In the Philippines, beauty pageants are a big deal, and if you are/have been a beauty pageant queen then you get put up on the idolize pedestal. You could just be the queen of the Mango festival or queen of the rising bamboo, as long as you're a winner of some kind of pageant based on your looks, then you are all that and a bag of banana chips.
When mom was a young woman, she was a beauty queen and a magazine cover girl in the Philippines. Of the nine girls in her family (yes 9! because you know Catholics can't stop reproducing), mom was considered one of the most beautiful of her sisters.
Now, I did not know about any of my mom's beauty queen days until I was in college, and I found out because of an assignment on how my parents immigrated to the U.S. It was shocking to me because, well one, she never talked about it, and two, she's just been a mom to me. I know in a way that sounds terrible, but I always pictured my mom as mother, nurse, and devote Catholic. Hot beauty queen with a tiara just never entered the figments of my imagination.
Ironically, I never dreamed of being in beauty pagents. The whole tiara thing just never appealed to me. I'm against wearing anything with taffeta. I just wanted to be a super model and look like Paulina Porizkova.
It's cool to think that my momma was a hottie in her day. She now hangs some of her pageant pictures on the walls at home, and occasionally I'll catch her fondly looking at the pictures and reminiscing.
