Scene & Herd - Judge hot

Have you ever had one of those nights where you’re just sitting quietly in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn in Dunwoody, minding your own business, and a Brazilian woman in a red dress taps you on the shoulder and asks you to be a judge in a Miss Brazil USA beauty pageant that’s gonna start in five minutes?

Me, too!

After taking the seat from which I was planning to merely cover the pageant for this column and after chatting with a friendly international commodities trader named Chip (“What sort of commodities do you trade?” I asked. “Scrap metal is hot right now,” Chip replied), one of the event organizers tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I’d like to be a judge. I accepted. After all, there aren’t many occasions when a guy can ogle beautiful women up and down, critique their appearance on a scale of one to 10, and then be thanked for it.

Saturday night’s competition pitted 11 Atlanta-area Brazilian-American beauties against one another in three of the four traditional beauty pageant categories: swimwear, eveningwear and the interview. The fourth traditional pageant category, the talent competition, was omitted, relieving everyone in the room of the inevitable burden of having to smile and applaud after an atonal bossa nova rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

The first competition was swimwear. It must be all the E! I watch, because I was expecting thong bikinis. Instead, contestants wore white one-piece swimsuits that were cut so tight in the crotch that, in most instances, a well-fitting thong would have been less revealing. I’m talking serious rear and frontal wedgie action, people! Every time one of the women walked by the judging table, I kept thinking of the line from that Camel Toe song, “Is your crotch hungry, girl? Cuz it’s eatin’ your pants.”

Next was evening wear. Ten of the women wore shape-hugging dresses, all quite flattering, but one woman wore a dress that was all poofy and promlike. She also had braces, so maybe she was going for a schoolgirl look. She was later awarded Miss Congeniality.

The interview portion of the pageant is where the judging got tricky. The questions were asked and answered in Portuguese, a language I neither speak nor understand despite my ability to phonetically sing along with the Portuguese in “Girl from Ipanema.” There was a translator, but she often translated Portuguese responses that were a minute long into 10 seconds of broken English, so I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hear the contestants’ full explanations about how they’re going to cure poverty, relieve suffering, cultivate their inner beauty and remain true to themselves.

The pageant winner was a sultry blonde named Joice. Later this month, she will travel to that other Brazilian-mecca, Newark, to compete in the national finals.

Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am: Last Thursday night, an Athens band called Aqualove performed one of my favorite albums of all time, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, in its entirety. I went to see it, with camera in hand, not knowing if I was even gonna include it in this column, because tributes like that are bad much more often than they’re good. Fortunately, Aqualove’s tribute was very, very good.

Singer Tim Conley played David Bowie playing Ziggy Stardust with dazzling skill. He looked and sounded every bit the gaunt, tuneful, melodramatic, pantomiming androgynous alien that a Ziggy Stardust should be. The music was spot-on as well. With a five-piece band that included a keyboardist and saxophone player, they faithfully reproduced all the little musical flourishes and harmonies that make the album so wonderful.

Since Ziggy is only 40 minutes long, the band followed up the album with a selection of other classic Bowie tracks such as “Queen Bitch” and “The Supermen” that Bowie no longer plays in concert. If you’re Bowie fan, go see Aqualove if they do it again.

Ripped from the Feaster File: On Saturday night, I visited Saltworks Gallery for the opening of __The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a group show featuring work by Charles Nelson, Kojo Griffin, Alex Kvares and William Cordova. Although some of my memory of it has passed — displaced by images of Brazilian women in ill-fitting swimsuits — two thoughts linger. Nelson’s scathing “Welcome to Atlanta” series attacking racism and materialism is terrific. I’d love it if he could rent a billboard near the airport and put one of the pieces there.

Second, even though I don’t really know if I fully “get” what Griffin’s human figures with animal heads necessarily mean, I was struck on Saturday night by how much emotion he evokes with subtle postures, hand gestures, and even tiny shirt wrinkles. For a guy who draws lots of horse and elephant heads, he’s a magnificent observer of the human body.

General attire: Last weekend, the Cobb County Civic Center hosted the Atlanta International Military Show. Shoppers in search of quality fighter jets at bargain prices were disappointed as the show’s inventory consisted mainly of smaller items such as uniforms, patches and hand-sized weapons such as rifles, pistols and bayonets.

The bulk of the show was historical. I saw rifles that dated back to 1867 that were used in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and dozens of beat-up WWI and WWII helmets. At one point, I even spied a loving a couple mooning over a table of old bayonets. Ah, romance!

Easily the weirdest item I found was the Hermann Goering postcard. Goering was in charge of Hitler’s air force. The postcard depicted him alongside his lovely wife and child in an attempt to, I suppose, make him seem like a more human and likeable Nazi. The postcard appeared to have worked on at least one person — the man selling it. He suggested that Goering wasn’t as bad as other Nazis because he “wanted to stop the war pretty early.” Yeah, he wanted to stop WWII shortly after his side conquered all of Western and Central Europe. What a softy.

andisheh@creativeloafing.com__
For more on Brazilian beauties, check out www.andy2000.org.