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By
C.Carr THE MISS VAGINA PAGEANT HAS EVERYthing one might expect from pageant spoofery without getting particularly heavy-handed about it. The girls do appear to be in jail whenever the gold lame curtain opens, but only because they're using the stage set for Fortune and Men's Eyes. Most startling, the audience seems to be full of Industry people. (Are they going to let us talk about vaginas on television now?) And some of them laugh so hard they occasionally drown out the dialogue. Sure, it's funny. But that funny? Perhaps they've been trained in ritual abuse and low expectations by weekly attendance at the Laugh Factory. A beauty pageant is the worst kind of sex show - the kind that pretends it isn't a sex show -and it's obvious from the tide that MM.? Vagina will bring this subtext to the surface. It also gooses the schmaltz, so to speak. Given the banality of these pageants - the vapidity required of "beauties" who have to prove their purity while displaying their bodies to win a scholarship - it sort of adds up to an easy target. But that's entertainment. Our candidates - the perky, the duddy and the dumb - represent several states, the south side of Chicago, and the territory of "Trinidad and Potato" (as its representative herself calls it). Miss Southside is butch. Miss Tennessee appears to be a Valley Girl. Miss Trinidad has a shit fixation. Miss Pennsylvania walks and poses like a good-girl robot. And Miss New York is clearly in blackface, which the other candidates fail to notice. Finally she explains, "Women of color have a good shot at winning these things as long as they have Aryan features." The talents they display are predictably small and amusing. Miss Trinidad poses lasciviously with tools. Miss New York tells of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery, standup style. ("So I'm thinking, I don't need this in my life right now.") And Miss Pennsylvania warbles a string of sentimental non sequiturs ("I have climbed the highest mountain in my very own canoe"). Any real feeling is banned; any real issue is trivialized. That's as much the rule at the real pageants as it is here. At the end, though, when each candidate for Miss Vagina must answer the question "What is the most important problem facing the world today?," we do get the banal ("Oppression is bad"). But one mentions reproductive freedom, one cites the objectification of women, and Miss New York indicts racism, maybe even her own ("I've learned a lot being black"). All seem serious. Meanwhile, slides of their body parts play over a screen, each time ending with a crotch shot. |
