Yesterday my mom and I got to watching this documentary on beauty pageants

There was an episode from recently, followed by one filmed a dozen years ago (a followup article is here), followed by another recent one. I watched out of some form of morbid curiosity.

But I'm not going to talk about what you think I'm going to talk about, because we were busy talking to each other and making snide remarks, and so didn't have much time to be offended by the very concept of beauty pageants for small children.

No, instead I noticed two things:

1. All the hair is ugly. Seriously, what is up with ugly hairstyles on these girls? Make-up doesn't bother me due to the reality of stages (they wash you out), and the clothes weren't that bad, but the hair! Who the heck puts 40 year old hair on a 4 year old child? And WHY would they do that?

2. Things have changed a lot in the past decade. The clips shown indicate a wider variety of dress, in more innovative fashions. They show fancier, more difficult routines. And the costs cited for all this - even taking inflation into account - seem to have risen.

And my mother and I got to talking, and it seems to me that this is common in all the performing arts sports (I'm loath to call pageants a sport, but let's move on from that). If you're racing, you just have to be faster than the other people in your race. Nice if you improve upon your own best time as well. But if you're figure skating*, or cheerleading, or dancing competitively then it seems you not only have to be better than everybody else there but you also have to be better than everybody last year, and the year before that.

What was it, 40 years ago you could win a gold medal by doing single - single - spins on the ice? Now it's triples, and people have started doing quadruples.

Here's something I saw today about a similar problem in Irish dance. The standard in many places (if this poster is to be believed, I know nothing of the subject) is to have the fancy dress (pricy), and the fancy socks, and the fancy shoes, and (to ensure the correct hairstyle) a wig, which has got to cost a lot. Because everybody keeps upping the ante slightly to stand out until it becomes the standard for everybody else.

Of course, the solution to this particular person's problem is simple. Call around, find likeminded schools, and organize your own "Truly Traditional" feis where the youngest students go in their practice clothes and the older ones wear homemade or otherwise very simple outfits with naturally curled (or uncurled) hair and the focus is on the dance. I assure you, all this costing money shit isn't traditional to anybody.

Not sure if that solution will work for related problems in other areas. I can't see it working, for example, with regards to Olympic figure skating.

*On the subject of figure skating, somebody I know online was talking recently about signing her young daughter up for classes. All the conversation was about helmets and warm clothes. Dude, when I figure skated as a young child I wore tights and a skating outfit (a leotard with a skirt), and maybe gloves if I remembered them. No pants, no sweater, no hat, and certainly no helmet, though that's one innovation I'm not actually scoffing at. If I was cold, I skated faster. But that's not the point at all.

Evangeline has been asking me to sing a lot lately.

Today I came out with "You Take The High Road" and "Bonnie George Campbell" and... oh, some other songs which, in retrospect, were all Scottish.

She's been paying attention recently, and now she asks me questions about them. Like "So, the low road is shorter, that's why you'll get there before me, right?" and "But WHY did he never return? Did he get lost? He DIED? WHY DID HE DIE? How do you know he died?" and... oh, the other day she asked a very interesting one about "Who is it that is happy?" and I said it was me, and she wanted to know who it was in the song. She'd caught on to the idea that the person singing the song isn't necessarily the speaker in the song, which is a sophisticated idea, isn't it? It's disconcerting. Ana certainly never asked, and it took her until she was five to suddenly realize that Barbara Allen isn't exactly a laugh-a-minute. (Well, it is, but only once you realize how impossibly maudlin and absurd the whole scenario is.)

Here's a question for you. A lot of songs I sing aren't in exactly in the language I speak, either because they're old, or because they're from another part of the more-or-less-English-speaking world. Like Scotland. This leads to two problems:

1. Words that don't have meaning to me, or that have the *wrong* meaning to me, such as "resigned we may be to our greetin'", to me "greeting" doesn't in any way mean "weeping", even though I know that's what the song means.

2. Rhymes that don't. This is worse than the first category!

How does one deal with that? As I see it, I have a few options.

A. I can ignore it and sing it the way I'd say those words. This option hurts my ears.

B. I can fake the appropriate accent. This is not possible, and is patently absurd.

C. I can sing it the way I'd sing it, but say those words the way the rhyme and meter demand. This just sounds silly.

D. I can try for an appropriate (and poetic!) translation into my own dialect and sing that. This is what I generally do (folk process and all), but I get this vague feeling like it's wrong and if people heard me who knew the original they'd be shocked and horrified. And then my mind throws up phrases like "cultural appropriation" and, honestly, I feel ashamed to even say this, but I was happier when I didn't know what that meant (although I *still* had those guilty feelings about changing the words).

So mostly I go with E. which is "Do option D, but don't sing the songs where anybody can really hear you other than your family", which is unsatisfying.

What do you think?