Due to Mrs. America, it's time for my Phyllis Schlafly story again (which is mostly how I, as a teen, totally didn't know who she was and thus set my chances of been a teen beauty queen on fire).

So, I was a weird, ugly kid in a NYC private school that no one liked, and I somehow got it into my head to do pageants, I think because there were always ads for them in the back of Seventeen magazine and maybe people would like me if I was certifiably likeable and pretty?

This was only the first of many mistakes.

So I would send away for all the various pageant literature and apply to ones that weren't just about being sexy but also smart and talented (because I was, at least, smart and talented) and also I knew what it would take for my parents to go along.

Of course, pageants don't really say no to people. It's a business (the exception is the Miss America system which really is a non-profit), so of course, I got accepted to compete in all of them.

Eventually, I conned my parents into taking me to Albany for a weekend so I could compete in the Miss New York National Teen-Ager Pageant 1987.

When I had to introduce myself at the contenst brunch and said I was from New York, NY, they asked me to be more specific. When I said "Manhattan" they said "Kansas?" So that tells you how that was going.

In addition to Evening Gown and Talent competitions, an off-stage Interview and Photoshoot portion, there was also an on-stage speech portion in which we had to wear our Red White and Blue outfit and give a talk on "What's Right About America?"

So, I'm me. I'm trying to be "normal" but I'm still a queer Jew from New York who thinks loyalty oaths are the CREEPIEST and that it's sincerely toxic that schools make kids recite the pledge.

(This wasn't a thing in my private school and when I later switched to public school, I was shocked, SHOCKED, and beligerent about the entire affair. Anyway.)

So I wrote an essay about how What's Right About America is that we have the right to criticize it and protest it to make it better.

Here, on the internet, in the year of our suffering 2020, the only thing notable about this is that it didn't acknowlege how much out right to protest is regularly curtailed or address the surveilance state or the harsher repsonses to protests by Black and brown people.

But in Albany, in 1987, as the Miss New York National Teen-Ager pageant speech competition, I might as well have burned my training bra on stage.

(Training bras: a seperate topic of WTF, America?)

You never forget the first time you shock an audience of 1,000 people into stunned, dread silence.

And I had no idea what I had done! I was _good_ at writing speeches. And giving them. I had mandatory Rhetoric classes in private school! I took Latin! I knew about alliteration! I was sure, even if I didn't win the pageant, I woud clean up in the speech competition!

Oh no, my friends. I did not. Because the speech competition was sponsored by Phyllis Schlafly and the Concerned Women for America, which was all just a bunch of WASP-sounding stuff I had never heard of.

My parents, in being wildly hands off with this whole debacle, either didn't notice or decided my incredibly incendiary speech (for the context) was the perfect solution to the problem.

Pageants and I would part ugly ways and all those little fascists would get told off by yours truly, genderqueer nerd princess.

In the end, I finalled in no part of the competition whatsoever and somehow still burst into tears over the entire affair. My peers at private school thought I was a hideous, unsophisticated weirdo for doing a pageant, and I got no cred back for losing spectacularly.

By the following year, I was in public school, sneaking around like a proper teenager and trying not to get arrested at ACT-UP protests.

Since you've read this far, here's me in 1987 in my interview outfit and look for the pageant.

Anyway, never let it be said that when I do a thing, I don't really, really commit.