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THE ESSENTIAL
ELLISON
“Our Little Miss”
The Catholic Church is, I believe, generally credited with immortalizing the directive, “Give me
your children till they are six—and they are mine forever.” That’s pretty heady stuff, when you
stop to think how many kinder there are growing up in the shadow of the Holy Trinity. But it is
nothing compared to the scale on which American Society debases its female population when it
says, “Give me your girl- children till they are old enough to enter the World’s ‘Our Little Miss’
Variety Pageant—and they’ll be doomed forever to be either hookers or consumers, or both.”
How it came to pass that I was provided with the knowledge that informs this week’s installment is
a small trip, so I’ll take you on it, as I was taken. It was a week ago Wednesday, August 19th.
About
eight o’clock. I was getting ready to go out to a screening, when the phone rang, and a voice said,
“You
don’t know me, man, and it isn’t important, but you ought to turn to Channel 11 right now. You are
not going to believe what’s going on, on that channel!” I asked what it was, and the guy on the
other end just
repeated, “Turn it on for one second. If ever there was a column, that’s it, man.”
So he hung up after I’d thanked him, and out of wild curiosity I turned it on, and there-about three-
quarters over-was something called the WORLD’S “OUR LITTLE MISS” VARIETY PAGEANT.
I was only able to watch five minutes of it, and then had to split, but I was so intrigued and
horrified that when Mary Reinholz called me the next morning—to inform me this week’s Freep
would be a Women’s Lib edition, staffed and prepared by the ladies—to ask me if I’d slant my
column toward Women’s Lib, I was able to tell her, “Dear heart, I was gonna do it anyhow. I’ve
got myself a doozy this week.” (Just so you don’t think I’m pandering. )
And I called KTTV and asked them if they’d screen me a tape of the live telecast of the pageant,
and they said yes, and so it was that last Monday I went down to the KTTV studios and sat for
ninety minutes as the Universal Broadcasting Company (of Baton Rouge, Louisiana) piped a replay
through its Dallas affiliate to a color TV at Channel 11. Ninety minutes of unrelenting bad taste,
petty hokum, deadly degradation of innocent children. Ninety teeth-clenching, stomach—bubbling
minutes of ghastliness as a clique of dirty old men and their exploiting associates debased and
corrupted a dozen little girls between the ages of three and twelve.
Thereby keynoting, most appropriately for this edition dedicated to the ennoblement of the female
image, one of the most insidious maneuvers utilized by our snake-twisted society to fuck up the
minds of
its female population.
Uh, Hef, that’s about 53% of the crowd. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, makes the Catholic
Church look like really inept small potatoes.
The “Our Little Miss” Pageant (we are told by a publicity release) is more than a beauty pageant! It
is a youth development program designed to give young ladies early goals in good grooming,
social
graces, talent training, and scholarship! It is the only outlet of this kind for deserving youngsters!
The brochure goes on to tell us that OLM (as I’ll refer to it hereafter) has 1200 local preliminaries
sponsored by civic and service organizations throughout the nation (as opposed to a mere 54 local
pageants for Miss Teenage America). Are you hanging in there?
