Poor North Dakota: One woman’s journey from geek to geeky beauty queen.

by Ellen Weisberg and Kelly Gousios

(Published in The Writing Disorder.com: A Literary Journal, Spring 2011 issue.)

Link to the Youtube video of “Poor North Dakota”!

As I wrapped the unopened “Mrs. United States Pageant” DVD in a
second envelope and scribbled my mother’s name and address on the front
of it, I knew I was making a grave mistake.
      Yes, she had begged me to order it.
      Yes, she had begged me to order it more than once.
      Actually, more than twice.
      And yes, I had made her wait no less than nine full months after the live
event
before I finally mustered the motivation to mail in the order form and
the accompanying check.
      But it was still a grave mistake on my part.
      Why?
      Because it would only be a matter of time after her sweaty fingers eagerly
wrapped around the DVD and pried the case open.
      Only a matter of time after her anticipatory eyes took in the vivid colors
of the bathing suits and the elegant sway of the flowing gowns, and her ears
heard the declarations of the delegates, proudly stating their names and
those of their represented states.

      Only a matter of time before I would be subjected to face down the
answer to the big question:
      Did I look like a schmuck on stage?
      And only a matter of time before I would be subjected to face down the
answer to an even bigger question:
      Did it matter?

Now how exactly did I, a New England research scientist whose biggest
daily fashion challenge for the past 22 years had been whether or not to
continue wearing stretch pants that developed a small hole in the upper
right thigh, become a state representative for North Dakota in the 2009 Mrs.
United States Pageant?
      Funny you should ask.
      I’d been asking myself the same question months before the pageant, the
hours leading up to and during the pageant, and for nine months since the
pageant. And after seeing myself through the objective eyes of a camera, and
the unbiased angling and focusing and zooming by some indifferent stranger
behind that camera, I had started pressing myself even harder for the
answer.
      And the answer was not an easy one to get. Yes, I’d been a research
scientist, with many years of carefully controlled and designed experiments,
calculations, measurements, and precisely generated and fully analyzed data
tucked away like a warm blanket fending off the bitter cold chill of ignorance
with comforting awareness and elucidation. You’d think dissection of just
about anything would have been easy for me. But in this case, the research
scientist was the one in the petri dish being probed and examined, with
assessment that was ideally to be fair and unbiased.
      Alas, not an easy task.

It was much easier, at least initially, to look at the nuts and bolts behind
what drew me into the land of boldness and beauty. It all started when a

pageant director had apparently, in the midst of her desperate recruiting
attempts, smiled favorably upon a fairly blurry, distant and over 10 year-old
profile picture of me on an Internet site that I’d been using mainly for the
purpose of promoting some children’s books that I co-authored for fun with
my husband. When she first told me she thought I’d make a “great New
Hampshire state representative” and that I should consider entering the
upcoming local Northeastern pageant, my first impulse was to delete this
obvious spam/scam that somehow found its way into my inbox.
      But something stopped me. Call it … a gnawing curiosity.
      What if this was for real?
      I had a sudden and clawing need for spontaneity and adventure. A need
to be impulsive. Whimsical. Wacky. Dangerous.
      I looked into it, and it was legitimate. It was when this woman told me
that a pageant could help one promote an idea or a business that the bells
and whistles went off in my head and I realized that it could be an effective
way to promote the children’s books. And so, I went for it.
      And then it went for me.
      I was the only one to show up on the day of the preliminary pageant
without flesh-tone colored shoes for my bathing suit (I honestly thought
black heels would look kind of cool with a Speedo), and I was also the only
one there without a sarong for the swimsuit (I really didn’t even know what a
sarong was- It had to be explained to me). The women there were luckily
pitying, gracious and helpful, and scrambled to find extras of whatever they
brought with them that’d get me through the evening. I must admit that
without intending to, I accidentally packed up and stole one brunette
woman’s nude-colored heels that she had let me borrow. I would have
returned them by mail had I known the woman’s name, or had I even been
able to pick her out from among all the other brunette women that in false
eyelashes and layers of makeup looked identical to one another.
      I also accidentally stole a sarong.
      The pageant actually went fairly smoothly, or at least I thought so at the
time. I didn’t care for the excess makeup that was layered on me, or the false
eyelashes that I had been intimidated by others into wearing, as I
wholeheartedly believed it made me look like some kind of twisted version of
a transvestite: a woman trying to look like a man trying to look like a
woman. But I went with it, and tried to believe what everyone kept telling
me, which was that when you’re on stage the excess makeup looks good.
      My main concern throughout the show was tripping in my stolen heels,
which I thankfully did not do.
      What I apparently DID do was a really crappy job.
      When it was award time at the end of the evening, I stood between the
only two other contestants that were competing for the title of “Mrs. New
Hampshire.” The woman to the right of me received so many awards
honoring her photogenic potential and physical fitness and contributions to
society that she didn’t have enough hands to hold all of them. The woman to
the left of me received one award, the “Director’s Choice” award, which was
decided by the same woman who had originally wooed me into the pageant
with the line, “I think you’d make a great state representative.” Then there
was the woman in the middle who received absolutely nothing and was left
to go home with her soon-to-be-stolen flesh-colored shoes and sarong, and
to ponder the current and future status of her trodden self-esteem.

