Pardon me, Ma’am. I know you’re a bitch and all, but is that Go Go Juice that you’re not sharing?
He said there was some kinda tension between him and that lady. I’ll bite her myself if I have to.
Come with me back to my planet where everyone gets a crown and no one ever pulls out.
That’s oddly inappropriate. And yet captures the essence of what that pageant chick tried to do to me.
Call Me Maybe?
I’m giving it all she’s got Captain.
Our Spray Tanning Shields are engaged, but compromised. I don’t know how long we can keep them up against an enemy cloaked in sequins and glitter.
The Pixie Stix Phasers seem to have no effect on the aliens, and the Tiara Tractor Beam is just too damn strong.
Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated, no matter how hard we fight back.
Toddlers & Tiaras has won.
And won big. Like Mega Ultimate Supreme big.
All we can do now is Sparkle.
…Baby.
………………………………………………………………..
Welcome to the Out Of This World Pageant.
This week the Toddlers & Tiaras rocket ship took us far, far away.
Like across the Georgia state line, almost, to a Space Age themed pageant that gave everyone a chance to explore uncharted corners of the Universe with the hopes of discovering new, and extremely glittery, alien life forms.
Life forms that could potentially share the same goals we all share of winning massive crowns and giant blow-up bouncy castles.
It was Cosmic, I tell you.
Director Chasity Saunders, decked out in some seriously red Clairol and one of those New Years Eve headbands with the boingy styrofoam antennae, explained the interstellar aspects of the competition. It should also be duly noted that in the Glitz World, even Directors must use the Pageant Name Generating Machine. If your birth certificate information isn’t worthy of at least a second place sash or plaque, you are required to remove a minimum of one letter from your name to make it pageant quirky.
In Space, they can’t hear you scream. And you don’t win Ultimate Grand Supreme.
You win MEGA (…say it with an echo…) Ultimate Grand Supreme. Way more cosmic.
You also win an inflatable blow-up bouncy tent, which Chasity felt required a slo-mo video demonstration just in case you’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese. Glad she cleared that one up for me, because I would have been up all night searching online for an explanation of how it goes from flat to Macy’s parade float with just one cord.
Grab some snacks, because even this recap is mega.
The first pageant princess beamed down to us was 2 year old Bella and her Mom Juliet, who now holds the T&T record for wearing the tiniest hair clip ever seen on the show in five seasons. The kind of micro clip you forget you have in your hair until you go to bed and then almost puncture the part of your brain that does long division.
That kind.
Teensy Bella was exactly what you would expect from any 2 year old human being or puppy dog: Very little focus, a whole lot of falling down and some teething issues.
She was cute as a button whether she was wobbling around the house or face down on the floor. But whereas a newborn puppy tends to gnaw on the day care furniture until you slap its nose, Bella’s teething ring of choice leaned a little more towards the other kids in her play group.
That’s right. Much like her Twilight namesake, this Bella also now liked biting people.
So much so, in fact, that Mom nervously chuckled as she explained how her little vampire had already been kicked out of four different day care facilities for chewing on crayons and fingers. It was the kind of nervous chuckle a Mom does when she explains that her kid only burned down 4 houses so far…so relax, people…and hand me my cocktail.
In her short career Bella had only lost one competition, and that was due to some nasty inner ear infection that had caused her ear drum to burst on stage. Ouch.
Those judges will deduct points for anything nowadays.
When she wasn’t biting stuffed animals or human flesh, Bella also enjoyed swatting her Dad Kevin in the face with her crown collection. Hopefully she doesn’t draw any blood, because I just watched Breaking Dawn Part 1 on HBO and it wasn’t pretty.
Our second puppy of the week was bouncy 3 year old Ava Layne and her Mom Ashley.
Styled up in a pair of Disney-ish hair bows with floppy dog ears attached, Ava was introduced while participating in some begging and rolling over kind of thing while Mom waved around a giant rawhide bone.
