I did them from 3 to 7 years old, then stopped. Robbie Meshell, 27, hairstylist and makeup artist in Shreveport, Louisianaġ00-plus pageants from ages 3 to 7 and 14 to 27, including Miss Louisiana Elite USA 2011. There was a whole group of black girls who did the competition together, like as a community, and we would party, have so much fun.Ģ. Those were the girls who won, like, Best Community Leadership and volunteer awards. It was probably half black girls, then a quarter suburban white girls, and then super-podunk back-country girls. There were a lot of really fabulous black girls. And I always befriended the awkward girls, and those girls voted for Best Personality. But the only awards she didn’t win were the ones I took from her. She won the all-around, the most promising model, the talent, the speech category. She had, like, a fucking bridal dress on. And Mindy Rick, like, swept the competition. Let me teach you the walk.” She bugged me so bad, but I was thankful for her.
And to me, she was all like, “Well, Marly, I just don’t think you know how to do the walk. So I’d never done a pageant before, and the girl next to me - I was Marly Ramstad, and she was Mindy Rick - Mindy Rick had done the American Coed Pageant since she was, like, young enough to do it, for-fucking-ever. I love pretty dresses I went to prom like nine times when I was in high school. At the time, though, it just felt like something fun to do. Looking back, doing the pageant was a self-esteem thing - I wanted so badly to be pretty and perfect that if I won, then that would confirm my perfect figure, perfect weight. All I remember that summer was eating tomatoes. I got a brochure in the mail and was like, Oh, this looks like fun. Petersburg, FloridaĪmerican Coed Pageants, 1998, age 14: Miss Teen Photogenic, Best Personality. (Of course, this may be informed by the fact that I placed.) But was I the norm or the anomaly? To find out, I interviewed adult alumnae of child pageants about how they feel about it in retrospect - and reconsidered my own experience.ġ. And no feminist is more agog than I am to report that my pageant experience was generally positive. I arrive at this question a little defensively because I am myself the alumna of one child pageant: I placed second runner-up in Miss Preteen Minneapolis 1996. It’s the same way I feel when I watch Toddlers and Tiaras, where hyperprojecting mothers bitch-slap sequins onto eager-to-please daughters, inviting the viewer to wonder, What train wreck of adulthood lies ahead for America’s Honey Boo Boos? After fifteen minutes of Go Go Juice and pageant tantrums, I had to turn it off - not because I disapproved of the Thompson-Shannon family, but because I resented that the show wanted me to disapprove of them. I should be honest: I couldn’t watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
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