One Sunday last February, a young woman named Kristen Smith left the parking lot of Bethany Baptist Church, in Plant City, Florida, and drove along a two-lane country road with a large gold crown on the seat beside her. The mossy pasturelands around Plant City—the winter strawberry capital of the world—were exploding with ripe fruit. Kristen was two weeks into her reign as the 2008 Strawberry Queen, and the crown was already causing severe headaches. It weighed nearly a pound and, even bobby-pinned on top of her thick chestnut hair, left a mark on her forehead, an affliction known among generations of Plant City Strawberry Queens as “the queen’s dent.” She was on her way to a lunch where she would be making her official début, and she was nervous.
Kristen, who is nineteen, was not a regular on the beauty-pageant circuit. She could eat a plate of ribs and two hours later be craving pork rinds or red-velvet cake. When her spirits flagged, she read Scripture. She drove a pickup truck, attended a Christian college, worked part-time as a waitress, and wanted to spend the rest of her life in Plant City, raising a family. Kristen Smith disproved the theory that the Strawberry Queen had to be the well-connected daughter of a town scion; her father repaired washing machines for a living. She looked like a young Bobbie Gentry, and she was just what Plant City was looking for in these modern times.
Along the road, mom-and-pop operators were selling flats of berries from tents and campers. One of the fruit stands favored by tour buses was doing such a business in shortcake that the whipped cream was pumped out by nitrous tanks. Fifteen per cent of the nation’s strawberries are produced in Eastern Hillsborough County between December and April. Still, the Outback Steakhouses and the stucco subdivisions were getting closer, and the life that Plant City celebrated was vanishing, acre by acre. The coronation of a Strawberry Queen had come to seem almost an act of defiance.
Kristen pulled into the Red Rose Inn & Suites, a motor lodge off Interstate 4, whose marquee said “Queen’s Luncheon.” The purpose of the luncheon was to introduce Kristen, along with four other young women, who had been chosen to serve as members of the 2008 Strawberry Court, to the thirty or so women whose husbands run the Florida Strawberry Festival, in Plant City. These women are called “directors’ wives,” and, unofficially, they represented the traditions of the town.
The queen and her court made their entrance. Their dresses were modestly cut, their hair was teased, and they wore strawberry pendants, strawberry charms, strawberry bracelets, and strawberry barrettes. With white satin pageant sashes, they stood at the edge of the dining room, more tentative than triumphant. They seemed to grasp the magnitude of their role when one of the luncheon guests clasped her hands and, in a loud voice, said, “Are these our girls?”
I grew up in central Florida in the nineteen-sixties, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where my father worked. I remember flocks of white birds that would lift from the backs of cattle, disturbed by the jackhammers and bulldozers clearing land for Walt Disney World. Disney would never have what Plant City’s Strawberry Festival had; we had the smell of hay and manure, the crêpepaper float that, on parade day, carried five young women through archways of Spanish moss. I must have been seven or eight when I got to ride in the parade, holding a tinfoil wand and wearing tap shoes from Jackie’s School of Dance. The closest I came to true royalty was when my cousin Susie made the Strawberry Court, in 1984.
Returning home last February, I saw that the little country fair had become a six-million-dollar extravaganza featuring Top Forty country acts, like Alan Jackson, and drawing half a million visitors during its eleven-day run. Plant City still had the First Baptist Church, with its white-columned grandeur, but the Church of Scientology had recently moved in next to the old train depot. The mayor wore Prada slip-ons and lived in a gated subdivision that had a huge tiki bar. On the interstate, a three-story Tyrannosaurus rex, constructed out of fibreglass, hovered over the exit ramp, urging tourists to visit Dinosaur World.
Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids. My family owned a small orange business called Hull Groves, and my great-aunt Dot ran our fruit stand on Highway 60 in the winter months. One day, Lucille Ball showed up. She was wearing a large scarf that partly hid her face, but her voice was so familiar that a dog belonging to one of my cousins jumped into the back seat of her car. We had a machine that washed and polished the oranges to an improbable shine, and I used to watch the tourists drive away with their perfect fruit.
