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Prince Paul gets vexed.

More from Retronaut:

Gorgeous color photography of NYC in the ’50s by Saul Leiter.

Here’s a great site–I mentioned it the other day: Retronaut. There’s just oodles of good stuff to be found there.

The Yanks have the night off but the Rays are in Boston for the start of a four-game series.

Commence-a-Kibbitzin’…Now.

[Photo Credit: Night Owl City]

It’s over. Now, dig this wonderful photo gallery (and thanks to Diane for pointing out the facts).

This story originally appeared in the April, 1994 issue of Life Magazine. It is included in The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan and appears here with permission from the author.

The Curious Childhood of an 11-Year-Old Beauty Queen

By Pat Jordan

It’s eight a.m. The lobby to the Riverfront Hilton in Little Rock, Ark., is crowded with pretty young girls. Their faces are elaborately made up — lipstick, mascara, false lashes; their hair is in curlers. The girls are not playing or giggling. They are just standing there.

These girls are some of the 100 contestants, ranging from infants to 21- year-olds, who will compete this afternoon in the second annual America’s Queen of Queens beauty pageant. They want to be named Baby Queen, Toddler Queen or Empress Queen — and win the cash prize that goes with each title. The overall winner, Grand Supreme Queen, will get $5,000. In room 2046, Dr. Bruce Pancake, a Chattanooga plastic surgeon; his wife, Debbie, a former Miss Chattanooga runner-up; and Tony Calantog, their 23-year- old ”pageant coordinator,” are preparing the Pancakes’ eldest daughter, Blaire Ashley, for the event.

Blaire started entering contests when she was five. Now, six years later, she has competed in more than 100 beauty pageants — and won 90 percent of them. It’s a costly hobby: Entrance fees for national contests range from $250 to $800, and that doesn’t include the elaborate gowns, voice lessons, drama lessons, Tony’s $40-per-hour fee, or traveling expenses. Blaire’s prizes range from hair dryers to television sets to a red Ford Festiva to, last year, $12,000 in cash. ”I like the cold cash,” says Blaire’s mom, Debbie. Blaire likes the crowns. ”I fell in love with this one crown,” says Blaire. ”God! I wanted that crown.” But, she says, she sympathizes with girls not as wealthy as she, girls for whom a crown is not enough. ”I feel sorry for them,” she says. ”They have to win a car because they don’t have one. Their parents yell at them. One girl dieted so much she fainted onstage.”

Child beauty pageants –3,000 or so a year–take place mostly in smaller southern cities but are spreading rapidly; more than 1.5 million contestants vie for the money, cars, trips to Disney World and, most important, the experience that will take them one step closer to becoming Miss America. There is even a magazine — Babette’s Pageant and Talent Gazette — to fuel their dreams. The cover features recent pageant winners wearing crowns and sashes. One section announces innovations like pageants for children missing an arm or with cerebral palsy. Ads pitch banners, robes, crowns, trophies, costumes and the services of makeup experts and pageant coaches. Articles advise little girls on the importance of eye contact and offer tricks for overcoming puffiness and dark circles. But the real problems are saved for the Letters page.

”The kids end up victims,” according to one mother; another writes, ”There is more to life than pageants.” Perhaps, but for some girls and for some girls’ families, pageants are the past, present and future.

Blaire Pancake’s bedroom at home looks like Cinderella’s — after she married the prince. It is filled with crowns, tiaras, batons and trophies, all glittering with rhinestones, that make her old Little League trophy look shabby. She has a bulb-lined makeup mirror and two walk-in closets overstuffed with evening gowns just perfect for a miniature adult. (When Blaire was crowned Little Miss Hollywood Babes Superstar, she had a dress named after her. The Blaire is tulle-skirted and sequined in a herringbone pattern.) Blaire doesn’t play organized sports anymore, though she skis occasionally ) with her family, and she’s just started to make time for a sleepover or two. (School is no problem: Blaire gets A’s.) ”Pageants are my only interest,” she says. ”They’re all I want to do. I love what I’m doing. I want to become Miss America.” Which is why there are no posters of Blaire’s favorite rock stars in her room. No posters of a fantasy heartthrob. Blaire’s room is a shrine to her own fantasy.

