Toddlers and Tiaras, Little Miss Perfect: Talking the Talk

debbie, originally uploaded by ishatter.

How do you top three weeks which included a gravel-voiced beauty queen terror-toddler, a pageant organizer skipping town with the pageant prize money, and a thirty-one year old woman who decides to make her pageant return via the "...age ten and up division"??? You can't and after three weeks of spell-binding programing, "Toddlers and Tiaras" has been a little tame the past couple of weeks. Don't get me wrong: Waxing a kid's eyebrows is still seriously freaky business, but we've seen it before, and I have gotten a little numb to the shock factor of watching toddlers get spray-tanned and plucked. Too much reality T.V. sort of raises one's tolerance for that which one defines as normal.

I remember when I first started to view the child beauty pageant shows "Toddlers and Tiaras" and "Little Miss Perfect". Back then, they were a jaw-dropping view into a parallel universe. Even if half the time I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. So, as a public service to those of you who are new to the pageant lingo, here are a few definitions guaranteed to improve your viewing enjoyment.

1. Facial Beauty: Whew! I was TOTALLY relieved when I heard one of the mothers explain that the children in the pageants were mostly judged on "facial beauty". The creep factor of imagining the judges voting for 3 year-old Kylee because she had a "swell rack and great gams" would have been a little too much for all of us. I am not sure how the mothers explain to the losers that the other little girl just had more "facial beauty" without permanently damaging the kid's self-esteem, but that may be why I have cats instead of children. (That, and you can't leave four children under the age of five at home by themselves with bowls of water and food on the floor.)

2. Full Glitz: Full fake. This look requires fake hair, fake tan, fake nails, fake eyelashes and plenty of glitter. If you can still find a child under all of this crap, you haven't loaded on enough stuff. Get out the Be-Dazzler and get crackin'!

3. Natural Beauty: Highly-overrated. Budget pageant. Cheap parents. Can afford the pageant entrance fee, but not the stuff to truly tart-up their kids. This pageant, from what I can tell, is set up to weed the "wheat from the chaff". The "wheat" being the the parents who will eventually blow their life savings on frou-frou dresses and spray tans; from the "chaff" which would be the (cheap) parents who think spray tanning a kid is sort of silly and decide to spend their money for useless things like mortgages and college educations. Good riddance to them! If they aren't willing to invest a butt load of cash into their kid, then they lack the sort of commitment it takes for a girl to be " The Full Package".

4. The Full Package (also: "The Total Package", "The Entire Package", "The Whole Package"): Full Glitz with no behavioral issues. Has learned to walk like a prissy little robot. Has perfected more poses than Tyra Banks.

5. "Sparkle, Baby!": This is a phrase often shouted by pageant moms to their little girls. I am glad no one shouted this at me when I was four or I probably would have tried to shoot gemstones out my behind. What I think this phrase means is to furiously bat your eyes at the judges, like the sparklies from your full glitz dress have made you so dazzling you might blind even yourself, or something like that.

6. Flirt: Suck-up to the judges.

7. Beauty Walk (also Prissy Walk): A slow, stiff walk in a short sparkly dress with lots of "sparkling" and "flirting". This usually requires a special coach. Apparently, there may be some danger involved. I dunno. Wear a short dress. They may say it's about facial beauty, but there is a name for girls who wear long dresses: Loser.

8. Pull-Out: O.K., I was pretty concerned when I first heard this term being batted around by the pageant moms. It does not pertain to what the slutty girls in high school were promised by the guys who got them pregnant. (Big "Whew!" there, huh?) Instead it has to do with the complicated pageant award system which, if I am not mistaken, seems to be set-up so the girls who are losers don't really realize they are losers until they get home. By then it is too late for their parents to realize they have been had and demand a refund of their pageant fees. This also appears to be a part of placating the newbies' parents into thinking that "Princess Best Hair" is actually a good prize and there is hope for their child in future pageants. When a girl "pulls-out" it means she has been selected for a higher title, usually something like "Ultimate Grand Supreme", which I think sounds like a dessert and usually makes me hungry.

Any questions?