It's 6:30 On A Saturday Morning at the Southfork Hotel in Plano, TX, just north of Dallas, and in Room 326, 6-year-old Eden Wood is perched on a stool, quietly staring at herself in a lighted mirror, waiting for the transformation to begin. First, a stylist applies layers of foundation, blush, eye shadow, mascara, lipliner, and hot-pink lipstick. Then she turns to Eden's hair — except it's not Eden's hair. A long blond fall, full of curly ringlets, is attached to the back of the little girl's head, and using a brush and curling iron, the stylist teases all the hair, real and synthetic, until it looks as if it's going to float away. Finally, she runs a cloth over Eden's already manicured fingernails and adds a touch of bronzer to her spray-tanned arms and legs.

"OK, sweet girl, let's get after it," declares Eden's mother, Mickie, a congenial, determined-looking 46-year-old who's wearing glasses with hot-pink frames and a matching pink coat over a black pantsuit. Eden jumps off the stool and steps into a $3,000 hand-sewn bubble gum–pink dress covered with sequins and edged with lace that billows out, tutu-like, just below her waist.

Mickie helps her put on white ankle socks and unblemished white patent leather Mary Janes. Finally, she snaps faux diamond earrings onto Eden's ears and fastens a glittery rhinestone necklace around her neck. After an hour and 30 minutes, her daughter has become part Barbie, part Madame Alexander doll, and part Las Vegas showgirl.

Eden, who's from Taylor, AR, is about to participate with 90 or more other girls in a beauty pageant put on by Texas-based Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant, one of the country's best-known children's beauty pageant organizers. All around the conference room and adjoining hallways that serve as the pre-contest prep area, little girls do the pageant version of suiting up. Some are having fake eyelashes applied; others sit quietly as their parents insert dental prosthetics called "flippers" into their mouths to cover the gaps where baby teeth have fallen out. A few are already on the stage, doing one final run-through of the formal "beauty walks" that they will later perform, acts that require the girls to cross one foot over the other and slowly pivot in a semicircle while keeping their shoulders back and their eyes locked on the judges.

"Remember, honey, step, then turn, then give those judges a big wink," one mother says encouragingly, holding a brush in one hand and a mirror in the other. "Your job is to make them love you."

JonBenet Ramsey, who would have turned 21 this month had she not been brutally murdered, remains the most famous pageant girl in the world. All one has to do is say her name and the images come flooding back — not those from photos of her home in Boulder, CO, where she was found in the basement on December 26, 1996, but those of the 6-year-old pixie strutting across pageant stages, looking like a baby Marilyn Monroe with makeup more suited to a woman several times her age.

Rayanna DeMatteo, a 22-year-old student at Samford University in Birmingham, AL, regularly competed at events with JonBenet. "I remember playing hide‑and‑seek with her," she says. "We used to jump into the hotel pools together after competition." DeMatteo remembers that increasingly, as she grew older, being part of the pageant world was something she wanted to hide. "I don't tell people my secret about what I did back in the day," she says. "I don't want people to know that I was a pageant girl."

This story originally appeared in Good Housekeeping in August 2011.

Before JonBenet, most Americans didn't know such beauty pageants existed, and they were shocked at what they saw. Karen Steinhauser, Denver's chief deputy district attorney at the time, bluntly told reporters, "It's impossible to look at these photos and not see a terribly exploited little girl." CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather compared the video footage of JonBenet at pageants to "kiddie porn." Given the force of what, at the time, felt like national outrage, one would think that child pageants would have faded away. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Though beauty pageants for adult women seem to be disappearing from the landscape (even the Miss America pageant no longer draws respectable television ratings), kiddie pageants are flourishing. Fueled by a reality TV show, an estimated 250,000 American girls participate in more than 5,000 beauty pageants every year.

The promise of a tiara has always been a fast, easy sell to young girls who pine to be princesses — just ask Disney, which reportedly makes approximately $4 billion annually from its more than 26,000 princess-related retail items. The connection between princesses and pageants exploded in 1954 with the first televised broadcast of the Miss America pageant; 27 million viewers tuned in. Six years later, Miami played host to Little Miss Universe, the first official beauty pageant for children. Soon, kiddie pageants emerged all over the U.S., particularly in the South and in California. "It was the thing to do if you had a halfway cute kid," says Nicole Eggert, 39, who was crowned Miss Universe, Petite Division, in 1976, when she was 4. That pageant led to a lucrative shampoo commercial and the launch of a decades-long acting career. Eggert went on to starring roles in popular 1980s and 1990s television shows such as Baywatch and Charles in Charge. She remembers the child pageant world as decidedly low-key. "None of the kids had their hair done, no one had makeup on; no one had custom-made gowns — it was a party dress from a store," says Eggert. "I remember it being sort of a joke [that I won] because my mom had a hard time getting me to brush my hair."