Room 2046 of the Riverfront Hilton is something else altogether, a shambles of toys, clothes, rumpled beds, potato chips, Pop Tarts, curling irons, makeup, cans of Coke. The Pancakes have brought three of their four daughters along. Alexis, one, also a pageant winner, is home with a sitter. While their mother, Debbie, hides in the bathroom — where she will stay until she is totally made up — and Tony prepares Blaire, Bruce plays with Elise, three, Miss Southern Charm 1993, and Erin, eight, who used to win pageants until she discovered art and sports.

”When Erin quit, we were sick!” Debbie calls out from the bathroom.

”White-blonde is the perfect look,” says Bruce, dreamily fingering Erin’s hair. Bruce says, ”I’m a plastic surgeon only from the neck up. I enjoy the beauty of the face. No doubt that’s why I’m so involved with Blaire.” Bruce is captivated by his daughter’s beauty but prefers it enhanced: He apologizes to strangers when she is not wearing makeup. Some parents have accused Bruce of enhancing Blaire’s looks with surgery.

Debbie, from the bathroom: ”They can be ugly.” ”It’s ridiculous to operate on children,” adds Bruce. ”But if Blaire wanted me to do something when she’s older, I’d consider it.”

This contest has the Pancakes worried. Blaire will be competing against 12- year-olds, some of whom, according to Bruce, ”have the breast development of women.” Blaire is tall and thin, like a stick figure, but this talk of breasts does not seem to bother her. She sits in a chair, dressed in a nightshirt, her hair in curlers, and watches cartoons while Tony fusses over her. Blaire is used to hearing adults talk about the tools of competition. Like the fake tooth she’ll wear today to hide the missing baby tooth. When Tony begins gluing on Blaire’s fake nails, she holds out her hands, limp-wristed, like the delicate wings of a bird. Finished, Tony dabs makeup on Blaire’s eyelids, which flutter shut, then open.

”Now Maybelline Great Lash,” says Tony. ”All the models use it.” Bruce looks over. ”New makeup! Oh, perfect!” he says. Finally, smiling, Tony holds up a lipstick. ”Lasting Kiss,” he says. ”We can kiss collars and napkins, and it won’t come off.” He turns, puckers his lips and blows a kiss across the room.

At 14, Tony Calantog weighed 250 pounds. He went on to play offensive and defensive tackle on his Pensacola, Fla., high school football team. His teammates called him Otho, after the interior decorator in Beetlejuice. But Tony preferred to decorate the faces of little girls. Word of Tony’s expertise in makeup, dance, modeling, dressmaking and fashion coordinating soon spread throughout the child beauty pageant subculture.

”I saw Blaire five years ago in a Jacksonville pageant,” Tony says. ”I didn’t think much of her. Come on! She wore blue eye shadow!” Bruce asked him to help redesign Blaire. After he did, Tony says, ”she became glamorous. She had a certain look, and beautiful hair.”

”Some parents said it was hair extensions,” calls out Debbie.

”Blaire loves the stage,” says Tony. ”She totally turns on. She becomes . . . Blaire! A total package. It’s who she is.”

”She comes alive,” adds Bruce. ”She has that sparkle of spontaneity judges look for.”

”I love pageants,” Blaire interjects, speaking in a precise, adult voice. ”Except when I have to do two back-to-back. Then I have to tell my father I can’t take it anymore. I need a break. Pageants are easy for me, except for doing my hair. I’m very tender-headed. Oh, and the interviews. I try to make the judges like me. If I don’t win, I try harder to make them like me next time.”

”In our first pageant we had no talent,” Debbie says. ”She, not we, honey,” says Bruce. ”Now Blaire looks the judges in the eye,” boasts Debbie, still in the bathroom. ”She smiles, turns on that charm that makes them look at her. That’s talent.”

”We try not to enter too many pageants where the interview is important,” says Tony.

