The peculiar news has reached even to this far remove of the British West Indies:
The contestants in this year’s Miss America Pageant (8 p.m. Sept. 17 on NBC-Ch. 5) will not have to wear shoes in the swimsuit competition.
They are to go before the judges and the cameras in full Spandex, but entirely barefoot-a first in 74 years of Miss America pageanting and swimsuit competitioning.
Also, they’ve done away with the traditional swimsuit procession and foolish prancing about, that has been a fixture of the pageant since it began in 1920. Instead, these magnificent, big-haired examples of unwed American young womanhood are to appear on stage en masse as mere props in a big swimsuit musical production number. It will have to do with the beach, thus offering a rationale for their sitting around in bathing suits, and will employ actual Beach Boys music.
The judges will discreetly observe the contestants during the production number, unobtrusively evaluating their swimsuit excellence while they sit or stand with their toes entirely naked.
Does this mean a blow to the chances of contestants who, in pageants past, could score big on their lack of need for Wonderbras while hiding big, flat ugly feet and fallen arches in high-heels? Should the contest be renamed The Miss Barefoot America Pageant?
Such are mysteries beyond my ken. But, curious as to how peculiar this peculiar news might actually be, I made an exhaustive survey of the beaches down here and, mirabile dictu, encountered not a single woman wearing high heels and a swimsuit. I found no one on this island wearing high heels of any sort in any circumstance.
There were a few French and Portuguese women wearing what appeared to be the bottom halves of bathing suits and nothing besides, but they weren’t wearing high heels, either. A couple over on an isolated stretch of Grace Bay were wearing, golly, nothing at all.
This put me in mind of a legendary, notorious, heavily political and very private luncheon and dining club in Kansas City back in the rip-roaring days of the old Tom Pendergast/Harry Truman political machine. It was called the Democratic Businessmen’s Club and the waitresses there wore high heels and nothing else! (Imagine a Democratic National Convention with that going on today.)
I suppose we can be thankful the Miss America Pageant people didn’t decide to go that route. But of course, they would not. Their elimination of high heels and the swimsuit parade this year is just another step in the pageant’s full, wimpy retreat from the obsessively politically correct feminist harpies who have long been trying to equate the pageant with what went on in the harem of Sultan Abi Ben al-Haroun Whoopee.
Just such a feminist harpy in the Washington Post the other day described the pageant without qualification as “sexist” and “notoriously archaic.”
That’s perfectly silly. In this era of “Baywatch,” “Married . . . With Children” and Danielle Steel TV mini-series, the only thing on television less sexist-certainly less sexy-than the Miss America Pageant is “Washington Week in Review.”
But if the pageant’s retreat continues, we may reach the ridiculous point where the Miss America contestants come out fully clothed (except for their feet) holding up empty swimsuits in front of them.
The pageant, of course, can never abandon swimsuits entirely, knowing full well it’s the main reason a large part of the audience watches the show. No one’s going to tune in just to hear Miss South Carolina play “Listen to the Mockingbird” on the kazoo.
Inspired by all the tropical languor down here, I have a suggestion that ought to boost the pageant’s ratings enormously while silencing the harpies. Instead of having the Miss America contestants wear swimsuits, have them wear nothing at all. They can appear in a big production number rolling around beneath silken sheets with handsome, swarthy young men while some group other than the Beach Boys plays swarthy, steamy music. To add spice, there could be a couple of staged murders.
The name of the show would be changed to “Danielle Steel’s Miss America,” of course. It would knock the socks (and high heels) off the competition and-as experience shows-there wouldn’t be a peep out of the harpies.
