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The 2002 Miss California Pageant,
or Race, Politics, Religion, Family, Arias, and My Sister's Own Personal Hell

Pre-Show: Miss Californias 1997 (a striking white woman in a long dress) and 1998 (a bleached-blond black woman in a knee-length skirt) come out on stage, smiling. They run us through all the program's sponsors, pausing to snark on the lack of an automotive sponsor back when they competed, and give us a brief outline of what is to come. They also introduce us to the contestants in what I think is called the California Distinguished Teen competition, but I don't really care, seeing as one of the girls is already wearing the tiara and they STILL try to make us wait a few minutes before confessing who won.

Ten minutes of down time. Well, hey, they have to set up. OK, fine. My parents take turns explaining to me how over the past three days, during the preliminaries, the dance sequences were all the same each day--likely to give the contestants lots of practice for tonight, the big night. (I'll state right now that they also provided running commentary over the next three hours. Imagine watching what I'm describing while wearing headphones tuned simultaneously to NPR and the Golf Channel, and you'll get the idea.) (I'll also mention now that MsCA's '97, '98, and '01 did little performances to distract us while the stage was being set up behind the curtain, but I can't remember who did what when.)

Then it begins.

The contestants march onstage carrying candles as an instrumental of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays, culminating in a thunderous "Glory, glory, halleluuuujah!" as the young women take their places. I marvel. In this era of church-and-state controversies, where singing "God Bless America" is practically a political act, they kick it off with, well, a hymn. About holy war. Without any actual mention of America in it. Miss CA is not a public organization, and I am not in Kansas anymore. However, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only friend of Dorothy here, based on the vibes I'm getting from the male dancers--one of whom is twirling a baton--they're using to supplement the contestants onstage. Wow, there's a tortured metaphor chain.

So yeah, there's a medley of tunes about the military, which refers at least to the army, navy (Sadly, "In the Navy" is not the chosen tune, but this is more than made up for at swimsuit time), and air force before my ears shut down. The Miss CA Dancers (about twenty women and five men, dressed in fatigues, some carrying what appear to be fake rocket launchers) do some pretty neat moves up front while the contestants (there are 51 of them, by the way) swing their arms, stomp their feet, and grin madly (all in sync) in the background. I picture their first pratice for this sequence being a fairly miserable affair, with no music in the background and stage directors shouting at them from all angles to put more gumption into what is really a silly-looking move when out of context.

The contestants are all announced individually. My father notes that C (my stepsister, and the reason I'm here) doesn't wave, whereas all the other contestants do. My stepmother huffs that waving seems pretty corny to her anyway. This pretty much sums up everything you need to know about my family.

Miss California 2001 appears, a vivacious woman with short blond hair who probably jumped and screamed when crowned last year. That would've been fun to see. (She won on her fourth try, and apparently that's not uncommon in pageant culture.) She's apparently our MC for the first couple of hours. Without skipping a beat, she starts off the show by announcing the top ten contestants--the semifinalists. Each of the first nine reacts pretty much the same way: widens eyes, hugs whoever's nearby, skitters up front, hugs some more.

Then MsCA'01 is called over to the side of the stage. There's been a mistake! The second semifinalist announced was supposed to be Miss Greater Bay Area, not Miss Greater East Bay! MsGEB slinks back to the crowd of non-semifinalists as I hear myself gasp and say "How heartbreaking!" It truly is. A murmur runs through the audience. But the show must go on.

They announce the tenth and final semifinalist, and my Demogra-Vision flashes on with the news that a) she's black, and b) the other nine are overwhelmingly blond. This is how I see the world. It probably drives people crazy to hear me.

They jump right into the talent portion. #1: Aria. #2: Showtune. #3: Baton-twirling, to the tune of Ricky Martin's "The Cup of Life." My eyes start watering--one, because I fucking love that song (it managed to not get overplayed in this country), and two, because I'm happy not to see another singer. Here's the thing. Yes, it takes great talent to sing really well, but it doesn't really offer much to the audience in the way of a visual. You have a bunch of people singing two-minute voice-showcases, it all kind of blurs together.

#4 sings a tepid song called "A New Life," with the tune brazenly ripped off from Carole King's "So Far Away." It's bad. I miss the showtune. And there are few musical styles I hate more than showtunes (reggae is one, but that's all the ammo you get). #5 is another aria. All right, already. Oh, wait, it's time for an intermission. Already.

Intermission-talk from my parents: Blah blah blah, they should let all eleven announced finalists compete (the undeserving will get knocked out anyway), whose fault do you think it is, etc., etc. Too much speculation for me. How did I end up sitting between them?

Twenty-odd minutes later, we're back. The executive director of the Miss California Scholarship Organization (I'll call him Mr. Miss for short) begins to make his way onstage, trips over a wire, and falls flat on his face. My stepmother had just told me about the parents' brunch they'd attended the other day, wherein Mr. Miss had made a joke about some of the staffers being from Nevada--he called them wetbacks and said it was OK "because they'd had their shots"--and she was royally pissed off about it. (She continued to talk through the night about alerting the media and asking my advice since I'd worked for Amnesty International and I'd tried to explain that we dealt with political prisoners, not tacky slurs, but...yeah.) So not much sympathy from us. I weighed the pros and cons of flinging my water bottle onto the stage, but relented after admitting to myself that I'd likely hit a judge or someone in the orchestra pit.

