The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills (12 page)

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant and Festival began in 1924. According to local lore, sixteen-year-old Charalena Blanton, the daughter of a prominent local cotton grower, told her beloved papa that there should be a festival in Melva, and that she would like to be the queen of said festival. After much chin-scratching, Mr. Blanton suggested that perhaps a Cotton Queen or Cotton Festival might please his daughter (as this was, after all, the basis of the local economy), but young Charalena instead declared that she would like for the festival to celebrate her favorite local foodstuff, livermush. And thus the Livermush Festival and Miss Livermush began. The festival became an annual event (except for about a five-year hiatus during the Great Depression), and yes, you guessed it: Charalena was the first winner of the pageant, the very first Melva’s Miss Livermush.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:
It’s also said that Charalena was not terrifically beautiful. In fact, it seems she was missing a great many of her teeth. At that point, academics were not taken into consideration either. But Papa Blanton happened to be footing the festival bill for those first couple years, so that probably outweighed any concern over dental pulchritude and helped the judges make their decision.

Among my twenty-first-century Miss Livermush competitors, however, it seemed that a full set of teeth was now de rigueur. The stage for our competition was set up outdoors, facing the historic courthouse (now a Civil War museum). Metal folding chairs had been set up in rows for what looked like miles.

Maybe it would storm
, I thought.
Maybe there’d be a tornado. Maybe the world would end
— but not fast enough. Already the pageant had started.

I found Margo in the wings and wedged myself next to her among all the other sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in tight, stiff dresses. Quarter-sized drops of cold sweat rolled down my armpits. We were a squirming mass of fabric, struggling to get a view out to the audience. I blinked, sans glasses, and saw only a swirl of blank putty faces and shirt colors.

Ms. Whitaker made welcomes and introductions into the microphone. The delay in the sound system made it nearly impossible to hear what she was saying from backstage, but periodically
she paused for bursts of audience applause. Then Blair was pushing us out onstage, hissing, “Go, go! Now!”

I clomped along, following the herd of girls. “You Are So Beautiful” blared out over the speakers. We crammed onto the stage. Some girls waved cheerily to a parent or sibling in the crowd. Blind without my glasses, stunned, I focused on staying as far in the back as possible.

Ms. Whitaker stood in the front and explained to the crowd, “We want to congratulate all of these young ladies onstage. They are all outstanding juniors at their respective high schools. They all represent Melva livermush — but only ONE young lady will be crowned this year’s Melva’s Miss Livermush! Now, the judges have already narrowed the contestant pool to a group of finalists based on GPA, teacher recommendations, and an essay. These twenty young ladies will continue in the talent and interview portion of the Miss Livermush contest!”

The crowd roared in enthusiasm. Was there really nothing better for these people to do on a Saturday morning than watch a bunch of dorky-looking girls in dresses on a stage? I groaned silently, hoping to make it through the pageant as early and as unembarrassingly as possible.

Contest helper-ladies in corsages were patting the chosen finalists on the shoulder and beckoning them to the front of the stage. Each chosen girl invariably squealed and clasped her hands. Mostly they were girls I didn’t know, from the county high school, but then Margo was selected. She smiled and moved
forward. And then, with the loudest squeal yet, Missy. In the final moment, I too felt my shoulder touched. The unselected girls cleared the stage, and I saw that TR, Casey, Tabitha, and some of TR’s cheerleading minions were in the final twenty as well. Camera flashes went off. The audience members clapped and shouted. Sweating, I tried to force a movie star smile. The mascara on my lashes felt like glue. I thought I heard my mom hooting, loud and happy, her voice rising above the other female voices in the crowd.

When the applause died down, Ms. Whitaker and Blair huddled the twenty finalists together in the wings.

“All right, girls. As you were told, you are to be prepared at this point to perform your talent. We’ll have a fifteen-minute break while the dancers from Miss Debbie’s Broadway Star Dance Academy perform a couple numbers, and then it’s back onstage in the randomly assigned order listed. That means first we have Grace Alton. I’ll post the list here in the wings. Go get ready!”

We scampered, tripping over our dresses, back to the green room.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” Missy mumbled next to me. I knew that Missy, after wracking her brain for some performable talent, had decided to rediscover her third-grade tap-dancing skills.

In the dressing area, I sat numbly watching the flurry of changing and nervous chatter. I pulled out my notebook and
observed them, noting how each girl handled her nervousness,
eyeing
each tic and superstitious ritual. Girls who hadn’t progressed in the contest came up to friends and hugged them, wishing them luck, until Blair shooed them away. I didn’t need to change clothes for my talent, but Missy was shimmying her way into a spangled tap costume with tiny fringe skirt and tights.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” she repeated.

“You’ll be great, Missy. You’re a star,” I said.

She furrowed her brow, adjusting the crotch of her costume. “You’re still reading an essay as your talent performance? Not the livermush essay, though, right? The anthropology one?”

I nodded. The others would razzle-dazzle in sparkly clothes, whereas I would finally showcase some of my anthropological fieldwork. Maybe it wasn’t what people traditionally considered a performable talent, but I’d worked hard on my anthropology paper. It was full of what I hoped would be stunning and incisive observations.

After the dancers finished, we finalists stood backstage, waiting, sweating, as Grace Alton began. She did ballet to a Johnny Cash song. The subsequent early acts seemed to happen amazingly fast. A couple girls sang. There was a flute, a violin, and, of course, three piano pieces. Three dances: two ballet, one modern.