I saw the 2008 Strawberry Queen and her court as a last stand against the inevitable end of a place that defined them and me. Yet the strawberry girls saw themselves as part of a tradition that started in 1930 and would go on forever. Kristen tried to explain this at dinner one night in a Plant City restaurant. Her case was strengthened by the presence of Ruby Jean Redman, the 1953 Strawberry Queen, sitting a table away. The two women nodded to each other. “It’s what joins the community together,” Kristen said. “The way the world changes so much, you don’t have to worry about this changing. It’s just something we’ll always have.”
Five pageant judges had come from out of town to choose the queen and her court, on the basis of an interview, skill in public speaking, and how the contestants looked in evening wear and a modest one-piece bathing suit. The moment the queen and court were announced—Kristen, Shaunie Surrency, Britney Balliet, Jackie Raulerson, and Amanda Sparkman—the town laid gifts at their feet, ranging from loaner fox stoles for chilly nights at the festival to scholarship money, and free tanning sessions at Planet Beach. Some of the girls had grown up in 4-H or Future Farmers of America, and knew how to calm a half-ton steer (Shaunie’s steer, a thousand-pound Black Angus named Paco, was entered in a festival competition). They usually introduced themselves by their church affiliation: “I’m Kristen Smith, I love organic peanut butter, and I go to Bethany Baptist Church.”
The only one who didn’t seem to be a true country girl was Jackie Raulerson, a five-foot-eleven sophisticate who looked like a runway model. Her high school was surrounded by cow pastures, but she wore chic trenchcoats with flipped-up collars to class. At public events, when other court members spoke of their desire to spend the rest of their lives in Plant City, Jackie said, “I’d like to come back—eventually.” During the pageant interviews, most girls got easy questions from the judges, but Jackie was asked about immigration. Her answer was deft, and probably helped her win a place in the court: “Without laborers, the strawberry fields would be virtually impossible to farm. It would be horrible for the strawberry industry, and that’s so close to my heart.”
Each girl signed a contract agreeing to good morals and good behavior. Pregnancy or marriage was grounds for dismissal. Last year’s queen was a stunning beauty, named Summer Pippin, who resembled a young Nancy Sinatra. The boutique owner who sold Summer her pageant gown had said, “Summer, you look like you’re sex on a stick, and they don’t go for that in Plant City.” Summer almost had to abdicate when she didn’t graduate on time with her high-school class.
Kristen said that she’d made it to nineteen without being kissed. She went on road trips to Passion plays on Friday nights. Her idea of small talk was probing someone on the finer points of baptism. “Do y’all sprinkle or do immersion?” she asked. It was hard to resist her raspy-voiced effervescence, or her enthusiasm when she discovered sautéed mushrooms or Tae Bo workout videos. But Kristen was a killer competitor. She claimed that she competed for the strawberry throne to win the three-thousand-dollar scholarship, although she had spent twenty-eight hundred dollars on her pageant gown. Her big concern was the bathing-suit competition. “It’s an opportunity for lust,” she said. “Why do you have to flaunt yourself in public?” She consulted a former Strawberry Queen and finally decided that she was O.K. with wearing a swimsuit on a public stage because it showed that she believed in good nutrition and fitness.
Kristen lived with her parents, ten miles out in the country, in a concrete ranch house. An above-ground pool in the back yard overlooked hacked-up grazing land. As queen, she had taken a quick course in etiquette and learned that steak should be cut one bite at a time instead of sawed up all at once. She studied YouTube videos to become familiar with the country stars who would be performing. As the festival approached, events piled up, and often it was after midnight when she pulled into her driveway. Then she had to start the process of washing and drying her long hair. Kristen was beginning to suffer from sleep deprivation, and she knew that she needed to find a solution. That’s when a cosmetologist friend named Nancy Rupp stepped in.
Mrs. Rupp, as she was called by everyone, moonlighted in funeral homes, “fixing the hair of loved ones,” as she put it, which is how she came up with the idea of styling Kristen’s hair while she slept. Kristen began spending the night in a spare bedroom at Mrs. Rupp’s house.
Mrs. Rupp, a slightly built woman with dark hair and a faraway voice, was not keen on publicity. “We all do what we can to help,” she said. “It’s just an honor to be able to help Kristen. She’s our queen.” Her daughter also went to Bethany Baptist. I arrived one morning around daybreak, as a sandhill crane plucked its way toward a drainage ditch in the silvery darkness, and saw a single light on inside the house. Mrs. Rupp was in the kitchen finishing her coffee. “It’s time,” she said, and she walked past an enormous red ball gown that hung in the hallway and toward a closed bedroom door. She knocked lightly. Kristen was sleeping with her head at the foot of the bed, allowing her hair to hang down over the mattress. Mrs. Rupp plugged in a curling iron and knelt on the floor. She worked over the hair with long brush strokes. By the time she started with the curlers, Kristen was yawning and stretching her arms.
“I’m so bad when I go to funeral homes,” Mrs. Rupp said softly. “I’ll spend an hour and a half. It’s my time with them.”
Kristen was still sleepy. “If you think about where they are going, it’s a celebration,” she said.
For decades, the Strawberry Queen program was overseen by a volunteer chaperone who made sure that the girls got to their events on time and looked good in public. The dressing area at the Strawberry Festival was a tent or a trailer with unreliable plumbing, and the wardrobe included such items as velvet capes with strawberry appliqués. But in 2001 a woman named Sandee Sytsma, who had worked for the Tampa Electric Company for two decades, took over as coördinator. She raised the G.P.A. requirements for pageant applicants, increased the program budget to twenty thousand dollars, brought in hair and makeup stylists, and scheduled more appearances around town. Angry mothers hunted her down in the beauty parlor to complain about the strict new standards, but Sytsma believed that the program needed a major overhaul to stay alive.
“The shine of the crown was not as bright as it once was,” Sytsma told me. “I wanted to build it back up.” Sytsma, who is known as Miss Sandee to the girls, is sixty and a perfect size 2, and tends to reapply her lipstick after sipping a cup of coffee. She went at her volunteer job like a C.E.O. Her immaculate Jeep Grand Cherokee usually contained five red sequinned cowboy hats, five cha-cha dresses, and five pairs of black jeans with a strawberry on the back pocket. Sytsma made no secret of her agenda: Britney Spears was the dark template against which she fought. She wanted young ladies who could represent small-town values circa 1958.
“I can’t believe they still make teen-agers like this,” a woman told Sytsma after meeting this year’s court. “They do in Plant City,” Sytsma replied.
Sytsma inherited her marketing sense from her father, Roy Parke, Jr., a legendary local strawberry grower. Parke owned a red Cadillac and had a swimming pool shaped like a strawberry. His produce stand, Parkesdale Farm Market, was the Liberace of fruit stands. Tour buses jammed the parking lot during the strawberry harvest, and customers posed for photographs while sitting in a big red papier-mâché throne and wearing a crown. Shortcakes and shakes, the best in the county, were devoured in a glitzy picnic area called the Garden of Eatin’.
Two days before this year’s Strawberry Festival started, Sytsma rounded up the girls at dawn to visit several radio stations in Tampa, twenty-five miles away. They travelled in a white van with strawberries painted on the side, and Sytsma used the time to prep the girls for their radio appearances. “O.K., what’s new at the festival this year?”
“Swimming pigs,” Kristen guessed, but the Paddling Porkers had been around for a while.
