TLC has created quite a little cottage industry by finding a strange niche and turning it into a television series whether it is real estate or little people or people who breed an unreasonable number of children.  Their newest show is King of the Crown featuring Cy Frakes, owner of Gowns and Crowns, and a South Carolina pageant coach who works with pretty girls to get them ready to compete in pageants great and small. As with all such reality shows, the flamboyant (code word for gay gay gay) Cy has a team to help him with his work including his quirky gay sidekick Shane who wears his bangs in a side pony and always has a witty quip about his sex life or lack thereof.

Now to understand Cy, you have to close your eyes and imagine a man quickly approaching middle age who loves his spray tan and fake baking and his hair product and uses these things religiously. He’s had some facial work done. He wears his hair, receding at two points across his forehead, in a shark, swept up and shellacked with gel and paste and who knows what. His skin has taken on the appearance of well-worn leather that has been lovingly shined by a slave boy. He has a deep Southern accent that I’m quite sure he plays up for the camera and he wears sassy little bold print numbers. In his studio, filled with sashes and dresses and mirrors and wooden floors for walking, Cy holds court and clearly knows how to teach girls how to be girls. You want to look away but you can’t because Cy is just so shiny. He sparkles.

Now, I am fairly obsessed with pageantry because it is such a foreign thing to me. I don’t have much tolerance for toddler pageants—that’s just creepy and gross, like hey here’s a three year old. Isn’t she lovely? No. She smells like hairspray and graham crackers. Cy mostly works with teenagers and women in their twenties who are (though not always) more capable of consenting to the farce of it all.  These young women spend so much time, money and energy parading across stages in tacky gowns, bikinis, their hair teased to heaven and their décolletage strategically framed. The best part is that they project a real nobility about the whole enterprise–that what they’re doing is using pageants as a means of reaching their goals and dreams. And even more interesting than the girls are the deluded, obsessive, overbearing mothers trying to resurrect their sad sad faded hopes.

Pageant apologists like to extol the virtues of the pageant circuit saying that a pageant is about so much more than beauty. It’s about teaching girls poise and self-confidence, the “scholarships” and other prizes, etc etc etc but it’s really hard to buy that party line. Sending a girl out on stage in a bikini to parade before of a panel of judges whose main qualification is that they have eyes has very little to do with poise or gentility. Let’s not pretend, right?

I’m really enjoying King of the Crown because despite Cy’s efforts to make us all believe that pageantry is all about helping girls reach their goals and dreams, and he does seem like a nice enough guy, nothing can hide the truth about pageants. I don’t even mind the truth—that pageants are all about a very narrow type of beauty—I just think it’s interesting (and laughable) when people try to make it into something loftier. In many ways, I think of pageants like a puzzle. You know what the judges are looking for and you have to figure out how to mold your body and hair and breasts accordingly.

In one of the episodes I caught this weekend, a girl, Kaleigh, who is, by pageant standards, “full-figured,” (translation: huge rack) posted pictures of herself on Facebook standing in a bikini top, leather chaps, and a huge M-60 (I think) machine gun between her legs. It was a big crisis and Cy had a serious talk with her. I like Kaleigh because she really classes up the joint. I am quite certain she is one tequila shot away from a Hustler photo shoot, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When asked about the picture of her young daughter posing half-naked with a gun between her thighs (subtle), Kaleigh’s mom said, “That’s my girl.”

I think that sums it up.