I’m going to assume that this was some kind of pageant rehearsal and not a daily Mother/Daughter bonding ritual, because it wasn’t really explained very well and we all know I’m not one to pass judgment on anyone else without all the deets.
Ava’s backstory is pretty amazing if you Google it. She was basically brain dead and couldn’t walk, or talk or roll over when she was born.
(I mean the roll over in your crib kind of roll over. Not another puppy joke…the dog story is finished. Gimme a little credit for knowing when enough is enough, thank you.)
Then one day she just woke up, blinked at her Mom, looked around and decided to immediately start doing pageants.
Or something. I skimmed it.
But she’s her Mom’s Miracle Baby, and I love stories like that. Plus she’s another cute button and had hair that you know always looks like balloon static, so she got my vote.
When we moved on to the third and final princess, my television sound went out for a moment. Or I thought it had, anyway.
But it was just 7 year old Jayla. Dead silent 7 year old Jayla.
For a second I thought that maybe one of the Bellas had already gotten to her, but it turned out that she was just a quiet, shy little thang who only came alive on stage.
Mom Andrea seemed pretty accustomed to Jayla’s borderline comatose state, but if it was me I would always be carrying around a flip-top compact mirror just in case I had to test for breathing fog once in awhile.
It was like Weekend At Bernie’s: Toddler Edition.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t the third cutie in the pack. She even boasted that she had a good personality. Sometime. And she wanted to be Miss America, even though she didn’t know who she was…or what she did or…how she…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
We’ll have to come back to Jayla later, I guess.
Since the whole shebang was going to be Out Of This World, the Outfit Of Choice portion was pretty much guaranteed to be something with a space ship or ET face.
Ava’s routine was a Men In Black number, but since Will Smith may or may not be going through a divorce right now her older brother Bubba was going to co-star to make sure that someone showed up on Pageant Day.
In retrospect, Mom or Dad probably should have done a quick run through of the pivotal scene with Ava before Bubba actually showed up in his Area 51 mask, because the poor little girl pretty much wet her pants when a martian strolled into the living room.
Bella’s pageant prep included a trip to Mom’s dental office to get her vampire fangs polished alongside her Care Bear Edward. No, they didn’t actually say the Bear’s name, but c’mon…Edward? I know you laughed.
Maybe not as much as when someone inflated a surgical glove until it looked like bloated cow udders and Bella ran around the office with pink cow teats in her mouth.
But you laughed.
(If anyone had told me that I would use the words ‘cow teats’ twice in less than 2 months on this site, I would have never believed it. But now it’s happened. If you don’t remember the last time I used them together in a sentence then I guess someone’s going to be killing some time on a rainy weekend scavenger hunt. Maybe there’ll be a prize.)
A couple of dress fittings and Sassy Sisters rehearsal studio wind machines later, and it was finally Pageant Day!
And as if Pageant Day wasn’t exciting enough…the Pageant Mothership hovered over the gymnasium and beamed us down Talent Agent to the Universe Blake Woodruff.
Love. This. Dude.
Out of the hundreds of…well…100…10…whatever…tomato….tomaahto…pageant people I have met through this hot mess site, this guy is one of my favorites.
A hoot.
Probably two hoots.
Most people don’t know it, but Blake proudly, yet quietly, suffers from a rare disease known as Bad Girls Clubmydia which often causes uncontrollably sassy side to side head pops and makes him start or finish most of his sentences with OhNoSheDin’t!
He also has a habit of wearing loosened up skinny ties that make him look like he’s about to break into one final ballad before Last Call at the Ramada Jersey Boys Tribute.
But whatever. Woodruff shizzle was in the hizzle, so I knew this was gonna get good.
Chasity was also back for a second visit to give her Vegas Bookie take on how the girls looked coming into the horse race, and it wasn’t until right then that I realized how much she sounded like she was reading the commentary on my grade school film strips.
“Ava is a cute little diva, and coffee is the number one export of Columbia.” Beep.
Go back and listen. I swear.