They arrived at the Clear Channel studios just before seven, the girls shivering as Sytsma grabbed a flat of berries from the back seat. Employees moved down the main hallway drinking coffee, but even the groggiest of them got out of the way for this sugary apparition. “You guys need to go see the Sports Animal at 620,” one man said. The girls waited outside the 98 Rock studio, peering through the window at d.j.s sporting Lucifer goatees and tongue studs. Two female mannequins in black bikinis were propped in a corner. One of the tech guys, looking a little frantic, came out. “We had some girls who were supposed to show up and we’re in a bind,” he said. “We need girls for our bit.”
The Strawberry Court drew near, but Sytsma intervened. “And what would that be?”’
“They are basically licking pieces of food, and they are supposed to decide what kind of food it is.”
Catching sight of Kristen moving toward the open studio door, Sytsma yelled, “No, Kristen!”
Something about the Strawberry Court girls seemed to make men want to test them. Down the hall at a studio with a hay bale outside the screen door, where a country show was being broadcast, the girls huddled around a live microphone. “The most important question,” a d.j. said. “When are you taking on last year’s crew in the milking competition?”
The host asked which court member was showing a steer this year, but the other d.j. wouldn’t let up. “In a fair fight, which could win, this year’s court or last year’s court? Any hair pullers? Kickers? Biters?” Afterward, Sytsma hustled them out to the parking lot, and they returned to the safety of Plant City. They stopped at Chick-Fil-A for breakfast and prayed before unwrapping their biscuits, or, in Jackie’s case, a multigrain bagel.
On the road, Sytsma pulled up to a toll booth. The female attendant looked beaten down, but Sytsma always sensed the possibility of self-improvement and, before she hit the gas, said, “Cute hair!”
That afternoon, I went to the empty fairgrounds to visit the expo hall that housed the Parade of Queens exhibit, a room filled with gold-framed photographs of past Strawberry Queens and Courts. The panorama of faces began with Charlotte Rosenberg, the first queen, in 1930, and wrapped around three walls. I looked for my cousin Susie, once a tomboy who liked to ride ponies through the groves. Her father, a strict Baptist, had objected to her competing in the pageant, because he thought it would corrupt a young girl’s soul, but Susie, a blue-eyed beauty with the feathered bangs of a Charlie’s Angel, won, and there was her picture with the 1984 court. It was a point of pride in Plant City to have a relative on the wall.
In 1968—the year that local public schools and hospitals began to integrate—Marian Richardson became the first African-American to compete for the court. Dozens of Richardson’s relatives and friends attended the pageant, but she was cut in the second round. Since then, only one black girl has made the court: Essie Cecille Dixon, who was among several black teen-agers competing in 1973. Dixon, the daughter of a single mother, couldn’t afford the suit she needed for the swimsuit competition; a former teacher helped pay for it. A young white woman who ran a local teen-fashion board coached Dixon and told her to keep her eyes on the judges and imagine victory. “When I walked out there, I wasn’t a poor black girl living in the projects—I was a model,” Dixon says. Now fifty-one, she is a retired public-school teacher who works as a server at Denny’s. She lives on Laura Street, in an older black neighborhood, two blocks from the railroad tracks that, in my childhood, separated black from white. Dixon and her husband, Ronald, earn extra income by working eight-dollar-an-hour jobs at the Strawberry Festival, and each year Dixon slips off to the Parade of Queens room to look at her photograph on the wall.
By 2000, Latinos had surpassed blacks as the largest minority group in Eastern Hillsborough County, owing to the influx of farmworkers. In 2006, a Mexican-American teen-ager named Ilene Chavez—the daughter of field workers who had come to Plant City to pick berries—was chosen for the Strawberry Court. Light-skinned and fine-boned, Chavez had hired a pageant coach, added blond highlights to her hair, and borrowed a St. John Knits suit for the competition. “I so wanted to be a part of it,” Chavez said.
This year, the barrier was broken again, although that wasn’t apparent until the festival’s kickoff parade. Parade day began with a 7 A.M. breakfast at the First Baptist Church, for a few hundred growers and ranchers, after which the members of the 2008 court dashed off to change into red gowns. As they got ready, Kristen, between gulps of tea, read motivational notes from members of her church. “Hey, guys, I have some Scripture for us, Philippians 4:6-7,” she announced, but the girls were so used to her praying that they kept on spraying their hair.