Although some of today's contests are now promoted as "natural pageants," in which girls compete in off-the-rack togs and little or no makeup, it's the glitz pageants that remain the most popular. While prizes are relatively small, the investment can be enormous. Parents, many of whom have only modest incomes, pay for high-glitz coaches ($50 to $100 an hour), high-glitz photographers ($300 per session, with $150 for retouching), high-glitz wig makers ($150 to $175 a pop), and high-glitz spray tanners ($25 per pageant). One company goes so far as to offer parents a "breakthrough Pageant Preparation System" with this promise: "No more drives home with tears! No more disappointing pageants, missed opportunities, and humiliating moments."

"When we talk high-glitz, we mean the glitzier the better, and we make no apologies for it," says Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant owner Annette Hill, who puts on about 12 to 15 high-glitz pageants a year, culminating in a national pageant that pays out $75,000 in cash and prizes, including $10,000 to the winner. "We love the beautiful dresses and the big hairstyles. We love the bling and makeup. We love our girls showing lots and lots of style, and we love seeing them sparkle."

After JonBenet's death, a few journalists and commentators went so far as to suggest that her tricked-up pageant look could have been the reason for her murder. Perhaps, they said, she had become the target of a pedophile who lurked around pageants. "The way people were talking, you would have thought we were all going to be murdered by child molesters," says Brooke Breedwell, who was 7 at the time. A recent graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Breedwell was one of the country's most famous child contestants during the JonBenet era. For Breedwell, JonBenet's murder was more than a tragedy — it was a little girl's worst nightmare. "I remember thinking when she got killed, I was going to get killed. I was convinced it was a serial killer going after pageant girls. I would hide under my covers, terrified, at night."

Stacy Dittrich, a former detective in Ashland, OH, who specialized in sex crimes and who is now a true-crime author and media analyst, says, "I found, in the course of my work, pedophiles who had gone to great lengths to obtain videos of little girls walking around provocatively, pulling their shirts down off their shoulders and smiling at the camera." Even though Dittrich never worked on a case in which a pedophile stalked a child from a pageant, she did have experience with pedophiles who lurked at football games to snap pictures of young kids. "I arrested one guy who sat at his window and took photographs of the neighborhood girls playing in a sprinkler," she remembers. "When I see pageants on TV, I think, These are the types of videos those pedophiles would watch." While Dittrich isn't totally against pageants, she thinks airing them on television is irresponsible: "On TV, they are not only giving out the names of these children, but they also tell you what towns these little girls live in," she says. "It would not be difficult whatsoever for an obsessive pedophile to track these children down."

There is scant documented evidence to suggest that pageants put little girls in danger, yet many psychologists believe that developmental and emotional problems can stem from the pressure and value system that pageants embody. A 2007 report issued by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls claims that parents who put their daughters in pageants can contribute "in very direct and concrete ways" to "the precocious sexualization" of their daughters. "These pageant girls are taught from a very early age that what is most critically important in life is their physical appearance along with a superficial and eroticized charm. They are presented in a hypersexualized manner that is completely inappropriate to their ages," says Mary E. Doheny, Ph.D., of the Family Institute at Northwestern University. Doheny says, "Also, for the mothers, their whole focus is imparting the critical importance of physical beauty, and along with that is the mothers' implicit criticism of their girls' own unembellished beauty. They are always applying makeup to their girls' faces, dressing them up, and dyeing their hair. They are hypervigilant about diet and posture. And so the message these little girls take away is that natural beauty isn't enough — that their self-esteem and sense of self-worth only comes from being the most attractive girl in the room, not from being smart or resourceful or tough or creative."

"These little girls are being trained to look and act like sexual bait," says Nancy Irwin, Psy.D., a Los Angeles–based psychotherapist who specializes in working with sexually abused clients, particularly teenage girls. "And what's really disturbing is that so many of these girls seem to be tools of their mothers, who think this is the way for the girls to get fame and attention." Raised in Atlanta, Irwin herself competed in pageants when she was a teenager and a young adult. "I did them in hopes of getting college scholarship money. I worry that these girls are just doing it because they are being ordered to do it — and if they don't win, many times their mothers let them have it," she says.

A small 2005 study, published in Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, that involved 22 women, half of whom had participated in child beauty pageants, concluded that there were "no significant differences" between the two groups on measures of bulimia, body perception, depression, and self-esteem. But it did find that the former pageant girls scored significantly higher on "body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust, and impulse dysregulation [an inability to resist performing actions that would be harmful to themselves or others]."

