Hannah Freedman

Former Beauty Queen Returns to Earth as Poodle

I begin hyperventilating from nerves, my pink tongue flopping out of my mouth. Betsey Jo stands by my side pressing her lips together the way she did when I won Miss Oktoberfest. She looked the same. Betsey Jo's hair was teased on top and flipped out on the ends, bouncing against her small shoulders, pale makeup fills in the wrinkles that have developed around her lips and eyes.

"You're up next." A 20 something girl wearing a long plaid jumper says. Betsey Jo sucks in her stomach. The large blue velvet curtain is pulled aside. Betsey Jo and I walk into the arena. The audience and Judges stare at us the way they used to when Betsey Jo and I would take the stage as competitors, our shinny dresses would rustle around our feet. Now my padded feet pushed against the floor and Betsey Jo jogged beside me. She smiled at the judges using her pageant charm.

Once before a pageant, in my former life, Betsey Jo had stepped on the train of my dress. Now, as her dog, She was leading me, wishing me on. I had the strong, unwanted but un-deniable instinct to please her, I wanted the treat that I would surely receive from not jumping off of the judges table as he molested me or stopping to investigate something in the arena. The people clapped and I tried to smile the way I once has, when me and Betsey Jo and I were competitors.

At the Miss Harrisburg Pageant I stole Betsey Jo's swimsuit top. I knew she wouldn't notice until it was too late. She wept as her dreams of becoming Miss America vanished. Her mother scolded her for being careless. Guilt flooded me as she was disqualified. I knew that G-d was punis??????
hing me when I didn't make the top 5. I

couldn't eat for weeks, regretting the immature decisions I had made. When I was a puppy and first adopted by Mary Jo I would like to chew up her leather pumps. Betsey Jo would break out a newspaper and hit me on the butt. I would feel that same guilt, wondering why this omnipotent figure was beating me.

After getting all the way Miss Pennsylvania, and loosing, I stopped doing pageants. I became a secretary to a wealthy law firm. I met my husband, Garret, there. Garret and I were never able to have children and I secretly didn't want them. Betsey Jo never got past Miss Pennsylvania level either. I would see her at the grocery store sometimes, alone or with a small child. We'd say awkward hellos, using our carefully rehearsed pageant smiles, remembering our deathly competitive younger years.

Betsey Jo's children had gotten married and moved away in the past 30 years, none of them ever showing an interested in pageants. Betsey Jo never lost her desire for attention. When her husband began spending more and more time at the office she decided to spend his money on a purebred dog. She groomed me so my hair was always perfect, shaped in balls on my hip bones and then a large poof on my head, similar to the way I liked to wear my hair in the '80's.

I was trained how to pose and how to walk once again, as a dog, by an overpriced trainer who liked to wear a neon fanny pack filled with treats. Betsey Jo and I would compete in different shows around Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Once we went as far as Delaware, I liked to stick my head out the window and inhale deeply but Betsey Jo insisted on closing the window.

This show, the Tri-State Kennel Club All Breed Dog Show was the biggest that Betsey Jo and I had ever competed in. All the dogs stood in line and I sized up my competition. I could feel Betsey Jo doing the same thing over my shoulder. I knew how hard I had trained, I knew that I had preformed to the best of my ability. I wanted to grab the hands of my fellow competitors and put up and act of friendship as the judge considered all the dogs, but my paws didn't allow it.

The Judge was a fat man with a shiny bald head and I crooked bowtie. He pointed at the dogs he liked asking them to do another ring around the arena and announced "One, two, three, four" giving the dogs their place. I stared at the judge who had failed to point at me. I felt that same wave of jealousy and self loathing I had been so familiar with as a pageant queen and I knew that Betsey Jo was feeling the same exact thing as me as we walked out of the arena, our heads held low. I knew the next day planning, practice and training would begin for the next dog show. Then we'd show them, then we'd be able fill that hole that each of us had because of our inability to be Miss America.