Stuff 87: A Beauty Pageant – Part 2

By J.J. Atwell

Talent and Interview

Welcome back! In part one, I covered how the judging and the four parts of the beauty pageant worked. If you haven’t read part one you might want to go back and do that before reading this part. 

Today, I’d like to give you a bit more detail on what was involved in the Talent and Interview sections of the pageant.  

Talent

The talent portion of the pageant was a bit mixed. Some of us had an actual talent, mostly musical, while others came up with a unique twist on their talent.  

One of the contestants is a very good bowler. But how do you display that talent to the judges? She brought a set of bowling pins and a ball. She set up the pins on one side of the stage and rolled a strike from the other side. Well, maybe it wasn’t an actual strike, but she certainly got credit for creativeness. 

I did a stand-up comedy routine, which was a more improv than scripted monolog. I attempted to do a Mrs. Mazel kind of routine making sure that my jokes were not disrespectful of women, but instead supported them. You remember from part one that I participated under the name of Miss Nothing. Quite a few of my jokes played on that misnomer. Watching the judges’ expressions told me that I was hitting the mark. 

Interview

In the interview portion, the judges had different questions for each contestant. Only one contestant was on stage at a time and the rest of us were in the back room busy changing outfits and touching up our makeup. That means that each question was a surprise and we didn’t have time to think about our response. All our answers were off the top of our head. There was lots of pressure to give a good response while remaining poised.

Much of that part is a blur in my memory, but I recall two questions. I was asked what I, as a middle-aged crossdresser, would say to younger one. I joked that I appreciated being called middle-aged, but didn’t really think I was going to live to be 150, which got a chuckle. I went on to say that life is short and a younger CD should just go out and be themselves. 

Another question asked what I did for the CD community which gave me an opening to mention my weekly Stuff column and how many people it reaches (Thanks, Stana). I believe that my responses to the interview questions were the major reason I placed as well as I did. 

I’ll be back

The picture at the top of this page is me in my Sunday best during the interview part of the pageant. More about the beauty contest is coming up in part three next week. In the meantime I welcome comments either here on the blog or by email to Jenn6nov at-sign gmail dot com.

Wearing Rene Ruiz

Alf Collins femulating in the 1909 British film How Percy Won the Beauty Competition.
Click here to view this film on YouTube.