Into that stewpot add a beauty pageant for virgins. No national scandal, but a five-minute item for sure.
The revised Norton Anthology of Poetry was on my sleeping bag open to the bottom of page 1249. I’d opened it while feeling particularly distant from college one evening; actually pretending I’d enjoyed my Survey of American Poetry seminar freshman year. I plowed it from the bottom of one of my book boxes and read awhile, but turned it down when Grandma called to me from the living room.
— Anthony! Come on, Anthony!
Even my sister said my name as she hadn’t done since the 12th, and it was the 20th already; hearing Nabisase speak to me really was a miracle worth thanking Selwyn for.
When I got upstairs they were on the couch. Grandma leaned forward, left elbow on her good thigh, resting her chin in that left hand, tapping the tip of her nose with her pointer finger.
Nabisase said, — Anthony, look at this.
The TV was speaking.
A cabbage-headed man hosted the show, but he wore a suit for dignity. His Australian accent made him sound smarter. Out of those clothes he’d look like any alcohol-pounded, red-faced, barender, but not behind a desk.
— Beauty pageants built this country, he said.
— They’re one of America’s sacred institutions. Women make more money, have more power, now than ever before in human history, but let’s hope we never forget to appreciate the precious faces of the ladies who compete in the pageant system year after year. Here’s our Jerry Ganz with a story we call, Pretty as a Picture.
His face dispersed into pixilated dust on the screen, which refocused on the image of a shaded runway. It was footage of a contest, but not Miss Innocence. Women in their twenties wearing gowns; this passed quickly. To teenagers in a similar promenade.
A new deep voice began; Jerry Ganz.
— Beauty, he began. Pageants, he finished.
— Every state in the nation hosts dozens each year. Fitness America, Cracker Jacks Bikini Contest, Miss Italia, The Black Mother and Daughter Pageant. Even Manhunt International, for gentlemen.
— While most of us can see that these institutions celebrate competition, excellence and, yes, good looks, not everyone agrees. The weekend of November the 10th found over forty families traveling to a small town named Lumpkin on the border between Virginia and West Virginia. A place where crime of any kind is rare.
— You can see the local temperament at the annual Apple Picking Festival, where families from every part of Frederick County come to enjoy apple cider, apple pie and apple fries.
The shots of sunny orchards were replaced by flashbright footage of college-aged men and women, skinny and sanguine, surrounding a Wendy’s restaurant.
— Film obtained recently shows this band of college students taunting helpless travelers a year ago. The old women you see trapped in this circle of belligerent twenty year olds were only buying copies of The Rescuers Down Under, a Disney film, for their nephews and nieces. When they were accosted, in 1994, at a Parsipany, New Jersey, rest stop.
— The Miss Innocence pageant was different from many others because they only accepted contestants who had held onto their virtue. A contest for girls from ages eleven to seventeen who’d done what few will nowadays— remain a virgin.
— Here you can see the Blue Ridge Theatre. Where musicals such as Oklahoma and The Music Man are regularly run. Gospel choirs practice on the second floor. And on Saturday, the 11th, these girls staged one of the most enjoyable shows in years.
The tabloid show had film of the night of the blowout: the protestors walking around outside the Blue Ridge, of them opening the door to the service hall. A camera man had perched himself at an auditorium window and there was footage of people inside running, spasming, crying as the flares burned. You could hear the horns, but the glass muffled it some. They had shots from inside the protestor’s yellow bus, but none of Uncle Arms.
Jerry Ganz was the gigantic man I’d seen taking notes at the McDonald’s foofaraw. He wore very small glasses, the frames strained to reach both ears.
— Rumors were circulating that the students had a bomb planted somewhere in the audience. If it had gone off who knows how many lives would have been destroyed?
Jerry Ganz was standing in front of the marble Lumpkin library as a man in frayed jeans and tatty T-shirt cleaned the steps behind the reporter.
— But we wouldn’t even bring this news to you if it was just one long sad story. There are enough disappointments in the world. It’s true that Miss Innocence was ruined. But there were actually two pageants that weekend. The second, a local event in its third year. It was conceived by one very special man.
— Ah neva hade it easeh, nut fo’ one minut ov ma lahf.
— His name is Uncle Allen. That’s what he likes to be called. Most of the year he’s in his office in downtown Lumpkin helping people of all incomes to buy a home. Uncle Allen is a mortgage broker. And how did he get started?
— Ah wish yawl cood see mah back, ah tell ya. Gots enuf bruisuss fo a fooball team. I dun hahd woik an’ ah buhleev dat good peeples awlwuss comes out on top.
— Uncle Allen, the son of men and women who had to work on their knees, now has the money to help others stand. And how does he do it? With his own contest. One that rewards girls for their character. He’s only got one question when they come on stage: Have you suffered?
— Because Uncle Allen knows, maybe better than most of us, just what rewards suffering can bring.
— Ah calls ’em mah Goodness Girls. Da winnas.
— And what good fortune really for Uncle Allen and his Goodness Girls. If the Miss Innocence pageant had gone on without incident we may never have known about Uncle Allen, whose pageant brings modeling contracts to girls of all sizes and shapes.
As proof they scrolled a few of the past winners and their advertisements across the screen. I couldn’t disagree about his standards. Only about a third of the girls had waistlines. They modeled ponchos, long jackets, overalls, serapes. Circulars for Good Will, an Army & Navy shop.
— This ends with a mystery though. One of the Goodness Girls is missing. As we speak.
— She left a picture, but not her name. Maybe she didn’t expect to win. A child who, Uncle Allen says, stole the show when she stepped on stage. We have only the Polaroid, taken when she registered, carrying her sick grandmother on her back.
— Uncle Allen hopes she’ll contact his office if she sees this, and the number is at the bottom of our screen.
— But maybe it’s fitting that she went off without a trace. A beautiful girl is just a daydream. We’ll end with her snapshot on the screen so you can see, as Uncle Allen put it, what an angel looks like.
33
Nabisase didn’t want to celebrate with me. When I reached over the couch and rubbed the top of her head with my sweet fine knuckles, she jumped away.
Grandma even stood up, painful work, and said, — Anthony, don’t do that!
— I was congratulating her!
My sister touched up against the entertainment center, one hand on the television screen as if it brought her more warmth than me.
She didn’t want to celebrate at all.
Nabisase put on her coat and left the house. She didn’t even tell Grandma that she was going. To the Apostolic Church of so-and-so. That’s where she called Uncle Arms. Same evening that the program showed.
After she left I told Grandma, — She shouldn’t be scared of me.
— It should be the other way round? My grandmother laughed. At least her award package came to the house. Nabisase still used it as her mailing address.