There are a few things I’ve tried to avoid over the course of my brief life, not always with success.

Disasters at sea, misjudgments on ex-wives, and airplanes that were overhauled in old barns and chickenhouses, homemade explosives designed to discombobulate beaver dams are among the few.

I found another one to avoid. Never volunteer to be a judge at a beauty contest. Especially if it is to be presented at your children’s house with all their little friends in the competition. Even I know better than to be a volunteer of that sort and made it plain. The judge therefore was elected by the contentious contestants to be my No. 2 granddaughter, Courtney.

Her nickname is “Courthouse.” She is a barefoot runner and rider and don’t care much for playing dress up. Everybody agreed (at first anyway) that she would be judiciously fair in her assessment of the winner.

As the 7-to-10-year-old contestants dressed in their finery, painted their nails, applied lipstick and mascara, Judge Courthouse fed the pig and the horses and generally ignored the pre-contest proceedings.

Those girls took their shot at winning Longtown’s first beauty contest and, of course, one would imagine that there would only be one first place winner but No. 1 and No. 2 commenced to cussin,’ first at Judge Courthouse and then at one another.

The losers joined in, so the judge adjourned court long enough to go down to the hog wallow and scoop up a bucket of whatever was in the hog pen, return to the pageant and proceeded to baptize the pageant contestants, finery and all.

“Now y’all are all ugly as hell and nobody wins.”

She should have been Queen Solomon. Everybody including the judge caught it pretty good when it came to the cleanup detail but it was a sight to see.I was proud to be there from a respectable distance.

Not running for that office ever,
Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)