Another beauty pageant

We received an invitation to the city-wide beauty pageant following the recent pageant at my university. This came as a special pleasure because we had gotten to know one of the contestants. A beautiful, kind and outgoing Venezuelan girl named Silangel came in second at the Minsk State Linguistic University and joined me on the team representing our university to the Minister of Education. I like Silangel’s competitive spirit: When I congratulated her on her success, she griped about coming in second. I don’t think most of us would have griped about that, but I have some relatives who would and I understand that this sort of attitude is common among highly successful people.

At the city pageant, the first event was a test of cleverness. There’s a type of improvisational theater called KVN that’s popular in the Russian-speaking world, and the KVN player leading this segment nearly choked on her name. He decided that he’d like to do a sketch with her in which she was a teacher of Russian as a second language and explaining to him some new word or concept. My head spun as I imagined what I’d do in her place. She decided more quickly, choosing a very simple approach: She made him pronounce the word “thermometer,” which is more or less a cognate in Russian, Spanish and English. Because she carried it out with grace and authority, it worked out just fine.

We enjoyed seeing all the beautiful contestants and their talent presentations, but missed the fill-in acts that had been part of the earlier pageant at the university. Nightclub “Next” sponsored this show, and while they offered a very flashy environment they did not round up the sort of continuous stream of talent we enjoyed the first time. In fact, I got bored and hungry while waiting for the judges to make their decisions, and we decided to slip out. Our escape was aborted, however, by a radio reporter who came to interview me. He asked me lots of questions, some of which I answered satisfactorily. If I had known there would be a quiz, I suppose I would have paid more attention to the show. Anyway, he promised that I’d be on the radio tomorrow evening and I guess we’ll try to find Minskaya Volna at 7:00 tomorrow.

By the time I had finished my radio interview, the judges were returning so we returned as well. Celanngel ranked among the winners, and she will defend her title at another contest next week. We are grateful that we’ve been invited, but doubt that we will go since it comes just before we will leave for Prague. That, of course, will be a whole other story.