When I was about 12 Jimmy Connor’s father gave his kids a bunch of tickets to the Miss Washington County Pageant. The Chamber of Commerce was one of the sponsors and Mr. Connor, a druggist, was vice-president or something. Anyway, he had these tickets left over and he gave them to his kids.
There were 17 children in the Connor family; Jimmy was somewhere just after the middle. A number of them were too old to care about the pageant and gave their tickets to him. His oldest brother was a Roman Catholic priest somewhere and two of his sisters were nuns up in Cottonwood, so they didn’t even get tickets.
Jimmy said his father had read someplace that a man up in Quebec or some real Catholic place like that had 21 kids and had gotten a letter from the Pope and he wanted to get one too. But after Bernadette was born, Jimmy said, his mom was too sick to have any more. She didn’t look very sick to us – she could clear the living room of kids with a couple of mighty swings of a broom – but they didn’t have any more kids.
Jimmy said Mr. Connor asked to priest at St. Agnes’ Catholic Church in Weiser to write a letter to the Pope to see if 17 kids was enough to get a letter, but it must not have been because he never got one.
Anyway, Jimmy got enough tickets for a half dozen of us to go to the pageant. We only wanted to see the bathing suit competition, but had to get there early to get front row seats. The pageant was in the high school gymnasium and if you got stuck in the back or up in the bleachers you could see much of anything.
I don’t know why we thought it would be sexy. All the girls competing went to the swimming pool in the same modest, one-piece bathing suits. I guess the suits looked like lingerie when the girls wore them with their hair all fixed up and makeup on while they walked and posed on the stage decorated like a salon.
But on this night we got more than we anticipated. The talent contest turned out to be the sexiest show ever to appear on a Weiser stage. Most of the girls sang or played the piano, but Yvonne (pronounced Wyvonnie) Biggs did a dramatic reading of her own composition.
She appeared in the spotlight at center stage wrapped in a full length cloth version of a tiger skin. Her hair was frizzed into a wild halo. A strip of tiger cloth was wrapped around her forehead pulled down behind her ears and tied at the neck. She had thick makeup on her face including black eye-shadow and a couple of black stripes down each cheek. Her lips were painted blood red looking like a gash.
“What is my name?” she inquired in a deep sultry voice. “Wild Zingerella,” she screeched pulling off the wrapper and holding it behind her back like a curtain. She was wearing what looked like fur two-piece bathing suit with about six inches of bare midriff showing.
“Where was I born?” she asked in her sultry interrogatory voice still holding the tiger curtain skin behind her. “High in the eagle’s nest,” she replied in her eagle screech dropping the curtain edge from her left hand and pointing to the rafters with her right hand still trailing the curtain and followed by her head as she sighted up her arm.
She slowly rolled her head back toward the audience resting her cheek on her extended arm and asked something else in her sultry voice. Her left leg was stretched behind her with her toe pointed into the floor. Her right leg was bent slightly at the knee completing the dramatic and, lets face it, quite sexy pose.
The rest of her recitation went much the same as she whipped the tiger cape around like a fan dancer. Some in the audience started laughing, a lot more gaped in agast horror. We in the front row simply stared in rapture. Yvonne Biggs was not the prettiest girl in school, but from then on she was certainly the sexiest.
Needless to say, the bathing suit competition was something of an anticlimax. The girls strutted their stuff around the stage displaying first their frontside then their backside finishing off with a sort of katykorner stance elbows cocked. a hand resting gracefully on each hip, one leg slightly forward knees slightly bent smiling like a grand piano at the audience.
Pretty they all were, but not sexy. Not after Wild Zingerella. Yvonne did not win the contest, but she did win the heart of every man and boy in the audience. And the women weren’t all that disgusted. They thought it was a pretty good show.
My father was a judge and he and my mother couldn’t stop laughing when they got home. He said he wished he could have voted for Yvonne, but didn’t dare as he was a high school teacher and had to maintain a high moral standard like not smoking in public and never going to bars.
