BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
I am at that age where details of my high school life have vanished from my mind. The name of my sophomore homecoming date, the ability to conjugate perfect tenses in Spanish, the location of my senior locker.
Still, the important things remain.
Like the day my friend Dee Dee and I were looking through her high school yearbook, and I noticed a large picture of the homecoming queen. The crown, the smile, the look of unmistakable triumph. I turned the page. There was another girl, with another crown. The opposing page was full of girls with smiles and crowns, which ranged from dainty tiaras to the construction-paper headgear the birthday kid wore in kindergarten.
The multiplicity of royalty was shocking. There were queens hugging other queens, surrounded by still more queens.
I looked up at Dee Dee. "Just who was your homecoming queen?" I asked, thoroughly confused.
She smiled a slow, delicious smile. "We all were," she said. A conflict over the nomination and voting procedures had led school officials to put the kibosh on the queen thing. A bit of anguish for tradition-loving adults in the community, no doubt, but sweet liberation for the girls of the senior class.
Not one of them had to be voted upon. No one lost. One girl's "thrill" at being queen no longer came at the cost of the others' feelings of imperfection and inadequacy. These homecoming queens came in tall, short, shy, brazen, large, small.
Every girl could be -- indeed was -- royal.
Troubling autumnal rituals
I am reminded of that happy vision each fall, when females in tiaras start popping up on high school football fields and television runways. Tonight, if you are given to such things, you can watch Miss Texas or Miss Virginia sing, yodel, juggle or jiggle her way to Miss America.
I am generally a tolerant person, leaving others to enjoy their little preferences as much as I do mine. But as I grow further into adulthood and deeper into motherhood, these autumnal crowning rituals come to bother me more.
And the kind of year we females have had isn't helping any.
It started with the death of Princess Diana, whose own tiara became a symbol of her unhappiness. Some observers had the gall to point out the "comfort" we could take in the fact that she had died at the peak of her beauty, and would live on as unchangeably young and vibrant.
Were she here, surely Diana would assure us a face full of wrinkles is far preferable to being dead.
Then we had Linda Tripp and Paula Jones, whose news-making actions were often overshadowed by references to their looks. They were ultimately "made over," an appeasement that Hillary Clinton succumbed to early on in her role as first lady.
The message, one has to surmise, is that a woman can be viewed as treacherous, ambitious, brave, bright or greedy. She just can't be perceived as ugly.
Move on, Monica
Finally, we come to Monica Lewinsky. Hate her or pity her, most of us will admit there's something pathetic about a young woman who finds herself in a place of prime career advancement and wastes it shimmying up to a man who treats her like a last-choice toy.
We weak individuals who actually read the details of her humiliating trysts, back-door treatment and adolescent gift offerings, want to say: Give it up, girl. Move on. Anytime a job, relationship or title depends on peeling off layers of clothes or piling on layers of mascara, there are better places for you to be.
Alas, tonight I'll be forced to miss the spectacle of big-haired women in gift-wrap banners parading in that highly realistic combination of swimsuits and high heels. I think I'll spend my time typing up a few suggestions to my female descendants instead:
If you want to wear a swimsuit, for heaven's sake, swim.
If you want to stand in front of a microphone answering questions about world peace and rain forests, do it as secretary of state, not Miss Congeniality.
And if you ever end up as a White House intern, show off your brains and not your underwear.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE