My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean Page B

beautiful, but they don’t know how to model and they don’t know how to dress.’ ”
    When Darlene had a break from the phone, she said that nearly every day since JonBenet’s murder she has been called by some reporter. So have most of the best-known coaches and the owners of the other big pageant systems. Since JonBenet, Darlene has had mothers tell her they weren’t going to come to the pageants if reporters would be there, and some mothers have said they had stopped answering their phones because they were sick of being asked to comment on the murder. She is rankled by how dismissive nonpageant people are of everything that she loves about pageants and of how much they mean to these little girls. Some people in pageants have difficult lives and work hard all the time and lose out on a lot, but on any Sunday at a pageant somewhere they have their chance to win. This seems so obvious that Darlene thinks there must be some other reason that pageants have been so maligned. She has finally decided that people who don’t appreciate children’s pageants probably just don’t have their own pretty little girls.
    From all appearances, Darlene has been a very successful entrepreneur. It happens that most of her state directors are women, and many other pageant systems and pageant-related businesses, like the dress shops, are owned by women. Some of the best-known coaches are women, too. It seems odd that these are the very same women who are certain that a girl’s best path in life is to learn how to look good onstage. It’s as if they had never noticed that they’ve made something of themselves by relying on other talents.
    The first day I was in Jackson, Darlene and I sat in her living room to watch some tapes of last year’s Southern Charm national finals, while Jerry was in the other room labeling FedEx boxes with Glitz dresses inside, bound for Irving, Texas, and Lawrenceville, Georgia, and Leesville, Louisiana. To me, all the kids on the tape looked the same—cute, awkward, stiff in their frothy dresses, a little uncertain when they got to the X’s on the stage. Most of them stared anxiously at their mothers for directions. Darlene used to judge pageants, and she still has a judge’s eye: As we watched the tape, she pointed out winners and losers and which girls had pushy coaches and which girls were wearing makeup that didn’t do justice to their skin tone. “This girl, she’s beautiful, but her sportswear doesn’t do a thing for her, it’s too boxy,” Darlene pointed out. “I don’t like this one’s hair all sprayed up like that. I swear, she looks like a Pentecostal! Oh, here’s the Southern Belle category. You have to wear something that’s historically accurate. My judges get so ticky about it that they’ll come up onstage and check your dress and make sure you don’t have any zippers. . . . Now, look at this baby with her belt sagging. I don’t know why these mothers don’t realize that a little Velcro under the belt would hold it up. Babies don’t have any hips and they have that little potbelly, and a belt just isn’t going to stay up on its own.”
    In her personal philosophy, Darlene doesn’t like too much eyeliner, and this year she’s going to allow only classic Miss America–style modeling in the Swimwear competition. She blames coaches for teaching sexy poses to the girls. “Ten years ago, it wasn’t like this,” she said. “Now, with the coaches, things are getting out of control.” On her granddaughter, Shelby, she likes to see simple makeup and a gorgeous dress, and since Shelby is doing well, this appears to be working. But some girls do need help to be really big in pageants, according to Darlene. They need coaching, they need advice on their clothes, and, in a few exceptional circumstances, they might even need surgery, although as a rule she doesn’t approve. “There was one girl, about thirteen, and it was a special case,” Darlene said. “She was a very pretty