Pageant Queen by Ryan Kristopher Jory
Like many flash writers, Ryan Kristopher Jory focuses on a childhood memory in this new creative nonfiction flash, “Pageant Queen.” When he was four years old, he donned a pink princess wig and dance-recital costume to play Miss America contestants with his sister for a visiting TV repairman. They “strutted” down the stairs, “taking deliberate, swishing steps.” The repairman applauded. His panicked father played along, not revealing that one of his daughters was a boy in drag.
Like many creative nonfiction writers, Jory admits he may have embroidered the truth. He adds a layer by describing the pageant story as a past “go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars.” We become simultaneously aware of the TV repairman’s response to the two children, the father’s response to the TV repairman’s response, and listeners’ responses to an entertaining story in a bar. When he was in his twenties, “this anecdote drew reliable laughs.” In his thirties, “it began landing with increasingly awkward thuds.” He composed his first draft of the story in 2018, he writes in his author’s note, “after noticing a tonal shift in the chitchat around queer bars.” He started to ask questions.
When memoirs like Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes climbed the bestseller lists, the influential essayist Phillip Lopate complained that young writers were neglecting retrospection and reflection in their memoirs. This neglect has been particularly apparent in flash memoir, where limited space leads writers to dramatize an event with at best a closing sentence on the significance of what occurred. Jory, in contrast, devotes five substantial paragraphs to reflection on how changing historical contexts continue to alter the meaning of his anecdote and responses to it.
Generations of creative writing students have been told “show, don’t tell,” but as Lopate argues, “There is nothing more exciting than following a live, candid mind thinking on the page, exploring uncharted waters.” Ryan Kristopher Jory tells a good story. Unlike most flash writers, Jory also provides a brilliant demonstration of the writer thinking on the page. —CRAFT
This used to be my go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars: the one about my pageant for the repairman.
It had been my parents’ first color television, a Zenith workhorse in a wooden case, complete with ornamental pulls attached to drawers that didn’t actually exist. By the summer of 1989, it required constant adjustment of its fine-tuning knobs. Soon, it died.
We couldn’t afford a new TV, so Dad called a repairman. My sister, Katie, was six at the time. I’d have been going on five. As the Sears van turned down our driveway, Dad said, “Upstairs, you two. Not a peep.”
We unearthed a bag of dance-recital costumes, hand-me-downs from our older sister.
“Are we playing Miss America?” I said.
We were.
We both donned sequined leotards—a good start, but, my being a boy and sporting a buzz cut, I desperately needed hair.
Katie owned a pink princess wig of the toy-aisle costume variety. Normally, she bogarted the thing for herself, but because she was feeling generous, and because she agreed that I couldn’t pull off a pixie look, she lent it to me. We applied strawberry lip gloss and paraded around her bedroom practicing the royal wave.
Depriving the world of our beauty seemed like a greater injustice than bending one little rule. We racked our brains until one of us spotted a loophole in our banishment: Dad said he didn’t want to hear a peep, so as long as we sealed our lips, there would be no peeps heard.
By this time, the repairman was breaking bad news. Our television was unsalvageable. Dad was deeply flustered, not in a mood for antics, but here we came.
The staircase descended directly into our living room, behind the autopsied Zenith. Katie and I strutted down, lips zipped, taking deliberate, swishing steps. The gray-haired repairman spotted us first.
“What lovely daughters you have.”
Panic flashed in Dad’s eyes. He stammered something noncommittal. In that moment, he had to make a decision—to out himself as the father of a four-year-old boy in drag or go all-in on the case of mistaken identity. He opted for the latter, wagering that I would remain in character until the stranger left our house.
Katie and I sashayed a bit, joined hands, and curtsied. The repairman clapped.
“I can’t choose a winner,” he said.
I sprang into an impromptu dance routine, hoping to edge out first place. Not to be upstaged, Katie gave a silent musical demonstration, playing something classical, I’m sure, on an imaginary piano. I did sloppy pirouettes and finished with a running-man move meant to evoke Flashdance.
The repairman declared an unbreakable tie. Katie and I returned to her bedroom, high on the buzz of a successful performance.
Mom had been out shopping with our older siblings at the time. When she returned, Dad recounted the ordeal he’d just endured, ending with the same punchline that I adopted, decades later, when telling the story to strangers in bars. “Thank God that damned wig stayed on.”
Precisely how tall this tale has grown is impossible for me to say. I’d estimate that its core remains no less than fifty-one percent truthful, which, as compared against other bits of cocktail chatter, surely places it in the upper echelon of accuracy. A pageant happened. I was definitely wearing the princess wig and, to my delight, mistaken for a girl. The bit about remaining silent is probably an embellishment, along with the entirety of the talent portion. I’m not even sure of our ages or whether Mom was away from home at the time. It’s just funnier to portray Dad like a bumbling sitcom character, flapping in the wind without his wife present to handle parenting duties, so that’s how it’s told.
When I was in my early twenties, this anecdote drew reliable laughs. By my thirties, shortly after the day my husband and I gained our right to marry, it began landing with increasingly awkward thuds, until I stopped telling it altogether. Younger queers had a hard time pinpointing the humor. Which part, exactly, was funny: my father’s specific discomfort or just the broader concept of entrenched homophobia?
I might have tried to give context by explaining that other boys in my hometown would have been beaten at least partway to death for being caught in drag, even in private, much less before a stranger. My parents were unusually permissive in that regard. The funny part, then, was that I’d been so sweetly naïve, I acted like Mr. Magoo at the zoo, blindly stepping over alligator jaws without any sense of the danger.
But then I’d have had to explain who Mr. Magoo was, which would not allay the fundamental aspect of my condition, that I was marching irretrievably toward middle age in the midst of a broader cultural shift, making me doubly unrelatable to newer members of my own community, not just aging but aging without grace, trotting out tired camp clichés in service of soothing communal scars that were no longer quite so universally borne.
I do worry, though, that some of the kids aren’t as alright as they make themselves out to be, merely feigning cool belonging in a world that, broadly, remains uncertain of where to fit them. Or worse, maybe they really do feel this sense of utter security. Like those folks in Florida who feel safe at home, warm in bed, until a sinkhole swallows it whole.
Anyway, none of these grumbles or worries or defenses play well over the noise of a crowded bar, so for now I’ll most likely leave my anecdote in retirement, or at least out of heavy rotation. Keep things airy. “Cheers to queers,” or whatever quippy toasts we’re making nowadays.
RYAN KRISTOPHER JORY is a multigenre writer originally from Flint, Michigan. His writing has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, MoonPark Review, and Necessary Fiction, among others. His flash was longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. He studied creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award for his short fiction in 2006. He earned a master’s in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio before relocating to California in 2009. Ryan presently resides with his husband in San Diego. Find him on Instagram or Twitter @ryankjory.
Featured image by Christina Langford-Miller, courtesy of Unsplash.
