Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Donna Collins
Donna Collins
Pageants are typically campy and politically incorrect, the stuff of cruel, late-night parody. Young women thank their mothers for piano lessons and vow coyly to work for world peace…while half the audience is just waiting for the bathing suits.
They’ll wait till hell freezes over at the Ms. Senior Missouri Pageant on July 13.
Sure, the women encourage each other along the way: “You look beautiful!” “We want you gorgeous!” That’s how women have learned to feel OK in the eyes of the world. But these judges are looking for inner beauty: wisdom, elegance, and the passion and refinement of real talent.
And those are taller orders.
At the auditions in February, I stop in the ladies’ room and hear a woman moan, “I have a blister, a bad knee, and tendinitis in my elbow!” “Oh, you’ll be fine,” someone assures her. “I wonder how the floor is. Are you tapping?” A voice floats from outside of the stalls: “I’m a tapper, and I’ve auditioned here. The floors are fine.”
We all head back to the meeting room, which is more like a slumber party, full of chatter and snacks, the air rosy with compliments. I meet Sonja Nelson-Stough, reigning queen, a petite woman with a tiara perched on a frost-white pixie haircut. She takes hammered dulcimer lessons.
State co-chair Peggy Eggers explains the pageant and how it’s judged. Over 60, she tells the crowd, “is the age of elegance.”
Donna Collins, with curly blond hair and a bright turquoise-sequined wrap, does a “Razzle Dazzle” tap routine for her talent audition. When the music stops abruptly, she just keeps going, hands graceful, a big smile on her face. The joy distracts you.
A tall redhead takes the mic. “I was told to let everyone know I’m doing stand-up comedy—in case it’s not apparent.” Her funniest moment comes when she looks around and confides, “It’s already weird here.” Valiantly, she keeps going. “My family said I should wear a tearaway skirt… I thought I’d do it—but I have five girdles on.”
The next contestant, Linda Franchini, dances to “Roxie” from Chicago. Her hair’s pulled back in a dark-blond ponytail, and her movements are fluid, perfectly timed with the jazz piano’s syncopation. As she pulls a long leg up higher than seems possible, someone in the audience murmurs, “She had a stroke last year. And she’s only 62.”
Deborah Gross, a former fashion buyer, taps to Frank Sinatra’s “Chicago,” her arms muscled and taut in a sleeveless sequined top. She’s got a huge smile, and whether it’s nerves or showmanship, it lights up the act. By the time she finishes a vigorous routine, she’s gasping for breath and has literally torn up the floor. (“You can tell who’s in their sixties,” somebody seventysomething remarks—not cattily, just in wistful appreciation.)
Barbara Eckert comes out in a red-sequined sleeveless number with a white fur stole—and spectacles. “I’ve got my love to keep me warm,” she sings. Her voice is high and pure—but she swallows the word “love” with each chorus. Her husband died last summer, I’m told. She gathers energy, goes into a throaty, “Off with my overcoat” and rips off the stole. “I’m burning with love!” she sings—and now you can hear it.
Afterward, she says, “I [competed] five years ago and kind of felt like I had to be more prim and proper. This is more me—although you wouldn’t know it, since I was a bookkeeper all my life!”
Joan Daues whipped the Missouri Cameo Club into shape after being thrown, without any rehearsal at all, into the 1993 pageant, held in Sedalia at the Missouri State Fair. “They had a plywood stage out in the middle where the hogs and the poop are,” she says. “This was the pageant. We changed in the holding pen.” Daues wore a sparkly blue dress and sang an aria from La Bohème, casting sequins before swine.
Now she emcees the former-queens show, because she can no longer sing. Her husband’s foot once slipped from the brake to the accelerator, and Daues, who was getting back in the car, was knocked beneath its wheels. She recovered from the coma, but her voice never returned.
Every year, Daues and other Cameo Club members—all former contestants—raise thousands of dollars for charities and perform around the region. Missouri’s is now the second-largest Cameo Club in the nation. And its focus goes beyond elegance, to strength.
Jacquie Crawford says, “When I was queen, I’d talk about having atrial fibrillation, brain surgery, a pulmonary embolism, and two knee replacements before I took up tap-dancing. Once, a woman in the audience said, ‘Oh, I have atrial fibrillation, and I can hardly do anything!’ She was crying, and I started crying, too. Another woman said, ‘You know what? I don’t think you really had your knees replaced and can tap like that.’ So I showed her my scars.”
