Elaine Benes or Miss America

There was a knock at my door. A girl was standing on the other side of it, crying.

"Hi, I'm Ashley. My aunt, Eileen Goldstein, said I should see you."

"Oh, did she?"

"I'm Miss Rhode Island. My pageant coach just quit, and I need someone to help me win Miss America."

Now everyone knows Mads is the pageant guy. He's completely fascinated by them. Me, on the other hand, find them to be wholly antiquated and unnecessary to our modern society. That being said, Eileen is a good, old friend, and I'd do anything to help her.

First we had an argument about the walk. She said she was supposed to walk a certain way. I thought that looked too "ornamental", and suggested a more forceful, assertive walk. I didn't like her swimsuit, or her evening gown. She didn't like my replacements, saying they were too "modern".

While I was waiting for some food to come for us, I turned on some Seinfeld. Oh, my God, I thought, that's it: Elaine Benes is Miss America. I had her watch 20 hours worth of Seinfeld with me so she could study Elaine. The first few episodes did nothing for her, but by the end, it had sunk in.

As you can well imagine, she lost the pageant. The judges couldn't appreciate her sarcastic yet insightful answers to their banal questions; couldn't appreciate how she pulled off her gross heels because they were annoying her during the swimsuit portion of the competition; and they definitely couldn't appreciate her in her evening gown in the background pantomiming using her finger to induce vomiting when one of the other girls walked past. She also didn't get the patronizing award of Miss Congeniality.

What she did get, though, was the strength of character to know that being Elaine Benes is much better than being Miss America. Eileen was happy with the result.