—-A home run?
I was scrabbling thru my little cedar chest of pictures yesterday, looking for one certain pix of me in a 2-piece swim suit. It was taken by the base photographer a few days after this really big beauty contest (?) where I was photographed in summer blues, holding a huge bouquet of roses and looking coyly up at the cameraman. I thought I looked cuter that way than just staring straight ahead. (I didn’t)
Oh yeah, guess I should explain. The “beauty contest” consisted of a dozen or so WAF, including me, stationed at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. It was part of a show thrown by the then St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball farm team, in Texas for their spring training.
So anyway, to make a long story short, I won. We had to parade our lovely uniformed keisters around a small part of the field where the players lined up in a big circle. We were like a bunch of cows ambling aimlessly around in that circle–some of whom had much larger milk-supply-units than me–but I was much cuter. (only in my own mind)
I wasn’t wearing my glasses and the world was a soft blur, so I didn’t have a clue what the players’ faces looked like. But at least I could wink in the general vicinity of a player, which I did — and very fetchingly, BTW. Maybe that vacuous, simple-minded face of mine, winking, did the trick. Yay for the near-sighted ditz! I received applause, the roses and my picture taken with the mayor of Fort Worth.
Several days later my Mother sent a hometown newspaper clipping of me headlined “Local Girl (!) Wins Beauty Contest”. It was the headshot the Air Force kept in our file. I looked very grim. But I suppose that was probably ’cause I wasn’t winking at a “contest” camera. I really must practice that winning grimace, who knows when I will be called upon, again, to join a group of old ladies here at the *Home for the Terminally Confused* (Well, it’s actually a “senior retirement community”) for a pageant we could call — Great [of course] Glamorous [possibly] Gorgeous [No doubt about it] ?