Breakdown of Talents Performed
at Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant

ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The term “talent” is strange and elusive and open to interpretation. It is said that Charalena Blanton, the first Miss Livermush, performed cornhusk dolls as her talent. By this I mean that she got up onstage with cornhusks and made dolls while the admiring crowd watched. Part of me has to really respect this girl.

I peered out from the curtains, watching each act. All of us hovered, silently rating our competitors.

“Our next performer, from Melva High School, is Missy Wheeler! She’ll be tap-dancing to ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’”

The music started. Waving and beaming like Shirley Temple, Missy tapped out onstage. The crowd cheered.

Watching her, I felt embarrassed for Missy but not humiliated. She moved simply and clumsily —
tap tap tap
. Nothing fancy, kind of childish. She looked exactly like what she was: a girl who’d learned some rudimentary tapping in third grade, and now had thrown together a last-minute tap routine years later. But she didn’t fall down, no one booed, and she finished the number. I flushed with desperate jealousy. It was a generous crowd, and once again, they cheered wildly when the song finished.

In the wings again, a flushed, sweating Missy swooped toward me for a hug.

“I did it!” she whispered.

“You were great!” I said.

Five more girls went onstage, faster and faster it seemed. Thanks to the random draw, I would be the final performer. My bladder ached with the urge to pee, but I’d already gone to the bathroom five times. Ms. Whitaker strolled back onto the stage.

“Aren’t these ladies talented, y’all?! I wish they all could be Melva’s Miss Livermush! Well, we have two more girls left, both from Melva High School. Up next, we have Margo Werther, who will be singing, and she will immediately be followed by our final performer, Janice Wills!”

The crowd cheered. I watched Margo walk out onto the stage again. She wore the same green dress she’d been wearing, but now she’d added a huge gardenia placed in her hair, like Billie Holiday. The audience grew hushed; Margo had presence.

She leaned in to the microphone. I waited for some sort of tinny music to begin over the loudspeakers, but nothing played. Silence. And then, finally, she began to sing unaccompanied.

She sang “Amazing Grace,” an atypical pageant song, perhaps, but the crowd listened in awed silence. Margo’s voice, a warm, rich contralto, flowed over them. My neck prickled at “how sweet the sound.” My arms were goose-bumped again. I watched Margo’s back onstage as she swayed slightly, prolonging the notes. Even without my glasses, I could tell the crowd was transfixed, hanging on her every syllable. Margo was annihilating the rest of the competition.

When she held the quavering final note to its finish, nothing happened. For a few moments, everyone was completely still. There were no “Whoo-hoo! That’s my girl!” no whistles, no nothing. People started clapping as if hesitant, made shy by Margo’s performance. The clapping grew slowly, and then it was thunderous. The crowd was on their feet. They began to whistle and cheer. Someone, an old man, shouted, “Bravo! Encore!”

Margo bowed slightly. The clapping continued and continued. Finally Ms. Whitaker had to step onstage and motion for silence.

“Ahem. Great, yes, beautiful. And now, for our final performer, Janice Wills!”

I walked quickly to the center of the stage. How could I follow Margo? And how could I follow Margo with this:

“Hi, ev-everyone. My name is Janice Wills, and for my talent, I will be reading an essay entitled ‘Margaret Mead, Manners,
and Melva: An Anthropologist Comes of Age in the Land of Livermush.’”

The crowd gazed at me silently. This, I noted, was a different silence from the one Margo had encountered. Someone coughed. My title had seemed so clever on my computer screen at home five months ago, but now — oh, well. I needed to begin:

“The esteemed anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, ‘Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment, and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.’ I have felt that growing up in Melva has taught me to look and listen carefully, and certainly to record in astonishment. Melva citizens celebrate a heavily spiced pork product over sculpture or painting. The locus of cultural activity is often the Super Wal-Mart parking lot. A seasonal sporting event involving muscled high school males charging against one another in helmets holds near-religious ritual significance. Instead of literary salons, we have only beauty salons. As a result, some might say that Melva is a town full of small-minded, provincial individuals. Some might say this town is very boring….”

I paused to take a gulp of air. Had my paper sounded so snobby back when I’d first written it? It was becoming clear to me that this was the worst idea of my life. Months ago, my words had sounded smart. Sophisticated. Why did I now sound like a brat? I could see audience members staring at me like I was covered in green scales. I cleared my throat and straightened my pages.

Someone shouted, “Reading an essay’s not a talent! Boring!” “Shut up!” a woman shouted. “Shut your stupid face and be polite!”

The shouting grew louder and indistinguishable. I froze for a moment, unsure what to do. There was no way I could read the rest of this paper. I cleared my throat again and began to speak off the cuff.

“Ummm. I’m just going to talk, y’all. Not read … So anyway, that’s what people often think. People
who do not take the time to get to know Melva, that is
. People who have not always stopped to observe Melva
truly
with the open-mindedness that Margaret Mead mentions.” I coughed, then coughed again, my mouth gone dry. “Melva is made up of people, wonderful people. Take my neighbor, Mrs. Crandor — there’s no one friendlier! Or Stephen Shepherd, who’s going to be the world’s next major innovator in aeronautics; or my friends Tanesha and Susannah, who are not only two of the best dancers in the entire state but also two of the most patient teachers; or Mr. Thompson, who runs the local ice-cream shop and takes the time to keep up with what’s going on in the lives of his customers; or my incredibly talented best friend, Margo, who just sang for y’all — you heard her! Amazing. All right here in Melva. And there are many more, so many more….”

I looked out into the crowd. My mom shot me a thumbs-up. I realized at this point that my eyes were tearing up, and I felt like a politician on the news trying to make amends after a faux pas. But I meant it. I meant every word, and so I kept talking.