It is difficult to ignore the link between the flirtatious behavior exhibited by pint-size contestants in heavy makeup (it's not uncommon for toddlers to be encouraged to wink or blow kisses at the judges) and the naive sexuality that is becoming increasingly blatant among elementary school girls. Author and journalist Peggy Orenstein, who wrote about child beauty pageants in her latest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, believes that pageant girls are being taught to see themselves as objects of others' pleasure. "I'm not saying that when they wiggle their hips and wink at judges at the age of 4 or 5, they have any idea that what they're doing is a highly eroticized, seductive gesture," she says. "But pageant girls are definitely learning that if they act in a very sexualized way, they will get attention. The risk is that as they become adult women, they will continue to see their sexuality as a performance and not something connected to their own true feelings."

Whether it's a 5-year-old strutting down the pageant runway in lipstick and false eyelashes or the 7-year-olds who became a YouTube sensation for a sexy Beyoncé "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" dance routine, the fact that these young girls don't mean to be sexual is actually part of the problem. When very young girls learn to disconnect sexy motions from the thoughts and feelings behind them, it's hard for them to integrate all of those elements as they get older. Deborah Tolman, Ed.D., a professor at Hunter College and author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality, says, "From Toddlers & Tiaras to America's Next Top Model, reality TV takes away a lot of what we know is good for girls. Focusing so much on how you look is problematic. Instead of focusing on how she feels — which is an important skill growing up — a girl learns to sexualize herself. Your body is a compass, and premature sexuality takes the arrow out of the compass."

"In 1996, when JonBenet was murdered, it was shocking for us to see a 6-year-old wearing lipstick and eye shadow," says Orenstein. "Now, market research studies have found nearly half of today's 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss. Walmart launched a makeup line just for girls 8 to 12. Abercrombie & Fitch marketed a padded push-up bikini top for 8-year-olds. It's easy to slam pageants, but maybe that's because no one wants to deal with the bigger picture, which is the day‑to‑day sexualization of all our daughters."

Perhaps it's precisely because sexy dress-up has gone mainstream that Toddlers & Tiaras, the TLC network's hit reality show about child pageants, draws 1.4 million viewers per week. Toddlers & Tiaras made Eden Wood a star. The chubby-cheeked 6-year-old has more than 15,000 fans on her Facebook page, and there are nearly 700 YouTube videos of her posing, prancing, or performing one of her talent routines: a song-and-dance act in which she struts and swaggers, swings her hips, flips her hair, coyly sticks her fingers in her dimpled cheeks, and belts out lyrics in her untrained but very enthusiastic voice.

The demands of pageant life can be relentless. Many of the girls start competing as babies; some, like Eden, are homeschooled and spend Fridays making all-day trips to pageants. The time devoted to pageants is a developmental concern, says Northwestern's Doheny: "On the most benign level, the girls who participate in pageants truly limit the time they get to engage in playtime and other creative endeavors, or to learn and practice other competencies, like sports or personal relationships with peers." The top girls on the pageant circuit not only have hair and makeup stylists; they also have "beauty walk" consultants and "talent" coaches.

Eden has her own agent, Heather Ryan, a Des Moines, IA, mom who, after entering her oldest daughter in pageants, realized there was money to be made representing the country's top glitz contestants. Ryan is the agent for 34 girls, and while she won't discuss dollar figures, she says none come close to making the money that Eden does. So far, with Eden's parents' approval, Ryan has produced an Eden look-alike doll, a book about Eden's life entitled From Cradle to Crown, Eden's first single ("Cutie Patootie," which Ryan wrote), and T-shirts that feature a photo of Eden in a showgirl-style pink costume and matching headdress along with a slogan that reads "I'm Tanned and Ready for the Stage!" All of Eden's merchandise is sold on her website, littleedenwood.com. But it is her TV appearances that have given Eden such a massive profile. Fans turn out in droves at her mall appearances to see her sing and to have her autograph a CD or poster. Only days before the Plano pageant, the agent announced that later this summer, Eden and a couple of other pageant contestants would do an eight-city tour of the Midwest, billed as "The Glamour Girls Starring Eden Wood." Eden is even taking her show abroad as a special celebrity guest at Universal Royalty's first-ever pageant in Australia this summer, signing autographs, posing for photos, and singing songs such as "Cutie Patootie." Even as Eden walks into the Southfork Hotel ballroom, she's got her pageant smile on: teeth clenched, lips unmoving. Many contestants gape at her, awestruck. One holds out a sheet of paper for Eden to autograph. "Thank you!" Eden says, signing her name in big block letters. Another tells Eden that she owns two blond-haired dolls, both of which are named — that's right — Eden. "Yay!" says Eden cheerfully.

"It's simply amazing," says Mickie, who's renowned in pageant circles for her level of prep, even bringing along a portable spray-tan machine to pageants. "Eden's now got fan clubs in Europe and Australia. Strangers come up to her and ask for her autograph. They call her America's sweetheart. I'm telling you, for a family from a poor little town in Arkansas, this is like a fairy tale come true."

