Chapter Five: The Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant
Chapter Five: The Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant
They're not girls, they're Blokes
When Pip—a common nickname in these parts, for Phillip or Phillipa—the owner and operator of the Mangonui Hotel, Pub,and Café, learned that Beau’s mum was a hairstylist from Palm Springs—everybody in New Zealand says “mum”—she made a beeline for Whatuwhiwhi and waltzed right into our little house without knocking. Many folk in Doubtless Bay consider it rude to knock on someone’s door. It might disturb the inhabitants.
“I’m Pip Dew. The annual Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant is in the works, Mum, and you are drafted to do everybody’s hair.”
“How many girls do I have to make beautiful?” Dee asked, in all innocence.
“About fifteen contestants. And they are a demanding lot, I do have to be honest with you, Dee. Oh, and they’re not girls. They’re blokes. And I do mean blokes. They’re a hard lot, Dee, but it’s for a good cause. All the money we raise at the door this year goes to the primary schools at Mangonui and Taipa.”
I looked at Beau. Beau looked at me. This was news to us. A drag-show beauty pageant in Mangonui?
Along with Russell in the Bay of Islands, Mangonui is one of the two most beautifully located and most picturesque small villages in all of New Zealand. In all the world. They were New Zealand’s early answer to New Bedford, Massachusetts. These three were the most important whaling ports in the nineteenth-century world. There is even a whaling museum at Butler Point in Mangonui’s serene, sheltered harbor. In those early days, Russell and Mangonui were rough spots, full of drunken sailors and whores and missionaries. Russell was the first capital of New Zealand and had earned the sobriquet ‘Hell Hole of the Pacific.’ Today it has a population of eight hundred and sixteen, and it and little Mangonui are idyllic villages on the north coast of the country—beautiful, sleepy-head little villages. And very provincial.
We couldn’t wait to see this Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant, full of sheep-shearers, fencers, big-rig drivers, and construction workers.
Things took a dangerous turn, however, and the entire pageant was placed in jeopardy. It happened like this. Beau, living up to his name, is beautiful. That day in our living room in Whatuwhiwhi, Pip took one look at him and decided then and there he was going to be a contestant. When Pip decides something, it is decided. It did not help that Dee and I were amused and excited about the prospects and sided with Miss Pip Dew.
“You have to think of the children, Beau. If you enter the Miss Mangonui Pageant, more people will pay to attend, and the more tickets we sell, the more money for the school. How can you deny the local kids a decent education when you already got one? Wouldn’t be fair. That’s that.”
Now Beau had never in his life dressed up in drag. Beautiful as my Beau La Joie is, it was just not something that ever appealed to him. Or to me. Though we both appreciated entertainers such as Ru Paul. Or Hedda Lettuce. Or Lypsinka. Or the one and only The Lady Chablis. Or Anita Man. Ah-need-a-man, honey! Or Ann Coulter or Condaleeza Rice.
But Beau finally let himself be cajoled by Pip and his ma and by me and he agreed to enter the pageant. When word got out, the blokes were furious and marched on the Hotel Mangonui to have it out with Pip. Now, these guys were always reluctant to join in this drag pageant benefit, but once Pip used her no-holds-barred means of persuasion, the blokes always come ’round — one year, she actually threatened to cut off all beer, wine, and spirits at the pub for one cow cockie who was reluctant to participate as a beauty contestant—okay, a cow cockie is New Zealand slang for cowboy. Don’t ask. New Zealand has slang for just about everything—a sparky is an electrician and a chippy is a carpenter. You get the idea. From now on, I’ll mark NZ English—NZ is pronounced ‘Inn Zed’—with an asterisk * and I’ll include a dictionary at the end of the book).
Anyway, once the blokes get roped in, each and every one of them becomes the biggest prima donna, the biggest diva, the biggest beauty pageant bitch in the world, including Alaska. Pip told us these blokes would rehearse, would scrounge and shop for just the right pumps, just the right wigs, the perfect ensembles, just the right shades of makeup, would get in bitch-fights with each other over the order of their performances in the pageant, even spike each other’s perfume with diesel or bovine urine.
In past years, some of them even broke into tears when they won or lost.
“You’ve never seen anything like it, Dee. Once these blokes are in, they have a whole personality change. Then when it’s all over, they go back to being who they were before. Makes me believe that ‘I am what I am and what I am is an illusion’ sums it up perfectly.”
“Don’t forget, Pip, honey, I lived in Arkansas and Palm Springs for much of my life. Illusion I know all about.”
It just so happened that we were all at the Mangonui Hotel a few days later, hugger-muggering with Pip about some final preparations, when the blokes broke in.
