How It All Began. Part 1 of 5 — A Father’s View of His Daughter’s Quest for the Miss Universe Crown.
How It All Began
It started with “Dad, I am thinking of running for Miss Belize”.
“What’s that?”.
“I am thinking of running for Miss Belize, what do you think?”.
I chuckled, the kind of smirky spontaneous laugh you make after getting a clever joke. That elicited a furled brow and a questioning tilt of the head from my daughter, the same volleyball playing, rough and tumble, super competitive water girl more interested in playing sports than wearing a dress daughter.
I recovered quickly “Bex? Why? I’ve never known you to go for that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know. Sherima thinks I should. She offered to help me.”
Sherima is Sherima Guity, a past Queen of the Bay and local pageant expert. I was to find out that she and her family are responsible for most of the past successes in beauty pageants over the decades in the Stann Creek District of Belize.
Seeing first the questioning, then growing look of hurt on Bex’s face from my initial laugh, my mind raced to recover. Visions of Rebecca tripping on her evening gown, or having a brain freeze on stage during a question, or looking small surrounded by thin, elegantly attired high fashion models flashed through my mind.
“Bex” I said in a slightly condescending way knowing nothing about pageants in Belize but trying desperately to defuse the situation. “These girls have probably been doing pageants their whole life, they are models built for pageants. You’re built for a kill shot, not high heels.”
It is not that I don’t agree with beauty pageants. I just never thought about pageants before, they really didn’t exist for me, negative or positive. My son and I happened to be couch surfing last year when we came upon the last few minutes of the 2015 Miss Universe Pageant, when Steve Harvey announce the wrong winner. We had a good laugh over that, not even considering how the contestants felt.
Little did I imagine that exactly one year later I would be in the Philippines, on the edge of my seat, stomach churning, head bowed, eyes closed, hands clenched as the same Steve Harvey announced the top 13 girls from the 2017 Miss Universe Contest, hoping, knowing he would say Rebecca’s name.
This is my version of the story of how we got to Manila and what I learned during the long six months from that initial question to the World stage to the homecoming in Belize. I found that pageants can bring out the good in a country; the bad in people; and the out right ugliness in individuals. While this story is a form of closure for a period in my life, I hope it will provide a guidepost for the future of pageants in Belize.
Links to Other Parts of the Story:
