Shortly before Christmas, as you, dear reader, may have heard, another beauty pageant scandal rocked the nation. I must say that I have always felt sorry for beauty pageant contestants, whether driven by their own warped, childish desires and tastes, or the warped, childish desires and tastes of their parents. In either case, their lives tend to end in tragedy, whether it’s being beaten to death with a hair brush at the age of seven, or dying old, wrinkled, alone and ignored in Burbank after a meaningless, unfulfilled life of pitching cars, clothes and cosmetics for big corporations.
But I never let my personal opinions affect my business, and that flap about the beauty queen getting high and kissing a female teenager a bit too passionately seems to have thrown the entire beauty pageant industry into an hysterical uproar, thus creating business opportunities for highly regarded multi-sector consultants such as myself. So when the grand kahuna of one of those pageants retained me to come up with a solution to his problems, I did what any professional consultant would do – I took the assignment. Oh, I could have spent Christmas drinking home-made organic-egg and XO brandy eggnog, reading Dickens in an overstuffed red leather easy chair by a crackling seasoned hickory fire in a living room festooned with holly and mistletoe, softly illuminated by the lights of a tastefully decorated, perfectly formed, ice-blue Minnesota spruce. But Mr. Big Shot was in a hurry, so instead, I toiled like a tin miner in my study starting Friday, when I was contacted about the task by fax just minutes after making the December 22 post to my new blog. I kept working until late Friday night, then all through Saturday, the whole holiday eve and Christmas Day and, after that urgent lunch with Dorkman on the 26th that I described earlier, I hurriedly posted an account of that meeting to my new blog and then went right back to work. I put in grueling 16 to 20 hour shifts until my analysis was ready for delivery. I subsisted on sushi, Peking duck, Cobb salad, crepes and goat cheese with pesto white pizza that I ordered over the phone while a beautiful Stasbourg goose, shipped fresh, direct from Alsace by Balducci’s, languished in the Traulsen down in my kitchen, waiting in vain for a Christmas Day it would never see – the damn thing spoiled and I billed the client for it as an ODC. For the record, I note here that he paid the item.
As we all know, however, an objective analysis of someone’s pet project can be hard for them to take, and, after submitting my deliverable, all I got in reply from this bumbling, gobbling, too-dumb-to-come-in-from-the-rain turkey was “You’re fired.” I didn’t take it personally, though, since I understand he says that a lot, most likely because he lacks the imagination and creativity to think of anything else to say. The amazing thing about this guy is that he got rooked out of huge amounts of money his family gave him to get started as a tycoon – I mean, he was essentially bankrupt, having run a couple of hundred million dollars into a shoestring. Then he talked them out of even more, and, having apparently learned how to not get completely swindled every time he made a deal, he subsequently threw that pile of swag around pretty much at random, depending on the sheer size and inertia of his fortune to pull him through. When you realize that, every single year, a portfolio constructed by Wall Street Journal interns throwing darts at the stock listings routinely outperforms half the money managers in American finance, it isn’t hard to see that a drunkard’s walk through the field of possible investments will do pretty well, provided you have a big enough bank account to finance such a stroll. But it gets better – he wrote a book about how to make business deals, and millions of people bought it and read the thing, trying to find out how to become a success, when the only real advice this moron can offer anyone is “be born filthy rich to begin with.” I can’t figure who is the bigger fool – him or one of his followers, although it’s obvious who the suckers are. But what the hell, I got paid in full for every hour I billed him, and it’s not like I need that bozo’s business or have the illusion that his future referrals would be anything but a huge pain in the arse, just like he is, to everybody, anywhere, whenever they deal with him.
Frankly, however, this particular product I prepared for the Grand Emperor, Master of Ceremonies, and Sole Ruler of His Very Own Beauty Pageant is special to me, because I put so much crunch-time into it during what should have been a period of rest, reflection, relaxation and recreation. That kind of thing happens to all of us once in a while, I guess, and we wonder what to do about it. Well, I’ve figured out what I’m going to do. Since he was in such a hurry, our agreement didn’t include a confidentiality or non-disclosure clause, and therefore I’ve decided to outline what I told him right here in Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log for everybody on the Internet to read.
My analysis of beauty pageants revealed that they are hopelessly out of date. First of all, there’s that “Miss” thing – “Miss Sardine Derby,” “Miss Pickled Pig’s Feet Festival,” “Miss County Poultry and Stock Show,” “Miss Scottish Hurling Championship” – it’s absurd. I mean really, where have the beauty pageant crowd been the last fifty years, hanging out with the ghost of Norman Rockwell? That’s “Ms.”, you ancient, doddering Victorian female-objectifiers!
Then there’s the issue of how we describe what the winner’s domain is – “World,” “America,” “Universe,” etc. Forget about that, it’s so 20th century. And it’s inconsistent. How come we have a “Universe” title but no “Solar System” or “Galaxy,” huh? No, that quaint, outdated nomenclature has got to go, too. I suggest, for example Alabama/Ms., U.S./Ms., U.N./Ms., E.U./Ms., O.A.S./Ms., etc.