“Hey, Britney, stop hogging that curling iron, I got six pounds of hair!” Shaunie said to her friend, who was swaying to a country-music song playing on a boom box and staring at herself in the mirror.
Around lunchtime, the girls got on their float, which was parked behind the Gro-More fertilizer store. Miss Sandee told them to drink plenty of water and to use sunscreen. Mrs. Rupp appeared with an old JVC video camera. High-school marching bands tuned up nearby. Finally, the strawberry float lurched forward.
Thousands of spectators stood along the old brick streets of downtown. Lawn parties were humming, with Crock-Pots and aluminum pans of cobbler resting on wobbly card tables in the shade near the azalea bushes. Tangy clouds of barbecue smoke drifted in the breeze. Members of First Baptist were on one side of Reynolds Street, and members of First Presbyterian occupied the other. The Diamond Fertilizer float was blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd. A black gospel float was piping out praise tunes. There were Barack Obama T-shirts and Mike Huckabee T-shirts. Almost everyone stood when the R.O.T.C. passed with the flag. “The big city is coming, but we are trying to get them used to how we do things,” a man named Jon Belk said, holding a soft drink. “Plant City is the slow life. That’s the way we like it. You come here and the clocks stop. You can hear trains in the background, and cows.”
The parade route passed through a historic area of bungalows with wraparound porches, and then travelled west toward the Dairy Queen in a Latino neighborhood, where teen-agers in ranchero belts and unlaced Timberlands sat on the grass. As the queen and the court approached, an elderly couple in folding chairs waved excitedly. The silver-haired man smiled as he rose up and shouted, “Hi, mi hija!”
The couple were Amanda Sparkman’s grandparents, Benjamin and Sara Rodriguez. The Rodriguezes had come to Plant City from Texas to pick strawberries in the early nineteen-eighties, and their daughter had married an Anglo from an old Plant City family. Their daughter was the eighteen-year-old on the float. Amanda wore green contacts, raised steers and hogs, and was the resident country-music expert; she was also the only one who had a box of congratulatory notes written in Spanish. “Even if you didn’t win first place, you accomplished a beautiful victory,” her grandfather wrote.
The girls climbed down from the parade float that afternoon, and from then on they could not escape the virtual giant mosh pit of the Florida Strawberry Festival, where on a good day fifty thousand visitors came through the turnstiles.
“We look good,” one of them said, as they got ready.
“We look hot,” another said.
“We look country.”
Kristen quickly learned how to resist exploitation. When a photographer asked her to dip her finger in whipped cream and playfully taste it, she managed to remove any suggestion of sexual innuendo from the stunt and turned it into a Martha White flour commercial. Everything about the festival was G-rated except for a Trick Daddy song about ballas, dealas, and hustlas that blared from a stomach-churning ride by the name of Ecstasy. A ministry group called S.O.S. (Serving Our Savior) ran a booth that asked festival-goers, including the Strawberry Court, about their salvation.
“Because I recognize Jesus Christ as my savior!” Britney said.
Jackie greeted the public with a big smile, as if she were about to show off a real-estate listing—“I’m Jaclyn, it’s nice to see you.” One night after a buffet of fried chicken and black-eyed peas, she stepped into an elevator, closed her eyes as she leaned against the back wall, and said, “I am so tired of country food. I don’t think God wanted me to be Southern. I love ethnic food. They look at me as if I were a gargoyle if I order unsweetened tea.” Yet Jackie was often the first to arrive at an event, eager to put on her sash.
One afternoon, Jackie rushed toward me and leaned in close. “Miss Anne, your zipper is down!” she whispered. As I started to remedy the situation, the others surrounded me. In their world, a lady retreated to the bathroom for such duties. To make up for the awkwardness, they complimented my white pants. “You know, those would look so cute with a little white fitted jacket with cap sleeves, heels, a polo shirt, and big earrings,” Jackie said.
