archives: pageant

TURN IT ON, TURN IT UP, AND KICK SOME BUTT…

fall 2004

Its Sunday afternoon in Easton, an Aroostook county town of 1700 people, and 8-year-old Stephanie Marie Hammond stands atop her bedside table in platforms and full makeup shaking her hips to Missy Elliot’s “Get Your Freak On”. She walks from tabletop to tabletop singing into the microphone as if on stage before thousands of people, then pauses to strike a pose. Her moves are as graceful and grown-up-like as Jennifer Lopez on the cover of the Cosmo she thumbed through while her mom checked out at Wal-Mart. Her 11-year-old sister, Brooke Ann, runs in and jumps up on the bed to join her. They bounce next to each other passing the microphone between verses, but sharing the limelight gets old quickly, and within moments they wrestle each other down onto the bed. Their dad, Doug, hears the commotion from the kitchen, barges in, and begins to tickle both of them. Their screaming fades to laughter…

“Since the day they were born, to me they were the most beautiful things that was ever placed on this earth, I mean, next to the flowers and the trees… they were the most beautiful things that God put on this earth, and the pageants don’t need to tell them that because they know—we tell them everyday” explains their mom, Kim. This year the girls have competed in twelve pageants. “I’ve taught my girls, it don’t matter what you look like on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside—that’s what beauty is.”

Brooke and Stephanie aren’t what one imagines as typical pageant princesses. They love watching wrestling with their dad, eating lots of chocolate, and playing rough. “They’re well known throughout Aroostook County,

and a lot of girls are scared to compete against Brooke… because Brooke has done the bigger pageants… she knows what to do and, after the last pageant we did, Brooke’s got her attitude back… She’s got the attitude back where she’s gonna win, this is her time.” At the Miss Northern New England pageant in September, Brooke’s interview question was, “What are the three words that best describe you?” She had been rehearsing her response since 6 a.m. when her mom started curling her hair, and confidently responded, ”The three words that best describe me are caring, kind, and helpful because of my big heart and I do things for others before I do things for myself”.

“This all started when she was five with a little piece of pink paper- an announcement to sign up. I said ‘Yah, okay…’ and she got the title and she went to Potato Blossom, but she didn’t place and she was fine with that because she was having so much fun that she didn’t care.” Since winning that 1999 Little Miss Easton title, Brooke and Stephanie combined have won 17 titles including Brooke’s 2001 Maine National Preteen Petite, which sent them to Florida to compete on a national level. Doug does auto-body work in their garage at night and on weekends to make the extra money—about ten thousand dollars a year—it costs them to cover the pageant expenses. When asked what she wants to be when she grows up, Brooke responds, “A model, a lawyer, and Miss America.” Those are lofty goals for an eleven year old. As Kim tells them as they step on stage “Smile, have fun, but, most importantly, be yourself, and…turn it on, turn it up, and kick some butt.”