Mr. Miss gave a short conciliatory speech about the mix-up. Whatever. Stage moms everywhere are fainting. The world is not otherwise over.

Back to talent. Four more songs and a ballet performance. The last contestant, Miss Hi-I'm-Black-Please-Stop-Staring, gave a pretty rousing show of "Your Daddy's Son" from Ragtime, but Dad was whispering the whole time about how much better she was at the preliinaries, so I couldn't fully enjoy it.

We are distracted for a while by a professional male tap dancer whose name I tried really hard to remember since he was damn good and damn funny, and he did impressions (including Savion Glover, whom I spent a couple of minutes explaining to my parents, Michael Jackson, Fred Astaire, and Michael Flatley).

The swimsuit competition begins to the tune of "Let's Get Soakin' Wet" from the Queer as Folk soundtrack. I am beside myself with glee, as I wonder how many other people in the theater were aware of that connection. MsCA'01 is grandstanding like all get-out and it's as silly as the opening was pompous and I love it.

As the Top Ten parade around in front (in swimsuits and high heels. WTF? This is so lecherous and undignifying--I'm glad to hear that C would rather have just done sit-ups onstage), the remainder of the contestants pose with inner tubes, floppy hats, rubber duckies, beach balls, and other beach accoutrements. The overall effect is cool, but I can't help thinking those not in the Top Ten are essentially window-dressing for the remainder of the evening. They somehow soldier on, smiling.

Oh, is it time for another intermission? OK. (Half an hour passes. I hear later that someone fell off the stage and that had to be dealt with quietly.)

Evening gown competition. Can we just skip this? It's basically the same as swimsuit (oh, my bad, "physical fitness"), with more clothes and different music.

Miss California 2000 comes out on stage, a sunny-looking Asian woman who still appears bewildered by the incredibility of it all. I find myself wondering what happened to Miss California 1999, as she's the only winner of the past five years not to make an appearance.

While we wait for the judges' results, MsCA'00 regales us with a story of how she was finishing her senior year at Stanford and her sister dared her to enter the local pageant (Miss Los Altos Hills--and by the way, I would really like to see a map of all the local jurisdictions that feed to MsCA, because it sounds more heinous than the worst congressional district: there are "cities" and "counties" and "greater areas" and damn, it's weird). She won, then won MsCA and then had to defer her first year of med school at UCSF, and she's just so sweet I wonder if we couldn't have just given her the title again, age limits and voting rules be damned.

The results are in: MsCA'00 summarily dispatches five of the semi-finalists. They're kind of quick about changing gears, I notice.

Interviewing begins, and it's basically what you expect. One question about the finalist's platform, one random. The only interesting platform question has to do with Miss Young Black Woman (she made it to the final 5! I like her!) and the ed-advocate nonprofit she and her mother founded. "We're in it for the money." A good answer, I thought, but everyone around me declared her sunk.

The random questions prove more interesting, and what I'd heard is true--there is a right (wink, wink, nudge) and a wrong answer to each one. My favorite was [not completely verbatim, but the cadence was the same]:

Q: How do you feel about the recent court decision that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional?
A: It's horrible. Ours is a nation UNDER GOD, and it was founded as a nation UNDER GOD, and we will always be a people UNDER GOD, and how dare they claim otherwise!

The audience cheered, just as they did on the cloning/stem cell research question when the finalist invoked God. I then picture one of them cracking, yelling "God, this sucks," and stalking offstage as the Pavlovian audience claps and cheers, oblivious to context.

Is it time for another intermission? Oh, hey! Tap Guy is back! Tap tap tap tap slide-slap toe-tap. Tappity tappity toe-tap. Now I'm thinking about that episode of The Simpsons with Little Vicki and...oh, never mind.

Mr. Miss has appeared. The five finalists are lined up. Everyone else (still smiling) in the background.

Fourth runner-up: The black one! [Dammit! I liked her!]
Third and second: Who cares, I couldn't tell them apart. I think one's a blonde, one's a brunette.
First runner-up: Miss Greater Bay Area, whom you'll recall was nearly not announced, due to the earlier screw-up. She seems nice. But then, most of them do.
Which makes the winner MISS CONTRA COSTA COUNTY! She who sang that insipid "A New Life" song. I instantly take points off for that. Otherwise, she's Barbie. Vaguely plastic-looking. Whatever. Good luck in October. The tiara is taken from MsCA'01, and it's all over.

Just kidding. There's a coronation gala immediately following (scheduled for 10 pm to 1 am) and an awards brunch the next morning (9 am to noon), but there's no way in hell I'm recapping that tedium. Seriously, these young women deserve cash for what they've gone through all week--hardly eating, spending sixteen hours at a time in the theater rehearsing, no outside contact except for a designated half an hour per day in an area that seems strangely reminiscent of a petting zoo.

The coronation gala = 0. The only remotely interesting item to report from the awards brunch was (apart from a very strong suspicion that Mr. Miss was drunk off his goat) that the fourth runner-up won Miss Congeniality. Yay, her!
peachy as always, Mike at 1:40 PM