Beauty Pageants Analysis

This writing starts off with the author as a young girl watching beauty pageants in the living room. She’d watch the shows with her mother as she narrates what she enjoyed and envied about these women. She tells about her parents’ divorce and all the hopes her mother had for her, including winning a pageant of her own. She comes to know later that her mother knew she was too weird, chubby, and poor to ever win. During her pageant she stood out like a sore thumb, and ultimately lost the pageant. She’d lost before she’d ever started. She’d lost because she didn’t tell people what they wanted to hear. She’d lost because of her mother’s loneliness. An idea I found interesting about this text …show more content…
I feel as if her mother was living through her daughter in some way, or maybe even wanting her to win the pageant to prove to herself that even though they were poor, her daughter was as good as anyone else’s. I also believe she was trying to shape her daughter into someone she had always wanted to be. I say that because of how the mother explains to Cindy how she was always too overweight or not as pretty as her sister. Also, Cindy says, “…I would always be too chubby…backward...different…poor for which she blamed herself, to win a beauty pageant.” In the essay she tells us about her beauty pageant practice experiences, basically how even though she knew she wasn’t like the rest of the girls she stood as much of a chance as the rest of them. She believed in herself because she had some talent, she had a pretty face with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she believed she was quite charming. She explains in particular how most girls had expensive leg warmers and she only had ones from Kmart. This really stood out for me because they thought …show more content…
I can’t believe people would think of her as a lesser person because of where she could and couldn’t afford to buy practice clothes. She lost the pageant. She had just as good of a shot as anybody else, but she lost the pageant. She believes she lost before she had even started. She had the wrong background to be a beauty queen. She had the wrong financial status to be a beauty queen. During her interview question, she hadn’t told people what they wanted to hear. She said she’d have done anything to save her mother from her own loneliness, but that isn’t at all what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear about ending world hunger and saving the whales. They didn’t care about her personal problems. Her mother said she’d lost the pageant because of a mistake she made during her gymnastics routine, but truthfully she had made no mistake. I feel as if her mother was so embarrassed by the fact that her daughter had essentially gone up there and made a fool of herself, and she felt that it was her fault. I feel as if she embarrassed herself by the fact that she even thought