My Pageant Dresses

One of the advantages of being a pageant girl is that we had to often go shopping for dresses. Sometimes when we went shopping it was for the same reasons older girls go shopping -- to try on not necessarily to buy. While this may seem a bit shady, Spokane is small enough that it does not have a great many stores that sell formal dresses for girls my age.  So few stores that we visited did not also get a share of the money Mom spent on keeping me in petty dresses.

Also not uncommonly stores would ask Mom if I could wear one of their dresses in one of my pageants.  So sometimes when I did these tryons it was to find a dress that I would be borrowiing.

None of  this is really all that important for you to know about me and my dressses except that I do include -- or rather will include  -- several photos of me in these dresses and I do not want you to think that Mom was spending a fortune of these dresses. Few of these dresses every made it into my closet.

As I mentioned most of the boys I knew were from my neighborhood and they often only had a chance to play with me on weekends.  Mom and I often had to spend out weekends out of town at a pageant.  It was not unusual for one of the kids in our neighborhood to show up just as Mom and I were preparing to leave.  And not uncommonly I would already be in the dress I would be wearing and in full makeup.

Needless to say, if I was already in pageant mode I looked like a totally different girl to the other girls and like a princess to the boys.  I did not like to flaunt my sashes and crowns and titles that I won, but as everyone in the neighborhood came to know me as the 'pageant girl,' it was difficult to not share how I had down when I got back from a pageant.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, as I grew older, there were changes I underwent that made me look a bit more boyish.   This never became an issue, partially I suspect because what person in their right mind would believe that a little girl who had won so many pageant could really be a boy.