The Lynn Street Beauty Pageant

To many of you I am a stranger. So let me introduce myself. I am a so-so wife and a pretty good mother of three children. In my spare time I am Our Lady of Perpetual Laundry.  I have strong views on politics, public education, the Catholic Church and breast-feeding.

            Although my husband will strongly object to this claim, I really am low-maintenance. I like cold chicken, cold pizza, luke-warm coffee and stale popcorn. But the love of my life is that magical decade from about 1966 to 1976, give or take a few years.

            For my 40^th birthday, I received a picture that my friend saved of the contestants of the Lynn Street Beauty Pageant, circa 1969. The winner, Miss Spain, is standing next to Miss USA who is wearing white go-go boots and a mini-skirt crumpled from tinfoil. And there am I, Miss Japan, a far cry from a geisha girl, dressed in a terry-cloth cover-up with my hair rolled up in pinecones, skinny legs ending in flip flops from Kresge’s. My mascara is smudged and I look disgusted because I have lost the competition, despite having memorized long paragraphs about Japan from the World Book Encyclopedia. The crown made with the Seagram’s medallion off the pretty gold metallic box from my parents’ liquor cabinet is now resting on the pixie hair cut of Miss Spain.

            But summer heals all wounds and we would cool down by exploring the woods on the banks of the Thunder Bay River. We moseyed down an old Indian trail that was carpeted with cedar until we came to an abandoned dump filled with dirty antique bottles, disintegrating enamel pans, and Coke bottles that had the names of cities on the bottom of the bottles.  At the end of the afternoon we cradled the bottles in our uplifted t-shirts and went home so we could line our shelves with artifacts.

            We were gone for hours and when we came home we wrapped ourselves in bedspreads and sheets hanging on the clothesline and called ourselves Gypsies. Our goals were not to have the highest score on a computer game, but to ride our bikes with no hands from the dead end all the way to the bridge, or to roll on top of an empty oil drum the length of the neighbor’s vegetable garden.

            Our parents did not hover, seldom intervened, but instead read newspapers on the front stoop while we bicycled.  Then they had martinis at 6. Back then parents had a life.

            Recently, I received an email from a former college professor who ended his letter by wishing me magical days with my kids. As guardians of the gate of our children’s young lives, we need to be more court jester and less pitbull protector.

            After all, I’m living proof that there is life after a miserably failed beauty pageant.