I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE PINK DRESS by Jane Little Botkin Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

About The Book:

Author: Jane Little Botkin

Pub. Date: September 10, 2024

Publisher: She Writes Press

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Pages: 304

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/THE-PINK-DRESS

For fans of Little Miss Sunshine and Secrets of Miss America, this memoir from a national award-winning author reveals the reality of being the first Guyrex Girl in the 1970s. Beauty pageant stories have never been this raw, this real.

Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso’s Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the “Kings of Beauty”—just as the 1970’s counterculture movement began to take off.

A pink, rose-covered gown—a Guyrex creation—symbolizes the fairy tale life that young women in Jane’s time imagined beauty queens had. Its near destruction exposes reality: the author’s failed relationship with her mother, and her parents’ failed relationship with one another. Weaving these narrative threads together is the Wild West notion that anything is possible, especially do-overs.

The Pink Dress awakens nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, the era’s conflicts and growth pains. A common expectation that women went to college to get “MRS” degrees—to find a husband and become a stay-at-home wife and mother—often prevailed. How does one swim upstream against this notion among feminist voices that protest “If You Want Meat, Go to a Butcher!” at beauty pageants, two flamboyant showmen, and a developing awareness of self? Torn between women’s traditional roles and what women could be, Guyrex Girls evolved, as did the author.

Reviews:

“It’s about time the story of GuyRex (Guyrex) was told, and to have someone like Jane, who was the genesis to the legend of these two incredibly talented men, share it so beautifully is a treat for all. Reading the events of their pageantry has brought back many wonderful memories that truly shaped my adult life as well. If you had the opportunity to be a part of the GuyRex system—that is, if you were a GuyRex Girl—then your life was forever changed for the good.”—Gretchen Polhemus Jensen, Miss USA 1989, former Miss Texas, and former GuyRex Girl


“The great meaning of this story and what makes it a page-turner is how Jane came to peace with difficult parents and extraordinary expectations to eventually become a highly successful writer, but perhaps more importantly, a wife, mother, grandmother, and role model. Her story is one that will linger in my mind and make me want to know her. Bravo, Jane, well done.”—David Crow, best-selling author of The Pale-Faced Lie


“I remember watching televised beauty pageants with my family when I was a kid in the 1970s and Mama saying, ‘They’re all pretty.’ But Jane Little Botkin unveils another view, one that shows how wild, western, chaotic, and sometimes downright ugly things were behind the scenes. The Pink Dress isn’t a beautiful walk down memory lane. It’s a wild ride through the turbulent 1970s, West Texas style. Here she is, Janie Botkin, taking the town by storm.”—Johnny D. Boggs, nine-time Spur Award winner and author of upcoming books Longhorns East and Bloody Newton

Excerpt:

This excerpt is from Chapter One, describing the relationship between me and my mother (who was NOT a stage mother)!

Excerpt from CHAPTER ONE

You Could Be Miss America

Like other university campuses across the country in 1971, our campus, sitting at the foot of Franklin Mountain directly next to an international border, had been a microcosm of American political disruption. Walter Cronkite’s evening news, with his nightly body counts, and Life Magazine’s weekly, graphic images fragmented our daily lives—adding color to stories about Vietnam War protests and massacres, Weathermen bombings, and Black Power and La Raza Unida rallies. Sit-ins, bomb scares, and streakers, wearing nothing but their ski masks, peppered my collegiate life as I tried to find my own place among scholarly and social organizations while radical groups fomented on campus.

I had not been a rebel, at least not yet, but rather an extraordinarily obedient daughter who feared veering out of her mother’s orbit. To make certain that I grew in a healthy environment, my mother became my Girl Scout troop leader, school parent volunteer, cheerleader parent, and primary punisher for all my sins. And because it was understood that college was in my future, Mother pressured me to join myriad organizations in preparation. Later, she complained that I “burned the candle at both ends,” but I didn’t care since I had been so interested in life—and learning.

To keep up with my activities, Mother had to join them in some fashion as well. Why? To ensure my accomplishments. At first, I didn’t question my supermom’s role in my life, though rebellion had begun fermenting in my mind. I bravely took a wee step in defiance early on, changing the spelling of my name from Janey to Janie. Yes, I was gutlessly obedient. Still, my secret pleasure, every time my mother had to read something with my newly spelled name, was something.

The sorority was Mother’s idea. She had been an ADPi in a Texas Panhandle college, in a Greek system devoid of men during War World II, and, as a result, often reminisced about her friendships with other girls who waited patiently for returning soldiers to repopulate their campus. In college, I would meet a suitable husband, she claimed, someone with purpose and a brain. Still, with the university life she engineered for me, she now had to shoulder new worries about the company I kept.

Possibly my mother dreaded that I would sneak out a window to meet a boyfriend, spending all night out, something she later admitted doing herself. Or possibly she worried that I would run amuck, perhaps to Juárez, Mexico. There, I might sit with my friends in a circle around an ancient table with scarred chairs, their cracked upholsteries pricking my back, just inside a door near the curve of the Kentucky Club’s polished bar. We might play Buzz and drink shots, our brains becoming fuzzy each time someone—their tongues thick like cotton—failed to “buzz” a multiple of seven or eleven or any number with seven in it.

Mother probably feared my walking back down Avenida Juárez, past dark-entranced bars and strip clubs, their neon lights flashing and loud music pumping from speakers, with hawkers inviting us inside, “Hey, girlie, venga, venga adentro. Come inside.” 

She might have worried that I would stop under the sign at Fred’s Bar to eat ham and avocado of unknown origin, in a sandwich wrapped in a Mexican bolillo, and purchased from a ragged street vendor. Inside the doorway, college students and Fort Bliss soldiers would leer and laugh too loudly, while we moved on, stepping over litter that stank of decay and debauchery. 

Perhaps Mother feared that two pennies might elude my clumsy fingers in the bottom of my bag, as I frantically tried to find coins to buy my way home through the turnstile gate at the Santa Fe Bridge, even as the person behind me, dodging a splatter of vomit, would ask, “Anyone got change?”