The year that Cameo Club president Sue Lauber-Fleming competed, she had a back brace. “I got a big, long elastic binder, ’cause I couldn’t wear my back brace in a formal gown. I said to my husband, ‘What happens if—poof!—it just unwinds?’ He said, ‘It’s the age of elegance. Just step out of it.’”
Sharon Houston, a retired school principal who was Ms. Congeniality in 2008, remembers feeling like a fashion model as she tried to emulate the straight, fluid grace of the runway. “But there was also a bit of Broadway,” she adds, blue eyes sparkling. “I still can’t believe I got up on that stage and tap-danced all by myself. It…lifted my idea of myself.”
I know what she means. My mother’s beautiful, and she’s never even known it, let alone flaunted it. But when she hit 60, she came home and announced that she seemed to have become invisible.
Houston nods. “You do feel like ‘What now? Y’know, there’s still a lot of living to do here.’”
The women meet again on April 22, to practice on the stage of the Florissant Civic Center Theatre. Quite a few contestants have lost their nerve or didn’t make the cut, including a statuesque woman who had an air of mystery at the auditions. “Are you a dancer?” someone asked. “A singer?” “Just Mary Ann,” she replied in a deep, resonant voice. Her poem began, “My granddaughter had completed the journey that I was afraid to make.” It ended, “I did not read until I was 65.”
Gross is here, but she’s hurt her leg. When it’s her turn, they play her music and she spins, miming the moves for the time being. Claudia Bidleman, a carefully groomed woman with a sweet, self-conscious smile, carries out easels holding stunning nature photographs. She weaves in and out of the easels and reads, too shy to have conviction, the lyrics to “What a Wonderful World.” Stage directors Marcene Tockman (queen in 1999) and Pat Bruder (queen in 1995) set to work, guiding her by the arm for her slalom around the easels and insisting she tell the audience the best part: She took those photographs herself.
Franchini dances her “Roxie” and blows kisses at the audience. “At first, I didn’t know who my kids were, who the president was,” she tells me afterward regarding her stroke. “There are still things that are messed up.” When she resumed teaching electronics at Linn State Technical College, her husband came before every class and taped words she might forget in every corner of the classroom.
Franchini learned electronics in the U.S. Air Force. She went on to co-sponsor a robotics club and teach ballet. She planned a ballet routine for last year’s competition, but the stroke canceled that. It also made her determined to come back. “It doesn’t matter if I win,” she says. “This is what I was getting ready for before the stroke. It’s like the period at the end of the sentence—a finishing point.” She pulls out the philosophy she has to memorize for the judges: “When asked what is my philosophy of life, it’s simple. Slow down, cherish each moment—because sometimes our biggest frustrations turn into our most beautiful moments.”
It’s a tough segue from there to a zombie dance, but Susan Pellegrini, a tall, lean aerobics teacher with a sense of fun, is ready. “I take tap from Marcene,” she whispers, “and she is everything sparkly.” Tockman was crushed when Pellegrini chose “Thriller.” “I’ll be a pretty zombie,” Pellegrini promised. She does her routine, and applause ricochets from every wall. “My face is going to be white,” she tells Tockman and Bruder. “Ragged skirt, tights, my top dull shades of gray and blue.” Tockman sighs. She points out that Pellegrini’s long grayed-black wig is covering the top of her sash.
“And I haven’t even sewn the ants on the back yet,” Pellegrini tells her cheerfully.
What she dreads is the evening-gown competition. Bidleman, on the other hand, comes out looking like Grace Kelly, her steps measured, her head high. Pellegrini gets through it with a goofy grin. “I know you are not walking in those shoes,” Tockman says, looking pointedly at her sneakers.
“I brought my heels,” Pellegrini says.
“Go put them on and try it again,” Tockman says. “And take your time. Show the judges how much fun you’re having with this. Where else do you get to walk onstage in a gown?”
Not to mention enter through a birthday cake. This year marks the pageant’s quarter-century anniversary, so a carpenter is building a cake nearly the height of the theater. Contestants will come onstage through its first layer for the opening ceremony.
“There’s no way you can keep us invisible,” Lauber-Fleming says gaily.