”We put Blaire in a package deal,” says Debbie. ”Clothes, beauty, talent, because she’s got a blah personality, like me.”

”Oh, honey,” says Bruce. Blaire is oblivious.

When Tony begins combing out Blaire’s hair, so thick with curls it almost obscures her face, Debbie emerges from her lair. ”Hi!” she says. ”I’m the mom.” Her face is heavily made up, her blond hair stiffly curled. She is wearing a black velvet pant-suit trimmed with gold brocade. Debbie has a doctorate in pharmacy, which comes in handy whenever Blaire is sick, like now. She has had the flu and was coughing and nauseated until Debbie gave her Dimetapp and an antibiotic. Today Blaire is feeling better. She is eating grapes, grasped delicately between her red fake fingernails. She eats each grape in three bites, with her front teeth, her lips curled back so as not to muss her lipstick. Debbie looks at Blaire’s hair and frowns.

”It’s too full.” Tony says, ”It’ll fall.” Debbie says, ”The main thing is to frame the face.” There is a knock on the door. Tony cries out, ”Oh, my shoes! My shoes!” He rips open a box and takes out a pair of shiny silver high heels. ”Cinderella’s slippers,” says Bruce. Blaire puts them on. ”They’re too big,” she says, without expression. ”Just watch out for the cracks in the stage,” says Debbie.

Tony holds up a black rhinestoned cocktail dress and stares at it in the mirror. ”I couldn’t wait!” he says. The dress is for the talent competition, in which Blaire will sing ”On My Own” from Les Miserables as one of her numbers. Blaire usually wears coral (”her best color,” says Tony), as she will in the western-wear, sportswear and formalwear competitions, which are really exercises in modeling. (The girls walk up and down a runway, posing, hands on hips, a little turn here and there.) Tony and Debbie make most of Blaire’s costumes. When she outgrows one, they sell it, often at a profit because of Blaire’s winning reputation. Everyone wants an original Blaire. Blaire unself-consciously strips down to her panties, a seasoned performer in a crowded dressing room. Tony helps her pull on her pantyhose, then her black dress. Blaire grabs a cordless microphone. (”You should have heard her before voice lessons,” Tony says.) While Blaire performs in front of the mirror, Tony stands behind her, pantomiming her act. He spreads his arms at the finale and bows, mouthing silently but with great exaggeration, ”Thank you!” Behind them, Erin faces the wall, drawing furiously. Elise, meanwhile, is holding up a bruised finger to her mother. Debbie looks at it and says, ”Did you cry? No. Good. Don’t ever make a scene.” Bruce stares lovingly at Blaire.

The ballroom at the Hilton is packed with parents, many of them overweight women in sweat suits or jeans, and their beer-bellied husbands in long-haul $ truckers’ caps. Bruce, Debbie, Erin and Elise, all wearing badges on their chests with Blaire’s photograph on them, are standing against the back wall, trying to be inconspicuous. Some of the parents have complained that the Pancakes get too much attention. Blaire is waiting in line with about 20 other girls. She stares, without expression, at the floor while Tony fusses with her hair. A few places behind her stands Ariel Murray, her main competition. Ariel has already won three cars, and last August she defeated Blaire in an Atlanta pageant.

”Blaire won Miss Photogenic,” says Debbie. ”And we were missing teeth.” When Blaire goes on, it is a seasoned performer who stalks the stage, belting out ”New York! New York!” moderately well, except for the high notes. For the first time in hours, Blaire is truly alive. She bows and leaves the stage. As Blaire and her mother walk back to the hotel room, Debbie says, ”If you had held the mike closer, you would have been more dynamic. But you wouldn’t. Ariel did it.”

Back in room 2046, Blaire wraps herself in her mother’s white satin kimono. Outside, little girls race down the hall, squealing. But Blaire has work to do.

Debbie: ”What’s your favorite color?”

Blaire: ”Coral.”

Debbie: ”Say ‘Because it looks good on me.’ ”

Bruce: ”If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?”

Blaire: ”Myself, so I can obtain my goals.”

