Beauty queens, cat fights, and Sasquatch part 1

Tympani roll please......and the winner is....
I can't tell you. Or I guess I can, but I'll let you find out for yourself. I'll post on here when the Mrs. World show will air so you can see it in all it's amazing goodness.

Things went off with the requisite drama and chaos, but at the end of the day, everything fell into place. I was stationed as the stage left stage manager and Keith was stage right. Which also means that most every entrance or exit was made on Keith's side, since this is his 9th pageant, which made my life easier.

There are flaws in the pageant system that you just can't get around. For instance, the way Mrs. World works is you start with your big group, in this case 41 women, from which you cull to 12. Then you have the 12 run around in bathing suits for a bit, make them change quickly and then put the whole loving gang back together for a big dance number.

Big mistake.

Once you're out, you should be out. Make a beeline for the bar with the other also-rans and get to forgettin' as quickly as possible. The last thing you want to do is go back on stage, prancing around as if to say, "remember me? I'm hideous. Take one last look and insure yourself that the judges made the right decision. Enjoy my pain, please."

That would be like losing the world series and then being forced to play an extra inning, just for grins. Screw that.

You just can't get around it, though. It makes sense that as the show progresses, you'd want a big dance number to keep the flow going. Or in the least to keep the 29 losers from breaking anything backstage.

Which is almost what happened. As Jeff the director was yelling at me through the headset to get everyone on stage in one ear, in the other ear I had girls informing me of a tidy mutiny going on backstage. Apparently there were women who simply refused to come out. Just like that. We had a giant stage built, cameras trained, hell even Boris Becker and Vijay Armitrage were in the audience along with countless Bollywood stars, and these women just up and decided they weren't having any of it. To which Frit and Frat declared, "Hellll no!" They rushed backstage and told the women simply, "You are coming out. You have no choice. Get on your dresses. Now!" And you know what? With the exception of several Latin American women, they all bucked up, hit the stage, and made some fairly entertaining television.

I can't describe how completely bizarre, yet all too familiar it was herding 41 "beautiful" women. I would find myself huddled in a van with 15 women in cocktail dresses, false eyelashes, breasts and hair extensions all chattering in fifteen different languages and accents, and me in a T-shirt with a monkey on a surfboard on it, my goofy glasses, and various stages of "creative facial hair" and I would think, "What the hell am I doing here?"

But then other times, when Keith handed off producing duties to me, and I would whip the girls up in a dancing frenzy along manmade beaches or force them in their bathing suits to frolic in the freezing wave pool at 8am, I felt completely comfortable. I'm thinking that my experiences as a substitute teacher had a lot to do with it. It's the same job, actually. You show up to a group that would rather you didn't exist, you have to quickly gain their trust, and trick them into performing a series of tasks that they excell at in varying degrees, all with the false promise that if we get done with everything, I'll let you out early.

Or maybe it's that I think, to some degree, this is what I'm good at. A little bit of art, a little bit of science and a whole lot of baby sitting. I remember taking a job poll online where you plug in a number of variables from the hours you like to work, to education, to amount of money you want etcetera. Well, honest to goodness, the thing told me to get into TV and Film production.

So far, so good.