The show is over. The week is over.


The first East Coast Miss Rodeo since 1987 is now wearing the Miss Rodeo America crown and the Miss Rodeo America sash. On the other side of the curtain, the rest of the queens — the former queens, now, most of them — are wandering, once again in street clothes, without their crowns and sashes. A dazed Arizona walks by, won- dering aloud, “Where do I go?” Charli stands alone, center stage, her


eyes sad and red and tearful. She finally goes to pick up the $1,500 scholarship she won for her performance during the pageant and mutters, on her way, “So now we’re all has-beens.”


A Closets


t lunch after the pageant, Charli’s mom says to her: “After this, a job interview is gonna be easy.” That proves to be true.


Through the Miss Rodeo America


network, Charli hears about a job north of Dallas, interviews for it and gets hired. She now works with big-time Texas ranchers, selling “ungodly amounts of horse feed,” as she puts it. Every morning, she goes to work at Eclipse Mercantile in Aubrey, still wearing boots and Western- collared shirts, still smelling the scent of horses, still living along the psychological border of a Western frontier. When she started as a rodeo queen,


she was eager to travel, see the West and earn a chance to live under broad, blue skies. She had also hoped to keep hang- ing out at rodeos, so when In Country Television offers her a gig as a part-time chute reporter — something akin to an ESPN sideline reporter — she grabs the mic. Her friends now call her “The Erin Andrews of Rodeo,” and she swings back and forth between commercial- ranching Texans and rodeo cowboys


around the country. And still she’s queening: In two


weeks, when this year’s Miss Rodeo America pageant commences, Charli will return to Las Vegas as the national director of the Miss Rodeo Virginia pro- gram, there to cheer on the current Miss Rodeo Virginia, an import from Ne- braska who hails from a pageant family and herself possesses vast queening ex- perience, including being crowned, years ago, the National Little Britches Rodeo Queen. “She’s ready,” Charli says on the


phone from Aubrey, where she is driv- ing into work. “I think she’ll be a really strong contender. ”


Darragh Johnson’s last story for the Magazine was about modern-day radicalism and Christian intentional communities. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.


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