Bruce: ”What’s your secret weapon?”

Blaire: ”When people have problems, I try to help them.”

Bruce: ”You mean, help your sisters?”

Blaire: ”Aw, yeah, help my sisters.”

Debbie: ”Don’t say ‘Aw.’ ”

Bruce: ”If you went to the moon, who would you take with you?”

Blaire: ”My mom, because she never goes anywhere.”

Bruce: ”If you could be like anyone, who would you be like?”

Blaire: ”Leanza Cornett, because she was Miss America.”

Bruce: ”When you look in the mirror, what do you see?”

Blaire: ”Myself. I like what I see.”

Debbie gets down on her knees and begins rubbing moisturizer into Blaire’s legs because she will be wearing shorts for the interview. ”If you cough, say ‘Excuse me,’ ” Debbie says. Blaire holds out her arms, and Debbie rubs moisturizer into them. ”If they ask what the smell is,” says Tony, ”say ‘Wings.’ ”S He throws out his arms. ”Tra-la!”

Tony takes Blaire to the  interview, which is conducted in private, and Bruce goes out for some fast food. With them gone, Debbie expresses her true fears: ”You got to watch out for them Louisiana girls. They pull ’em out of the swamps. They’re dumb but gorgeous.”

When Blaire returns, she says she thinks she did well. ”It’s not hard for me to talk to adults,” she explains in her precise voice. ”I like to spend time with adults, even though I have to act older because they expect more from me.” Maybe Blaire, who has given up a child’s spontaneity, shows so little offstage emotion because she’s so busy editing herself with adults.

On Sunday morning, the third day of the pageant, all the girls, in their gowns, and their parents assemble in the ballroom. When last year’s Grand Supreme Queen gives up her crown, the pageant organizer, a short, bald man, begins to cry. Then the winners in each group are announced. When Blaire’s name is not called for her group, the Pancakes turn to leave. But the pageant organizer urges them to stay. Finally, after each of the group winners has been introduced, the name of the Grand Supreme Queen is called out: ”Blaire Ashley Pancake!”

Her parents scream with joy as Blaire takes the stage to receive her crown and her five $1,000 stacks of $1 bills. The huge piles weigh heavy in her hands, like bricks. Blaire stands there for only a moment, smiling, looking slight and a little bit lost, before she leaves the stage. On the nine-hour ride back to Chattanooga, Bruce, Debbie and Tony are still too excited to sleep. Tony says, ”I feel great. I did everything correct.”

Debbie says, ”My parents think we go overboard with pageants.”

Blaire says nothing. She is asleep, clutching her crown in her hands.

Couple of days ago guy asks me, “What’s the best pastrami in New York.”

“Katz’s.”

I didn’t know if it was a question or a test but I didn’t hesitate. And that’s part of what it means to be a New Yorker, being certain. Now, I could be wrong, and these things are a matter of taste, of course. Mile End makes a tasty sandwich out in Brooklyn. But it is not like Katz’s. And not only is the food tasty but the ambiance is usually just right. Has always been better than Ratners, the Stage or the Carnegie or even the 2nd Ave Deli, rest in peace.

Any other nominees for the best pastrami in town? Get at me.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

“Yellow Porch,” By Richard Diebenkorn (1961)

De La

+ Fela

= Fela Soul. Don’t sleep.

The Yanks say goodbye to the west coast tonight.

Here’s how they’ll roll.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Jesus Montero DH
Andruw Jones LF
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez 3B

Never mind the time difference:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Tigers are playing some great ball these days and are more than Justin Verlander. Over at SI.com, our man Cliff breaks it down:

The Detroit Tigers won their 11th straight game Tuesday night behind yet another gem from likely American League Cy Young award winner Justin Verlander, who pushed his record to 23-5 with seven scoreless innings against the White Sox. What that winning streak proves, however, is that the Tigers are more than a one-man show. In fact, their success has had more to do with scoring runs than preventing them, a fact that has been overshadowed by Verlander’s award-worthy season.