A month or so later, I received a phone call from a pageant affiliate, who
informed me that I had been selected “at large” from a pool of applications
and photos to represent North Dakota, which had no state delegates as it
had no pageant director, in the upcoming national pageant to be held that
summer in Las Vegas. She asked me if I’d be interested.
      Whoa.
      Is she kidding?
      Me? The only one of three contestants for the New Hampshire title who
received not even the smallest consolation prize and who also stole a pair of
shoes and a sarong?
      And … North Dakota? What did I know about North Dakota other than
there were roaming bison and ice fishing? And the fact that Steve Buscemi
did a great job in the movie that was based in, and named after, the state’s
largest city?
      Those feelings came over me again. The sudden and clawing need for
spontaneity and adventure. A need to be impulsive. Whimsical.
Wacky. Dangerous.
      And it would also be a good opportunity to promote the children’s books.
      I went for it.
      And then it went for me.
      Again.
      Las Vegas was intense, and I was convinced that I’d never— even in the
week’s time I was there—be able to learn my way around the Orleans Hotel
and Casino, or be able to find my way out of it … I developed blisters like I’d
never seen from the constant pressure of walking around the casino and
during rehearsals in high heels, along with a blood clot under my big toe nail
that was still visible after nine months. And yet again, a makeup artist that
came to me on the recommendation of another contestant succeeded in
making me look like a cross between a Geisha and the Joker from Batman.

      But in all honesty, I found the pageant itself to be … kind of pleasurable.
And I convinced myself that with my hair professionally made up and my
face under twenty plus layers of makeup, I could blend in with the others
and at the very least do a respectable job and have something unique and
exciting to look back on some day. It was all good. It was all positive.
      And for nine months, that was how I continued to feel about it. All good.
All positive.
      That was, until I was subjected to actually seeing myself on a DVD that
captured what I did, in fact, look like on stage, in Las Vegas, with my
professional hairstyle and under the twenty-plus layers of makeup. As I sat
in an armchair at my parents’ villa in West Palm Beach, looking much the
same as Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange in front of films about
violence and pornography with his eyelids propped open and his arms in a
strait-jacket, I watched Mrs. North Dakota in all her warped transvestite
glory first slump across the stage in a bathing suit that somehow had gotten
twisted and looked asymmetrical against her not-as-trim-as-I-had-hoped-
or-thought-body. The stomach bulge I thought I had detected underneath
the swimsuit was confirmed when Mrs. North Dakota slumped across the
stage in a tight-fitting evening gown, flashing her portly protuberance as she
slumped sideways to the audience and made her rapid exit off the stage.
      There was actually one pregnant delegate in the pageant, and in
retrospect all would have been forgiven had I also claimed to be with child
during the event. But, in reality it was just me and my poor posture and my
lack of exercise that—combined with the bright stage
floodlights—highlighted the fact that the state of North Dakota was indeed
screwed.

And what was up with my eyebrows? I had thought they looked normal
when I last glanced at them in a mirror prior to the pageant. But on the
DVD, they looked like rigor mortisized caterpillars that had dropped dead in
the center of my forehead. And was one of my eyebrows higher than the
other? Now how in the hell did that happen? I believed that Marty Feldman
would have had a better stage appearance than I did with all these freakish
flaws I was making note of. Freakish flaws that were in stark contrast to the
otherwise paragons of competing delegate perfection that dazzled the
audience from start to finish.
      And so, as it turned out, I did subjectively look like a schmuck on stage,
and it did matter. Alas, I did not claim some semblance of emotional security
upon seeing myself in the objective eyes of a moving camera, and alas I had
quite an emotional reaction to the unveiling of what had otherwise been
laying low and dormant in my imagination for nine relatively blissful
months.
      I shut the DVD player off and pursed my lips.
      As if it wasn’t enough that South Dakota gets the fame of Mount
Rushmore, its poor over-shadowed northern neighbor must now tack a
slumping bloated, uneven eye-browed state delegate to its list.