“And red lipstick!” Amanda added. That night, I went to sleep wondering where I could find a jacket with cap sleeves.
No matter how intense the Florida heat, the girls always looked fresh. Their base of operations was a locker room called the Palace. It was full of clothes, wet wipes, hair spray, hot rollers, curling irons, gummy bears, and potpourri. Each girl had a makeup mirror surrounded by dozens of snapshots. A chaperone was always present, usually an older woman who passed the time in a chair by the door, knitting or reading. Boyfriends and mothers were not allowed in. In exhaustion, the girls sometimes piled on the couch together like puppies and fell asleep. One would invariably wake up and say, “Let’s get pedicures,” or “I want boiled peanuts!”
Eventually, the façade of perfection started to crack. One of the girls let the “f” word slip out. Britney Balliet let loose some atomic belches. Jackie went temporarily insane and smeared lipstick all over her face. She said she missed the smell of Nordstrom.
“Jack, you’re such a nutcase,” Amanda said.
Twice a day, they went backstage to meet the country stars who would be performing in the afternoon and evening at the thirteen-thousand-seat open stadium on the fairgrounds. In the old days, people like George Jones and Loretta Lynn would be hanging around a simple wire fence, waiting to go on. Today’s stars, in their two-thousand-dollar boots, love playing at the festival, because it embodies everything their songs are about, but they sometimes seem nonplussed when they encounter five country girls in matching outfits who step forward to present a flat of strawberries. One day, the girls went backstage and spotted the singer Blake Shelton bending over a mixer board. He was wearing a snap-front Wrangler shirt and a grungy Hoyt cap. They all shook hands, and Shelton mentioned that he’d just flown in from Las Vegas.
“How old do you have to be to go there?” Kristen asked.
Shelton paused, almost embarrassed—unsure whether Kristen was joking. Then he grinned. “Can I wear your crown tonight?” he said. “That would be hot.”
One afternoon, when the crowds had been thinned out by rain, the girls and Miss Sandee traipsed across the muddy fairgrounds to the livestock tents. Shaunie, a delicate girl with doleful blue eyes, was scheduled to show her steer later that night. On their way to the tents, they passed a demonstration area that featured a BMX and skateboard ramp, along with a little trailer where the skaters hung out between shows. The girls had noticed a stunt rider named Austin Coleman, who had smooth chocolate skin and short dreadlocks that he kept under a knit cap. “Miss Sandee, can we go talk to him?” one of them asked, breathlessly. Coleman was already sauntering toward them, eating a rice cake.
“We’re going to see Shaunie’s steer,” Britney said. “Wanna come?”
Coleman shrugged. “Sure. Is it going to do something?”
The girls led him into the steer tent, where he hung back from the bray and stink of the beasts, while the girls kept going forward, even Jackie.
Coleman, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Southern California, viewed the queen and the court with a sociological fascination. “I feel it’s outdated,” he said. “I see these girls walking around and I’m, like, ‘Wow, what are these girls gonna be doing in two years?’ They are not strongly opinionated about anything going on outside of Plant City.”
Britney, for instance, lived with her mother and father on the same street as four of her aunts; her grandparents lived one pasture behind her house. “I would be an outcast if I moved away,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be able to move away and not know anyone. It’s kind of hard to describe.” I knew what she meant; when I was twelve, and my parents’ marriage ended, my mother took my brother and me to live in another part of Florida, in a town of retirees who played shuffleboard and bought shiny fruit. I understood why the strawberry girls never wanted to leave their fields and fences.
