Instead, my brain makes me wonder where they all are, if they're dead, if I could reach them on the phone and so forth.
The absolute worst is when I see photos at the hockey rink of young athletes from 10-15 years ago. Rather than allowing the image to come alive again, I ruin it by asking myself: how old are they now? what sort of work did they get as adults? did they stay in the neighbourhood?
I just wish I could let an old photo come back to life.
The Miss Montreal beauty pageant lasted decades but effectively ended sometime. And yeah there are still beauty contests here and there but they generally run by carpetbaggers who force the girls to pay big money to join and often don't even reward the promised prizes.
Some say beauty pageants are demeaning, but so what? What activity isn't demeaning. If the same young women were standing behind a counter at McDonald's would they be totally undemeaned? Digging a hole? Coding a website? Every activity is demeaning, so let them stand around in bathing suits and be what they want to be.
In the photo above, the four contestants on the left are all holding a small trophy and other seven are looking over at them. I think the ones on the left are being politely eliminated.
The two at the far left are no great shakes, the one after is a chinless big bird and the the attention-starved fourth one is just generic and insipid.
The seven other candidates are all pretty solid but look a little dour. The tall one has the leggy gams and the one in the black negligee to her right could probably squeeze your head like a chestnut with those muscular thighs.
My vote goes to the middle-candidate of the seven on the right because she looks a little drunk and fun to be with and her costume is a bit more see-through.
The great Rene Ferron did an exhaustive 10 minute report on the Miss Montreal in 1989, when politically-correct thing made it all about who could talk the best.
Eighty percent of the marks were based on interviews with these young women which is way too much. The girl in the freeze frame thing below, Edith Fortin, (appearing at around 3:00) couldn't compete in Miss Montreal 1989 cuz she was only 17 but man, she was ambitious, she went on to do a ton of such contests and eventually became one of main dancers in Starmania.
But there you go, I'm doing it again, where are they now? Let's just try to focus on where were they then.