Current/Recent Reading List

23 March 2009

But In This County...

Our school just held its annual Miss ______ High School pageant a couple of days ago, and because I share planning and curriculum with one of our newer teachers who was helping with the pageant, someone who fortunately grew up in the socially-intellectually-materially advanced (wink-wink) town on the southwest side of Raleigh, I have heard quite a bit of the scuttlebutt surrounding the whole thing.

Of course, over the past few weeks there has been the predictable girl drama, the backbiting, the selectively leaked utterances of overconfidence, and the fake friendships (including, it seems, among the teachers organizing the event). But what was most interesting about the whole event was the girl my colleague really was hoping would win. Seems the girl is a great student, more of an intellectual than the other girls, a nice person, and someone possessing a most unusual talent: she played the sitar. Turns out, by the way, that this girl did win.

Granted, it sounds like I would have preferred her to win as well, had I been subject to daily helpings of pageant preparation. If you've spent much time around the pageant girl crowd - and if you are like me (that is to say, a typical man) - your patience has been tried early and often. Plus, as a rule, the dancing and singing "talents" these girls typically rely on are, to put it delicately, God-awful. So, good for this girl and her mighty sitar playing for laying 'em low.

But for the last few weeks all I've heard are how the rubes "in this county" might find something like the sitar too bizarre, or how people "in this county" don't think to ask the caterers of the event for vegetarian plate optiions, or how the people "in this county" aren't too concerned about proper syntax in the girls' addresses to the audience.

We should feel sorry for ourselves, I guess, living out here in the armpit of the state - a whole 20 minutes or so from civilization.