The Tigers’ hot streak also stretches back much further than the last 11 games. Detroit has gone 29-11 (.725) over its last 40 games dating back to the beginning of August, the best record of any team in baseball over that time. Research has shown that coming into the playoffs hot is no guarantee of post-season success, but the Tiger’s aren’t just hot, they’re very good. Detroit possesses a potent offense, an emerging No. 2 starter to complement Verlander and a a bullpen that is anchored by closer Jose Valverde, who has yet to blow this season.

Who knows? Maybe the Tigers go to the Whirled Serious. One thing is for sure, though, Valverde will blow at least one game along the way.

David Lebovitz makes chocolate ice cream.

Oh, hell yes.

A Message From Mr. Bochco

By John Schulian

In the midst of the terror that paralyzed me in my first Hollywood story meeting, I heard a voice from my newspaper days tell me to do what I’d always done when other people were talking: take notes. So I madly started scribbling down everything Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher were saying. And I kept scribbling until the day was done (thank God) and the story was broken (no thanks to me).

The story would become a script called “Gibbon Take.” It was about, among other things, a trust for the poor people of Beverly Hills. Steven sent me off to write the beat sheet for it, so we could see how the story looked on paper and where it needed shoring up. A beat sheet is a scene-by-scene outline that serves as the foundation for a script and a safeguard if a writer (me, for instance) makes a hash of said script. In the movie business, it’s known as a step outline, but movies take forever to make and writers come and go, leaving step outlines trampled and forgotten. But in TV, where the pace is furious-–a new episode is shot every seven or eight days-–a beat sheet is a rock to cling to.

On my way out the door that day, with my head still spinning, Steven’s assistant asked me the magic question: “John, where would you like us to send your check?” I hadn’t done anything to earn it yet, but I’ve never been one to turn down an offer of money, so I gave her my address in Philly and hurried off before she learned the awful truth about me.

I was staying at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard–the fabled rock-and-roll Riot House from the 60s-–and I spent the next day or two arranging and rearranging the order of scenes, looking for coherent act breaks, and basically taking baby steps as a TV writer. I worked on the same Olivetti portable typewriter that I’d hauled around the country as a sports columnist.

Steven would make changes in what I concocted, but still what I handed him wasn’t so bad that he banished me back from the premises. Instead, he gave me a big smile, wrapped an arm around my shoulder and asked, “You all right?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “you looked like a horse in a burning barn the other day.”

Then we sat down to do some more work on the story. He wanted to get me writing as soon as he could, just as he had the other two untested TV writers he was taking a flier on. One was a woman whose name I forget. The other was a young lawyer from Boston named David Kelley. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Created “Boston Legal,” “Ally McBeal,” and “Picket Fences,” to name but a few series. Wrote almost every episode himself (to the amazement of even the most prolific and best writers in the business). Won every kind of award they hand out. Married Michelle Pfeiffer. All that and he was a good guy, a certified Boston sports nut who kept asking me what his favorite ballplayers were really like. I told him they were all princes. I was in no position to disillusion anybody.

Anyway, Steven wanted to find out about me as a writer as fast as he could. The woman he’d taken a chance on had just delivered her script, and it was a disaster. If I turned out to be just as bad, he wanted to send me packing as quickly so he and Terry Fisher could do a salvage job.

This wasn’t anything he told me, of course, but I could see it written on his face just as he had seen the fear written on mine. Inspired by our mutual discomfort, I made a proposal: what if I wrote five or six scenes from my beat sheet as a test run? If he liked them, I would finish the script. If he didn’t, I’d go back to sportswriting and we would part as friends. It didn’t take any convincing for him to say yes.

By now I was staying at Mike Downey’s apartment in Marina del Ray while he was on the road for the L.A. Times. Just me and my Olivetti as I tried to bring those great Bochco-esque characters to life. If I had any gift at all for what I was attempting, it was that I was a decent mimic. Steven’s characters spoke with such specific voices that I could imitate them without embarrassing myself. So I wrote and re-wrote each scene, polishing them until they had as much shine on them as I could muster. Then, on a Friday afternoon, I stopped by Fox and handed them to Steven. He said he’d read them and get back to me as fast as he could. Both of us were nervous, though for far different reasons.

