The so-abbreviated USER Pageant started off with all the delegates doing a synchronised dance to the former hit tune “I Want Money, Lots and Lots of Money”. After the badly coordinated steps were finished, the contestants began introducing themselves one by one to the audience.

First on show was Mr. Omawale Nkrumah, modeling a bell-bottom pair of pants, a button-down silk shirt, an Afro hairstyle and a thick gold chain. Nkrumah boldly proclaimed his platform “Pageant Prima Noctae or Droit du Seigneur Promoter.” Nkrumah said that should he win, he will see to it that the principles enshrined within his platform are put into practice at any pageant he promotes.

After Nkrumah stumbled boisterously and drunkenly off-stage, Ms. Pam Julian stepped on stage resplendent in a wrap thingy and sporting about 15 layers of makeup dramatically enhanced by her innovative zebra-stripe mascara application technique. Looking, well to be frank, frightening, Ms. Julian told the audience that her platform was “Reincarnative Sadism” which she said was her own way of re-living her allegedly lost youth and beauty by making young, good-looking - if not that smart girls - dance to her tune.

Next up was the perennial pageant promoter/producer Beulah Sashay. Ms. Sashay introduced her platform “Rationalising Exploitation”. She said that should she win this year’s useful and prestigious USER Pageant, she was going to use the money and her reign as monarch to promote the rationalisation of pageants with her radical new theory of pageantry which promotes the idea of the swimsuit segment being the professional modern woman’s rite of passage in a male-dominated world.

After Ms. Sashay had waddled her 200-pound frame from the creaking stage, Mr(s) Ethno Androgyny swung his hips onstage, wearing an outfit with the curious name of Yinyang 2000. Mr(s) Androgyny said that its platform, “Racialising Pageantry”, was chosen to demonstrate that although everyone is beautiful in their own way, Martian women possess a unique, proud and unspoiled cultural heritage, a statement supported by the fact that the planet with the most Miss Universes per capita was, in fact, Martia.

After this segment was the “Updates” section in which former beauty pageant contestants were asked the question, “How has your life been since entering one of our contestants’ pageants.” One of the first young women interviewed stated that her self-esteem and linguistic skills had improved since her participation in Ms. Sashay’s pageant but admitted afterwards that continuing her education and reading a bit more might have played a small part as well. Several other former beauty pageant contestants came on to attribute all the positive changes in their lives to their participation in the different contests but pandemonium broke out on stage after each of the young ladies’ noses start growing to inordinate proportions.

After the stage was effectively clear, the USER delegates were again invited on stage for the talent segment. To make a tall tale short, each of the contestants listed “screwing people over” as their best talent and then began to “plead the fifth” to the judges’ request for an anecdote which supported their claims. When advised that Guyana does not have a fifth amendment and that they are, more importantly, not on trial, most of the delegates said “Harrumph” and walked off-stage while Mr.(s) Androgyny started shouting that the laws of Martia…

Anyway, enough of that pageant spoof. That’s just a long introduction for something that’s been on my mind for the past three years or so. What on earth is going on with all this pageantry? The number of pageants that have been put on recently has been so damn…gratuitous, it’s way beyond pornographic. Anyone with a few contacts and a desire to make some fast cash is putting on a pageant nowadays. The pageant promoters are happy, the designers are happy, a lot of the businessmen start thinking happy thoughts and not always about a rise in their sales, and the winning girls seem happy - in fact, many of them are what a psychologist might term “compulsive delegates.” But have you ever seen one of these girls some months after the pageant? They’re like former supermodels.

I mean, after the endless events, cocktail receptions, modeling shows, television ads, life in the fast lane, so to speak, many of these former shiny smiling delegates begin to look washed out, haunted, to put it frankly, used. And in my mind, that’s what they are.

A while back there was a huge fiasco about one pageant delegate and her turtle conservation answer. In contrast, at the recently held Ms. Talented (sic) Teen pageant, some of the top delegates are the ones who provided the dumbest answers to some pretty simple questions.

Now I don’t want to get all “Freddie Kissoon, Defender of the Faith and Seawall” on you but I honestly believe that there should be a Pageant Promoters Pageant. Somebody should get all these people on stage and have them parade around half-naked, singing and dancing and answering questions culled from a “Best of Jeopardy!” video.

Pageants per se aren’t such a bad thing. We live in a male-dominated world, so originally they were invented so stuffy middle-class American men, during the puritan 1950s, could have a bit of flesh to look at (I mean other than the slightly over-weight helpmeet) without any of the associated guilt. To rationalise it, some smart-ass threw in the “intelligence” section. But facts are facts; no plain-Jane, girl next-door, with acne covering her face is going to win Ms. Universe, even if she has the IQ of Einstein, or even God.

Young women in today’s Guyana need to seriously rethink entering pageants. You sing, you dance, you smile till your jaw muscles hurt, and in the end you end up getting screwed. Half the energy and time you spend being someone’s show-monkey, albeit a pretty show-monkey, may be better spent improving yourself as a person the old-fashioned way. By doing it yourself.