“Where’s Pip? We wanna see Pip now!”
“What’s up, Drago? I’m right here. What are all you blokes up to anyways?”
Drago was short for Dragocevich or Dragomorovich or something like that. Drago is a Dolly and the Far North is full of ’em. That’s the way everybody here pronounces it, Dolly. I guess the correct spelling would really be Dali, as in Dalmatians. In the nineteenth century, boatloads of Dalmatians emigrated from the far coasts of Croatia, later part of Yugoslavia, all the way to the Far North of New Zealand to dig for Kauri gum, a fossilized resin of the native New Zealand kauri trees. It was used mainly in the production of varnishes worldwide and then later in the manufacture of linoleum—who figured that out?
Beau and I both thought it hilarious that the leader of the angry, disaffected contestants in the Miss Mangonui Beauty Pageant, the biggest drag show in rural New Zealand, was named Drago. This is too rich to make up.
“It’s not fair, Miss Pip Dew, and we won’t participate if it’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair, Drago?”
“If the Boys enter the Miss Mangonui Pageant, one of ’em will win. They got advantages.”
I started to speak up but Pip put her petite and perfectly manicured hand on my arm and held it with the vise-grip of a stevedore.
“What advantages, Drago?”
“You know—”
“No, honey, I don’t,” she said softly. “Explain it to me and the Boys. Oh, and this is Dee, Beau’s mum. She does all the ‘stars’ in Palm Springs and she’s gonna help us out in the Miss Mangonui Pageant, gonna do everybody’s hair—everybody who’s got any. And everybody’s wig, if you choose to go that way in the interest of beauty. And she’s supervising all the makeup and consulting on gowns and swimsuits and all that.”
“G’day, ma’am.” Drago started beaming. “May I please sit down, ma’am?”
Dee nodded her head. She turned to Beau and me and whispered so loudly that Drago himself jumped a little, “Oh, my God, what a hunk of a man.”
(Dee is hard of hearing, remember, and so she thinks the whole world is hard of hearing.)
“It’s like this, Pip. We’re all new to this and the Boys are professional. It strikes us as unfair.”
“Professional?” said Pip. “Professional what? In what way professional? Beau here was an executive at IBM Microelectronics and Aaron was a professor. How does that give them an advantage? Anyways, Aaron is not entering the contest. Just Beau.”
Drago glanced at Beau’s beautiful visage, his luscious lips and gleaming black hair, his flawless skin, then looked away quickly.
“Well, we can’t none of us compete if put up against a professional.”
“Professional—professional what?” Pip cocked her head at Drago and smiled. “Don’t be shy, Drago. Professional—? You can say it.”
Well, professional professional. I don’t know what the proper way of putting it is. Professional gay, maybe?”
Some of the other blokes snickered softly. “Hey, Drago, you’re turning red as a professional side of beef,” one of them offered.
“Or a professional beet,” said another bloke.
Four hours later, we all left the Mangonui Pub and this was the upshot: Two of the more-tipsy-than-somewhat beauty-bloke-contestants-to-be fell into Doubtless Bay across the street from the pub as they followed us to the car, talking and gesticulating to Dee about their outfits and makeup and wigs; Beau and I were forced to accept a driver because Pip decided we had had too many beers to be allowed to drive on the left side of the road; Beau had gracefully, and to his relief, bowed out of the competition, allowing as he was a “professional.” He agreed to be the MC of the beauty pageant. All of our new buddies, our ‘mates,’ were over the moon at having a ‘professional gay’ as MC and were beside themselves at getting an imported beauty consultant from Palm Springs.
As we were driven away by one of Pip’s bartenders, the beauty pageant blokes were still drinking Lion Red beer and singing—if you want to call it that—at the top of their raucous voices, singing, more or less, from the Hotel Mangonui’s outdoor garden overlooking the most beautiful little safe and serene harbor in the world. At the top of their voices:
“YO, I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I WANT, WHAT I REALLY, REALLY WANT,
“SO TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, WHAT YOU REALLY, REALLY WANT—
“I WANNA,
“I WANNA,
“I WANNA,
“I WANNA,
I WANNA REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WANNA ZIGAZIG HA!”
The Spice Girls had always sounded much better than these blokes but had never sung with as much exuberant energy and abandon as the Miss Mangonui contestants did that beery and cheery afternoon. The sun was still up and the moon was already rising over the harbor. A fog was moving in.
The Maori replica waka, Te Aurere, was anchored most serenely in front of the Pub and Hotel Mangonui.
End of Chapter Five.
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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
Before too long!
In a Desert or a City
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?