Miss Sandee decided that the girls should look elegant for that evening’s stadium concert, so they put on their strapless ball gowns and wore their hair swept up; the fox stoles rested on their shoulders. Along with the chaperones, they were escorted by sheriff’s deputies to reserved seats. The evening performer was Tom Jones. He was oiled and coppery, wearing tight pants and a shirt open over his chest. The girls watched him with looks of stunned horror; Britney and Amanda bit their lips, trying not to giggle. Then lingerie started flying toward the stage. Britney shrieked when a pair of panties landed near her feet. Kristen, curious, picked them up and read a note that was attached. Later, Tom Jones and his tight pants were all the talk. Someone asked, “Kristen, did you see?”
Kristen was leaning into the mirror. She laughed. “See what?”
The last Saturday night of the festival, there was an auction in the steer tent. Hundreds of locals staked out places in the bleachers, bringing along blankets and thermoses. Future Farmers of America and 4-H kids, wearing blue corduroy show jackets, gave last-minute brush-outs to their animals. The smells of hay and manure were joined with those of soap and cologne. I spotted my great-uncle Roy sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers. He is ninety-four, and his big leathery hands were propped on a metal walker. His wife, Dot, who ran the family fruit stand, died ten years ago, and his orange groves had been killed off by disease, like many thousands of others in central Florida in the past decade. The trees that had shaded my childhood were now a flat open space that Roy leased to strawberry growers and protected from developers. He was sitting next to my cousin Susie, who still had her Charlie’s Angels hair, although now it was dusted with gray.
A bell rang to signal the start of the auction. The first items were prize strawberries grown by local farmers. The queen and the court, wearing fitted jeans and high boots, entered the ring. They lifted flats of berries above their heads and, like warriors, paraded around as the auctioneer trilled off numbers. The steers were next.
Shaunie had been morose and jittery all day. She seemed no match for Paco as she stood in the chute waiting for her number to be called. But once they were in the ring Paco followed Shaunie’s every direction, his hooves sinking into the sand as she nudged him along. The bidding held at five dollars a pound; Paco was bound for the packinghouse. Shaunie skipped her duties with the court that night; she insisted on spending those last hours with Paco in his pen, lying on the hay until her mother picked her up, around midnight.
On Sunday afternoon, the festival’s final day, the girls arrived at the Palace subdued, even melancholy. The end of the festival meant an end to escorts through town, sirens at full blast, flashbulbs going off. They would resume the routines of school and jobs—Britney at a day-care center, Amanda as a cashier at the Sweetbay grocery store—and Wednesday-night church. In the fall, new girls would sign up to compete for the next court. Miss Sandee was already lobbying for a radical change in the pageant: she wanted to do away with the swimsuit competition, and, eventually, she succeeded.
In the Palace, the girls were sprawled on the floor, wearing faded jeans and signing heartfelt tributes to each other on poster board. Britney wrote to Amanda, her classmate at the community college, “You are my favorite and I love you with all my heart. Yay! Harvard Community College.”
“Hi, darlings,” Jackie announced as she breezed in. “What’s wrong with everyone?”
I wandered over to visit the Parade of Queens exhibit again. A skinny teen-age girl was staring up at the 1954 queen, Ruth Shuman. “I know her,” the girl, whose name was Chelsea Myers, said. “My mom works for her—cleans her house—and I pull her weeds.” Myers moved on to Kristen and the 2008 court. “They’ll probably do really good in life,” she said.
Sugarland was playing a concert at three-thirty, and it was a sellout. The sky was blue and cloudless, and the sun illuminated everything into dazzling clarity. There were cowboy hats and trucker hats and girls in T-shirts and tank tops that said “Got Berries?” or “Plant City FFA: Keepin’ It Rural.” Half the stadium stood up and sang along when Sugarland played “Who Says You Can’t Go Home.” Mrs. Rupp filmed it all with her JVC, and I spotted several former Strawberry Queens in the V.I.P. seats. The 2008 queen and court were in the front row, wearing sunglasses and looking untouchably glamorous in the last few hours of their eminence. Jackie was crying. Kristen’s eyes were closed and her arms were swaying in the air, palms up, as if she were at church, and she was smiling broadly. ♦
