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612-822-4611
The Pink Dress: A Memoir of a Reluctant Beauty Queen

The Pink Dress: A Memoir of a Reluctant Beauty Queen

Paperback

Entertainment & Performing ArtsBiographies General

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ISBN10: 1647427401
ISBN13: 9781647427405
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: Sep 10 2024
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
Awards: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
For fans of Little Miss Sunshine and Secrets of Miss America, this memoir from a national award-winning author reveals the reality of being the first Guyrex Girl in the 1970s. Beauty pageant stories have never been this raw, this real.

Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn't have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso's Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the Kings of Beauty--just as the 1970's counterculture movement began to take off.

A pink, rose-covered gown--a Guyrex creation--symbolizes the fairy tale life that young women in Jane's time imagined beauty queens had. Its near destruction exposes reality: the author's failed relationship with her mother, and her parents' failed relationship with one another. Weaving these narrative threads together is the Wild West notion that anything is possible, especially do-overs.

The Pink Dress awakens nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, the era's conflicts and growth pains. A common expectation that women went to college to get MRS degrees--to find a husband and become a stay-at-home wife and mother--often prevailed. How does one swim upstream against this notion among feminist voices that protest If You Want Meat, Go to a Butcher! at beauty pageants, two flamboyant showmen, and a developing awareness of self? Torn between women's traditional roles and what women could be, Guyrex Girls evolved, as did the author.

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