Instead of the usual hotel room chaos though, all the hair and makeup was being done in the cafeteria of whatever school it was they were using for the competition. There was a big school logo/letter graphic painted on the floor of the gymnasium which should have been a pretty good clue, but I was too busy trying to figure out how the castle inflated and missed the actual name. My bad.
Being held off site, as they say in the biz, also meant that not only did we get to whiff a cloud of Aqua Net, spray tan mist and Red Bull, but there was also residual fish stick stank and whatever Friday’s Mystery Meat happened to be that week. At least while the girls were getting their fake hair stapled on they could read up on the Food Pyramid.
The More You Know, kids. The More You Know.
I’m not gonna lie. Whenever my boy Blake came on screen I was hoping he would unleash some Clubmydia, but being the pageant emcee was cutting down on some of his sass. I knew he still had it in him, and I knew we’d get at least one good one before it was over…but I’m not a very patient person when it comes to waiting for snark.
Which probably explains why my DVR is 90% Bravo TV.
Let’s hit the highlights of this shindig, shall we?
When it came time for Bella to do her Beauty thing, she was MIA. Blake had just finished marveling at how the last contestant’s hobbies included pooping and power crawling (…whatever that is…) and then the stage went blank.
Some classic T&T kicked in as soon as Bella’s name was called for the tenth time. Bella is never late for her shows, but somehow Dad had missed the announced line up or something.
Needless to say, after rushing Bella up on stage, picking her up and down like a marionette and then finding out that he had been holding her wrong the entire time, Kevin was cranky pants.
Storming out of the gymnasium, he tracked down…and then threw down…with Pageant Assistant Gem.
Now I have no clue what her name really is, but she had a big ol’ tee shirt on that said ’Gems Rock‘ and when I first saw her I thought it said ‘Gem’s Rack’…like she was proud of a new boob job or something.
Yes, I thought that was odd, but this is Toddlers & Tiaras. Do the math.
So I named her Gem.
During their first encounter Gem walked off in a big dramatic soap opera diss, only to have it completely ruined mid-stream by two locked doors that she couldn’t open. Not being able to open the door really takes the wind out of any drama queen’s exit.
When he stalked her a second time, Gem told Kevin to call her lawyers if he wanted to beat up on somebody. (They know this whole argument is about getting a 2 year old into a gym to blow finger kisses, right?)
Kevin seemed to be the one on the right side of the law on this one from what I could tell, but regardless dude…if you’re gonna try and get all bad a** on somebody, take the pink sippy cup outta your back pocket first.
The rest of the pageant kind of paled in comparison, though there were a few other non-boob job gems.
Jayla proudly boasted that she had been practicing her facials a lot. We’ll just let that one pass with no discussion.
Care Bear Edward made a return visit, held up in the air like a confetti colored glo-stick for inspiration.
The judges were all a stitch, but I don’t have time to mention any of them except for that overly tanned up Darrel who always seems to show up every few episodes. He never blinks, and looks like he does the One for You, One for Me spray tan assist with all the kids out back.
Bella ended up being robbed of whatever title is was that Mom and Dad wanted for her, and you knew Gem and the Holograms were gonna get blamed for that one. Personally I would be glad that I didn’t have to shlep a giant inflatable castle home on the roof of my van, but that’s just me.
For whatever reason, the score sheets were not going to be made available until midnight.
Seriously. Midnight? Now I don’t know about you, but the only people I know who hang around school gymnasium parking lots after midnight either work for Dateline, or end up sitting on a kitchen stool eating out of a bowl of chips on Dateline.
If you know what I mean.
Blake knows what I mean, because when he announced that bit of info, he finally got to unleash his Inner Moesha and told all them bitches to “…so, ahh…have fun with that.”
Head pop. Doo Wop.
Some other kids won some stuff, too. Creep them on Facebook if you really need to know.
Right now, I just need to go into that decompression chamber they used to put the Apollo astronauts in after they splash landed back to Earth.
Like I said at the beginning…in Space, no one can hear you scream.
On TLC…I’m not so sure.
Beam me up, Blake.
