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Beauty Queens Skinning Muskrats, Miss Out Doors and only in Maryland...
Golden Hill, Md. -- Contestant No. 1 sashayed down the catwalk, her hair bouncing in blond curls, and smiled a beauty-queen smile. She picked up a furry dead rodent about the size of a football.Then she took out a very sharp 4-inch blade and stuck the point in just above the animal's tail. "Then," she said, narrating the incision as sweetly as a Miss America contestant talking about world peace, "you're going to want to take your knife ..." This was the "talent" portion of the 2008 Miss Outdoors pageant, part of an improbable Eastern Shore festival that combines the worlds of beauty contests and competitive muskrat skinning. For years here, young women have paraded in glittery evening gowns, and then - on the same stage - skinners in camouflage hats have separated small animals from their pelts. This year, two girls chose to do both. Their story played out less than 60 miles from Washington, in a place where time is slowly eroding a culture built around the Chesapeake Bay's boot-sucking marshes. These teenagers were afraid that, without their participation, both the pageant and the skinning races might decline even further. So they sought to take on a hybrid role, one foot in their world and one in their grandparents'. In one weekend, they would be both modern princesses and old-time, blood-covered 'rat-skinners. "You want to take your knuckles," 17-year-old Samantha Phillips, Contestant No. 1, was saying. One of the pageant judges squinched up her face in shock. "And separate the meat from the hide, just like this." In 2005, when she walked out for the talent portion of the pageant with a muskrat thrown over her shoulder, a man in the audience yelled above the cheers, "I want to marry you!" "Oh my God!" a boy in the audience yelled, at the sight of a woman in perfect makeup with her hand inside a muskrat. Then, from another part of the crowd, an older woman's voice: "She's good." And no folks this isn't an April Fools Day joke. You can see a video of the skinning portion Here Posted by: Icerigger 2008-04-01 |
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