It was at this point that I attempted to move past the nuts and bolts of the
frivolous how’s, when’s and where’s that led me into pageant land, and
instead scientifically ventured into the hardcore, deep-rooted, maternal-,
paternal-, sibling-, peer-, cultural- and societal-influenced why’s. This
pageant notion had me suddenly facing questions that dated back to my
gum-smacking, big feathered hair days: Was it a lack of free time that kept
me from being a cheerleader? Was it a scheduling conflict with chemistry
lab that prevented me from being Home Coming Queen?
      I knew deep down that even in a class of one, I would not have been
Home Coming Queen because I honestly had no interest. I had no interest
because I had no one encouraging me to be anything other than the
stereotyped geeky girl I had always done such a smashing job at being. I had
suitably mastered the art of introversion and social awkwardness and had
provided my junior high and high school classes with a token bookworm-ish
nerd. Why would I- or anyone that knew me back then- have wanted to risk
tainting such purposeful perfection?
      And so perhaps it wasn’t such a great mystery that I should find myself,
decades later, on a lighted stage in Las Vegas in a bright red cocktail dress
and stolen nude heels doing a choreographed opening number to “Baby I’m
a Star” by the artist formerly known as “Prince.” No great mystery why this
erudite poster child for geekdom attempted to infiltrate one of the top tiers
of modern America’s hierarchal caste system, earmarked by beauty, elegance
and social eptness.
      I was encouraged to do it. Plain and simple. For the first time in my life, I
found myself being encouraged to be something I had never even thought
about stepping outside of the box to be.
      And also, this particular time in my life was technically the middle of my
life, should I live so long as to see my eighties. Midlife crises come in all
shapes and sizes. While for men it could arrive in the form of a Lexus SC 430
or a 23 year-old intern, for me it arrived in a tankini and suicide heels. It was
all very breathtaking, in the sense that the combination of anxiety and
apparel reduced my ability to take in air.
      Alone in the dark at the back of my parents’ villa, holding a cup of coffee
in one hand and the DVD remote with the other, I had to admit that there
was in fact no mystical late-in-life calling from the outside of the box as I

watched myself clumsily stagger across the stage. Mrs. Wyoming, Mrs.
Alabama. They glided and I visibly faltered. Not in my mind, though. In my
mind, I had mimicked them perfectly.
      Yet even if I could have succeeded in mimicking them, I could never be
them. Cold, pained, and quasi-scientific observation of the subject in the
DVD showed no other viable interpretation of the data.
      They were them.
      I was me.
       And … I wasn’t so sure, after all of the data were in and I had the chance
to plot the results and construct line graphs, that there was anything really
so wrong with that. My final data interpretation was colored by a pearl or
two of wisdom a fellow pageant-goer had dropped not long after the viewing
of the DVD:

“As for the pageant, I’m nowhere near perfect and I’d love to meet
someone who is (lol). Really, I don’t do perfect and I know I wasn’t great
myself, however, all that matters to me is that I did my best—and that I
know I do good things for people!”

Hear, hear.
      In the pageant, on that Las Vegas stage, I didn’t look like a beauty queen.
I looked like a scientist.
      That’s because in the pageant, on that Las Vegas stage, I was a scientist.
      Yes, a geeky scientist. With 20 plus years of geeky science under my
geeky belt, in the geeky box that has been – for all intents and purposes – my

geeky life for over 40 geeky years now. And there is not a sash or a crown or
a pair of stolen heels that could change that geeky fact.
      It’s a fact that I’ve been living fairly comfortably with for a long time.
      It’s a fact that I’ll continue to live fairly comfortably with for as long as
I’m able to live.
      Even after viewing the “2009 Mrs. United States Pageant” DVD.
      Okay, so maybe South Dakota has Mount Rushmore. But I’ve seen
“Fargo” three times now. And I’d like to see it again.

Ellen Weisberg is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators. She has authored/illustrated several books published by U.K.-
based Chipmunkapublishing, including “Gathering Roses” (2007), “All
Across Canada” (2008), “All Across China” (2009), “Fruit of the Vine”
(2010), “All Across Europe” (in press), and “Making Emmie Smile” (in
press). She published a short story and poetry in the literary periodical,
PKA’s Advocate. In addition, she authored and illustrated “Friends and
Mates in Fifty States” (Galde Press, 2008), and has had articles published
in magazines, including Natural Solutions, Many Hands, Today the
Dragon Wins, NH Mirror, and Working Mother Magazine.
Kelly Gousios is a former Army Engineer Officer with a masters in
Regional Planning. Later, she declared herself well into her second life time
and entered Federal service as a Presidential Management Fellow. She
finds her life of late happily derailed by children and the desire to write.
She was tickled pink to realize that she lived next door to Mrs. North
Dakota, albeit in New Hampshire.