By Brian Lee
While absorbing the excruciatingly absurd U.S. primary race, it struck me how much it resembles one of our own political contests. Though the format has changed in recent times, elections for the upper Sunshine Coast’s most coveted title were also well known for vicious personal attacks and nasty behaviour. Yes, I’m referring to the choosing of the Pender Harbour May Queen.
In recent years, our queen has been selected by a random draw of participating Grade 6 girls. In a ceremony as solemn as a papal inauguration, one drawn name decides who wears the white gown and tiara. The luckless chumps whose names remain in the salad bowl become her attendants. As her name is read aloud, our queen beams with a special joy only a former pre-teen girl might understand. Conversely, her mother sweats coldly, feigning happiness. But she is not happy. She knows the mother of the chosen one is appointed leader of the May Queen parade float construction. She knows it’s a lonely and exhausting task made worse as the other mothers, bitter over their childrens’ loss, bail on work parties and shun the Queen Mother altogether.
But it wasn’t always so fair. In the spring of 1983, I was 12. I didn’t know it at the time but things were going pretty well for me. I had a girlfriend, a part-time job splitting firewood and summers off. It was still common then for children to be thrust into activities where feelings could get hurt but the most emotionally gory spectacle we knew of excluded boys.
The Madeira Park Elementary School May Queen election might also have been called "the annual shattering of innocence for 11- and 12-year-old girls" because, just as in the Republican and Democratic primaries, pre-campaign friendships quickly dissolved into name-calling and deceit. Every kid in the school got a ballot and by voting day, May Queen hopefuls found themselves in a no-rules popularity contest.
They would start out making nice to everyone — even the Grade 1s. But so would the other girls, forcing them all to up their game. Normally, the boys were too focused on soccer to notice what the girls were up to. But no balls were checked out on election day as we gleefully took in the drama wafting through the schoolyard. One girl started buying votes from the little kids with nickels and dimes swiped from her parents’ coffee can. Naturally, the girls who didn’t have parents with coffee cans countered with the tools they had. That was usually slander.
With three sisters, I thought I knew the depths of female ruthlessness. I did not. At that age we boys had an inkling that girls possessed a redeeming quality or two, but we were still a little unsure what they were. But something gave us hope the suddenly rampant tales of our classmates’ loose morals were true.
Other rumours would circulate about a contestant’s hygiene, her complexion or her booger-eating habit. It was pretty awful and voting was abolished a few years later in favour of the current selection method. But grudges persist around here and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still a couple of middle-aged MPES grads who aren’t talking because of it.