than these other dogs, just take my word for it.
II. January 18, 2006—Miss America Pageant, rehearsals, the Aladdin Theater, Las Vegas.
The theater is empty and quiet but for a few stagehands, a reporter and a cute young woman on the stage modern-dancing to some music in her headphones. Her blond bob flops madly all over her face, and she's wearing a blue Miss America contestant T-shirt and brown pants, and while this reporter knows nothing about what makes modern dance good or bad, I decide, after watching the complete routine, it must be something die-hard pageant-watchers and judges understand.
III. Fall semester, circa 1990—Sociology of Gender class, University of Arizona, Tucson.
A plain-faced female professor with a bowl cut and ankle-length skirt flips through slides of magazine ads, pointing out the manner in which they subtly exploit women. In this champagne ad, the placement of this woman waist-high as the man uncorks a bottle, she explains, makes her a subservient sexual object. Later she would make similar arguments against female cosmetic rituals such as using makeup and shaving body hair and using perfume. It's saying "women are here just to be evaluated by men."
I toy with the notion as long as it is my college luxury to do so, sometimes in circles of hairy-legged university womyn friends who refuse the rituals of American womanhood, and sometimes in circles of equally educated "feminine" women friends who don't want to identify themselves as man-haters, or, increasingly interchangeably, as "feminists." I talk about it with lesbians who love gender role-playing sex and gay men who fantasize about being Miss America. I've been watching a pageant of opinions on gender ever since.
IV. Kenyon Review, 1990.
Gerald Early wrote an essay titled "Life With Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant," which later makes the collection of the Best American Essays of the Century.
The theme of the essay is that as the father in a black family, it was significant for him to have black candidates and a black winner in the Miss America Pageant. However, it is his description of the pageant that also seems pertinent 16 years later:
"The Miss America Pageant is the worst sort of 'Americanism,' the soft smile of sex and the hard sell of toothpaste and hair dye ads wrapped in the dreamy ideological gauze of 'making it through one's own effort.'
"In a perverse way, I like the show; it is the only live television left other than sports, news broadcasts, performing arts awards programs and speeches by the president. I miss live TV. It was the closest thing to theater for the masses.
"And the Miss America contest is, as it has been for some time, the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition. Am I doing all right? the contestants seem to ask in a kind of reassuring, if numbed, way. The contest brings together all the American classes in a showbiz spectacle of tastelessness."
Sixteen years later, on the other side of reality TV and a week after the porn convention and several years of watching pop culture descend into a contest of Internet-circulated celebrity home sex videos, I am—sadly?—downright giddy about having a good seat at the Miss America Pageant. I've seen all of the sexploitation imaginable, and here comes a simple dog show to our over-the-top city, sweet scripted ridiculousness of the sort that tries to be about scholarships and platforms such as "raising awareness of saving children from cancer" and will still be about how good she looks in a swimsuit, but quaintly not whether she'll blow a stranger.
Early said of the pageant then, "We are still being told that something is nothing." And he couldn't have been more right, and he couldn't have known how significant that would be 16 years later, and that we might be somehow relieved by it.
V. January 21—Miss America Pageant, pouring into the Aladdin Theater for the live TV show.
We are dressed up, us audience members—suits and ties and dresses and furs—and many sport badges and banners and even digital signs with the names and images of their home state's contestant. Pictures of each and every girl are air-brushed and dreamy and so is this night, and we are packed into this theater at big-time prices on national TV like days of old, to see one young woman receive the coveted title "Miss America" based largely on how she walks. In two different outfits. Swimsuit, and evening gown.
One by one they are introduced and we look at their gait and the condition of their jowls and their apparent personality, and we cheer wildly for the one we've selected—sorry, Nevada, I was rooting for Miss Virginia, for her brain as assessed in a 20-second prerecorded big-screen TV clip—and we are having a blast. We applaud and laugh and give standing ovations for 30-second answers to the question: What one event in your childhood shaped your life?
During a commercial break I sprint to the bathroom along with a few dozen other women, and as we stand in line for the stalls and look at ourselves in the mirror, lined up in perfect choreography, dressed beautifully, smiling, moving efficiently through this business in perfect cooperation, I see the pageantry in us all. It scares me.
Of course, the odd airbrushed feeling ends when I accidentally drop my reporter's notebook onto the floor in my stall, and it slides into the stall next to mine, and I begin my talent portion of the show, a modern dance that involves reaching inconspicuously behind my neighbor's heels for my now-disgusting notebook while unknowingly dipping the end of my faux fur coat into the toilet bowl. By the time I have washed and dried that corner in an empty bathroom, they have named Miss Congeniality, and I have been reminded why pageantry never really appealed to me. In addition to a number of feminist principles.
VI. Miss America Stage.
Miss Oklahoma wins. Glittery confetti stuff shoots out of large blowers and she cries and waves like some of the best drag queens I've ever seen. I feel fortunate for being a part of American history; the 85th year of the Miss America pageant and the first year they brought it to Vegas, allegedly to restore the tradition and sex it up—that's right, they walked around on a distant stage in not terribly skimpy Speedo bikinis within a few miles' radius of a thousand topless $20 woman-empowering lap dances. It's all about perspective.
VI. Animal Planet, American Kennel Club/Eukanuba Competition.
The old lady is surprisingly nimble in her heels. She knows her dogs; it's obvious why they called her out. She's making them trot around in circles, turn, sway their hips; she's making their handlers, also dressed up for the competition, sweat. Then, just as the moment of crowning the top dog arrives, the judge appears to become interested in a dog at the end of the line of best-of dogs, a statue. From this angle, on our sofa looking through this camera, it appears our judge is about to select a porcelain statue of a dog as Best in Show, that she's become confused as to which are real dogs and which is just a fake, an image of a dog meant to signify what we're all judging here, the ultimate dog.
Oh no, I say! Not that one, he's not real! Pick the spaniel!
Just then she lurches right and calls out the Alaskan malamute, named Costello, as the winner. He's pretty.