I spent most of the next day wandering around and didn’t get back to Downey’s apartment until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The message light on the phone was blinking. It was Steven, with a verdict: “I don’t know what you’re doing hanging around with sports writers, kid. You’re in show business.”

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

More is more. More is better.

Mike Lupica on The Great Mariano:

This is what the great W.C. Heinz wrote once about Sugar Ray Robinson, the one the old-timers all say was the greatest fighter, pound for pound, who ever lived:

“When the young assault me with their atomic miracles and reject my Crosby records and find comical the movies that once moved me, I shall entice them into talking about fighters. (Sugar Ray Robinson) will be a form of social security for me because they will have seen nothing like him, and I am convinced they never will.”

Mo Rivera, who got to 600 saves Tuesday night, who got to his own magic number in the season of Derek Jeter getting to his own magic number on that 5-for-5 day against the Tampa Bay Rays, will be that kind of social security for us someday. Because after everything we have seen from the Yankees in this generation, all the winning they have done since the winning really started with Joe Torre’s Yankees in 1996, Rivera has been the greatest of all of them.

Yanks in Seattle again tonight, working the late shift.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Jesus Montero DH
Andruw Jones LF
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez 3B
Brett Gardner CF

Never mind the Late Show:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Will the the Rays catch the Red Sox and win the AL wildcard. Don’t count on it writes Jonah Keri over at Grantland:

No team has ever squandered a lead of 7.5 games or more in September. Yes, the Sox have seen their 9.5-game cushion on Tampa Bay shrink to three games in just 12 days. But this isn’t horseshoes or nuclear war. No points are awarded for coming close. If the Sox merely play .500 ball the rest of the way, the Rays need to go 11-5 (.688) just to set up a tiebreaker.

The schedule says that won’t happen. Seven of Boston’s final 16 games come against the Orioles; the Rays have just two games left against them (and seven against the loaded Yankees). Baltimore owns the worst record in the American League, second-worst in the majors. Last night’s O’s lineup included Matt Angle, Kyle Hudson, and Robert Andino. The Red Sox could send a 51-year-old Oil Can Boyd out against the Orioles and they’d still win. Steamroll the O’s as expected, then win a handful of other games, and you force the Rays to play ostensibly perfect baseball for the next 2½ weeks.

Regression is coming. Everything that could have gone wrong for Boston has gone wrong. Dustin Pedroia, one of the best all-around players in the league, has gone ice-cold. He’s 3-for-34 in his past eight games, with nine strikeouts and one extra-base hit. He’s hitless in his past 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position. The recent RISP woes run deeper than that: The Sox are hitting just .228 in that situation over their past eight games, including a 1-for-15 stretch against the Rays.

These things don’t last.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Dig this most cool photo gallery of American restaurants, cafes, and dinners of the 1950s and ’60s over at the even cooler site, Retronaut.

(Peace to Brad for showing us the way to this one.)

The wife and I went to Pittsburgh last weekend. Went to PNC, gained 46 lbs each and had a great time. The wife said, “It’s a nice little city,” which is what a New Yorker says whenever they visit a town that is not Mexico City or London or Rome.

Then to come back and see something like this?

Well, it’s good to be home.

[Photo Credi: Ribonyc]

Last week I told Ted Berg that I really like Mexican Coke and he challenged me to take a taste test to see if I’m just being a sucker. I’m going to take the test (and I’ll let you know the results) but the good folks at Serious Eats have beaten me to it:

Those folks who prefer Mexican Coke (like myself), really just like the idea of Mexican Coke—whether it’s because they think real sugar is tastier/healthier than corn syrup, whether it’s because Mexican Coke is more expensive and harder to find, thus more valuable, whether it’s because of its exoticism, whatever the reason—strip away the Mexicanness of it, and suddenly it’s a lot less appealing.

Which is what Ted was getting at to start with.