Now, let’s take the specific example of a beauty pageant queen selected to represent these United States of America, the U.S./Ms. Current pageants, from the block level all the way up through every city, state and municipality, right on up to the top, they all seek to crown a young female who satisfies the classical definitions of beauty, possesses remarkable talent, displays intelligence, exudes charisma, believes in and practices traditional moral virtues and looks really hot in gowns and bathing suits. What we need to realize, Mr. and Mrs. America, is that today, there are no females under the age of thirty who can fulfill all those requirements. Our society has changed, and it’s not realistic to expect that anymore.
So I recommended taking these circumstances into account. Where is it written in stone that there should be only one, single title? My solution is to split the awards up into several categories predicated on the contestants’ essential post-modern personality types. That way, the winners will have a realistic chance of living up to the standards of the title they win. Not only that – I go farther still, and suggest category-specific competitions based upon the personality traits that currently cause all the brouhaha. After all, to wear the crown of a particular category, shouldn’t the queen excel at its salient attributes? And isn’t such a basis for judgment the best way of defining each category? Here are some examples:
U.S./Ms. Party Animal – Contestants are judged on beauty, talent, essay, gown and swimsuit merits, but the title also includes competitions for flirting, teasing, all night ecstacy fueled dirty dancing, a 100 mile skinny-winding-in-a-convertible race, heavy making out in public, punching paparazzi, swearing creativity, smoking style, talking back to police officers, letting your stuff slip out of your bra in the most interesting situation, doing more than one guy at a time, best catty insults and a cage match girly fighting seeded elimination tournament.
U.S./Ms. Alchemical – Beauty, talent, essay, gown and swimsuit, plus chugging a beer the fastest, shooter drinking contest, best performance with a fifth of top-shelf over 80 proof, champagne-fountain dip competition, racking up the most sinsemilla bong hits before passing out, twelve-day meth run elimination, sleeping-pill bed-a-thon, 500 microgram LSD interview, best China white dragon chasing, freestyle crack pipe competition, hashish brownie eating contest, best prescription drug medley performance, taking the biggest 10 to 1 Frisco speedball while remaining seated in an upright position, best intervention scenario and confessional intervention aftermath speech, best rehab-center escape and recidivism story.
U.S./Ms. Airhead – Beauty, gown and swimsuit categories, plus best wreck of a car worth $25,000 or more, best broken equipment/destroyed property story at $10,000 or more, most foolish household, school or vacation accident, most moronic cute giggle, most outrageous public statement, most ridiculous choice of boyfriend, most absurd situation resulting from idiotic reasoning, most inappropriate conclusion drawn from interpretation of social circumstances, most unlikely explanations of common proverb meanings, most amusing unintentional insult or slur, most pathetic language skills in a marathon cell-phone competition, longest time to make change from a twenty dollar bill given a random amount less than twenty dollars while receiving electric shocks of increasing intensity every five seconds; and, least comprehension of her environment, to include (a) least able to locate herself on a map, (b) least able to explain how a randomly-chosen household appliance works, and (c) least able to correctly interpret signs, billboards, traffic signals and newspaper headlines.
U.S./Ms. Money Princess – Beauty, talent, and essay, plus Sweet Sixteen party or Bat Mitzvah displaying the least taste and refinement at the greatest expense, Rodeo Drive Shopping Rodeo, five-day trust fund squander competition, greatest embarrassment to the wealthiest relative, sommelier and waiter slapping competition, domestic help abuse contest, Beluga caviar food fight, most ridiculous collection of birthday presents obtained at the highest price, greatest expenditure for a haute-couture gown that looks like it’s pret-a-porte, swimsuit competition to feature (a) greatest cost per square inch for a swimsuit and (b) most expensive mink, ermine or endangered species coat to go with it; most absurdly expensive spring break visit to Daytona Beach, best “increase my allowance” speech with temper tantrum, least meaningful collection of photos and souvenirs from abroad obtained for the most outrageous travel and purchase expenses, multiple platinum card max-out and most undeserved college or university admission.
U.S./Ms. Bisexual – Beauty, talent, essay, gown and swimsuit, plus best performance in a round-robin negligee pajama-party make out competition with the other contestants, best collection of girl-on-girl pornography featuring the contestant, best all-round erotica collection including the contestant as a participant, best demonstration of lesbian techniques with a specially selected lesbian contest judge, best performance in menage a trois with specially selected male and female contest judges, and best ten-minute butch drag show.
Then I went on to present a detailed set of revised rules, regulations and judging criteria. That ran eighty-two pages, single spaced, eleven point Verdana, including six appendices for the Ms. Teen competitions, and four more for the Ms. Tween and Under Division, and it’s a bit dry. No point in going into all that.
Anyway, there’s still Orthodox Christmas, with its Christmas Eve on Saturday, January 6, 2007. I intend to leave the decorations up and enjoy that, maybe read some Tolstoy instead of Dickens, and drink some quintuple-distilled Okhotnichya vodka instead of that eggnog. Under no circumstances am I going to work on that weekend. No way, not for anyone.