Tiaras across the planet

Tuesday

During my “office hours” at the University of Botswana yesterday, a writer for the student newspaper came looking for my help. She came to the right place.

She plans a story for the next edition about Miss Intervarsity, the winner of a beauty contest that coincided with a recent whiz-bang intervarsity competition among college athletes from Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. How would she write this profile? What questions should she ask? I shot answers at her rapid-fire. This topic I knew, having been a game but gullible reporter in the pageant oeuvre from Hot Springs to Atlantic City.

Seeing how history repeats itself, I must note that the beauty pageant theme comes round and round for me. My first out-of-town assignment as a college intern was to travel from Little Rock to Hot Springs, Arkansas, one hour away, to cover the Miss Arkansas pageant. I had an expense account to supplement my Arkansas Democrat newspaper wages of about $3.35 an hour and checked into a fancy hotel. I was frantic about not screwing up. This was a big deal, what with the rampant pageant mania in the South, where tots start wearing plastic tiaras at shopping mall pageants at around the age of 2 or 3 and grow up to be surrounded by an entourage of dressmakers, posture perfecters and makeup deliverers known in the biz as “pageant people.” Mine was sure to be a front-page story. I was so nervous I ended up with a case of heartburn that landed me in a doctor’s office.

Wide-eyed throughout the whole event, I went about my duties with all the seriousness of a war correspondent, preparing my dispatch to enlighten our readers with the remarkable tales of these girls, uh, women. I filed my copy. Nothing terrible went wrong that I know of. But I do remember some years later being deflated when I saw that the winner who had told me with great sincerity – and whom I had quoted with sincere admiration --that she intended to become a corporate lawyer had instead wound up in the tabloids as one of Bill Clinton’s paramours and was living in Paris, as if in gilded exile. She hadn’t become a corporate lawyer. She was an actress of little note and, as Clintonian fate would have it, a historical footnote.
First lesson for a cub reporter: Not all beauty pageant contestants really want world peace even though they say so.