Not all child pageant participants come from modest means, but it's hard not to see the material aspirations reflected in the paste-jewelry crowns that sparkle atop the heads of little girls like Eden. Melissa Harris-Perry, Ph.D., a professor of political science at Tulane University, says, "We tend to think that we're very class-mobile in America, that anybody can do anything. But the fact is, we're not. Most working‑class girls born into working‑class families are going to die working-class. These pageants are a time for them and their moms to have the Kate Middleton moment. These moms want to live the princess story and, more, to feel like they've captured it for their daughters — this instant of extreme specialness. If you think about the royal wedding, it really was like a pageant in that way. Kate Middleton was praised during the ceremony for the same things these girls are praised for: 'Look how she can stand so still and self-possessed and smiling while people take photographs of her.'"

When Mickie Wood compares Eden's pageant career to a fairy tale, the question is, for whom? For Brooke Breedwell, pageants were a potent symbol of her mother's ambition. When she was 3 months old, her mother began entering her in pageants; Breedwell left the circuit, at her own insistence, when she was 8. "I had to quit soccer, and I couldn't go to certain school events or friends' birthday parties, all because my mom wanted to spend thousands and thousands of dollars so I could win $500 and a trophy," she says. "I ended up having a very tense relationship with her because she was always nitpicking at me, pushing me to be perfect. One day I got so mad I threw a curling iron at her, and I finally quit because of the stress. And you know what I hate? All these years later, I've still got this anxiety about feeling like I have to be perfect."

Breedwell says if she ever has a daughter, she'll never let her do pageants. But in the next breath, she says, "I did love performing; I will say that. I miss the feeling of being onstage."

If you were to come across Eden in Taylor, a town of 566 people that is a few miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana line, you would think she was just another country girl, cute but not particularly beautiful, with her hair in pigtails and the knees of her blue jeans scuffed and dirty. She lives in a small brown brick house with her father, Louis, a welder and full-time farmer, and Mickie, a music and drama teacher at the local public school. One day, when a visitor arrives, Eden is outside, riding her bicycle with training wheels past a truck in the driveway that's on blocks with the transmission pulled out, then past the backyard chicken coop, whose roof is held down by two tires.

When she heads inside the house, Eden walks down a dimly lit hallway filled with mounted deer heads, her father's hunting trophies. She opens the door to her bedroom — and the contrast is breathtaking. The walls are lavender, and painted on the closet doors, like a coat of arms, are the initials "E" and "W." Her bed is set inside an oversize pink dollhouse that reaches to the ceiling. At least 300 trophies line the floor, many taller than Eden herself, and custom-made shelves hold a seemingly endless array of glittery crowns and sashes.

Throughout the room are photos of Eden in pageant costumes. While spray tans rule the pageant stage, in photos the look is pure porcelain doll. Many of them have been retouched to make her hair blonder, her face creamy white, her eyes bigger and rounder, and her lips larger than life. It is nearly impossible to recognize that the child in the pictures is the same girl who is standing in the room.

Mickie was raised on a farm not far from Taylor, and as a young teenager and college student, she entered a couple of local beauty pageants and sang with country music bands. She quit the pageant world a few years before she married Louis. After years of trying to get pregnant, she gave birth to Eden at age 40. When Eden was 14 months old, Mickie entered her in the infant division of the Miss Lumberjack pageant in a nearby town — "People told me my baby was too pretty to keep hidden at home," she recalls — where Eden won for best hair. Mickie then entered Eden in a pageant in Shreveport, LA, "and a judge told me I had a star on my hands." As Eden got older, Mickie began driving her to pageants around the South in her red pickup truck, keeping a curling iron plugged into the cigarette lighter. By the age of 3, Eden was winning trophies in some of the bigger high-glitz pageant circuits — Darling Dolls of America, Tiny Miss America, Ultimate Dream Queen, and International Fresh Faces, among others.

Toddlers & Tiaras began featuring Eden in 2009, when she was 4. In one commercial promoting the show, there's a shot of Eden sweeping across the stage as the announcer says, "A toddler's greatest fear. Two little words: Eden Wood." Soon, she was being interviewed on such shows as Good Morning America and Entertainment Tonight. Reporters couldn't get enough of this chubby-cheeked, hip-wiggling girl whose original song "Cutie Patootie" included the refrain "I'm a cutie, cutie patootie. Rockin' out the pageant stage and shakin' my booty."

Predictably, there was plenty of criticism. After Eden performed "Cutie Patootie" on The Talk, CBS's afternoon talk show, cohost Sharon Osbourne, clearly dismayed, said that Mickie needed to let Eden be a normal little girl. "Seriously, do people believe I'd be so cruel as to force my only child to do all this if she didn't like doing it?" Mickie says at their home, making Eden a peanut butter sandwich. "When Eden gets to a pageant, it's like someone has flipped a switch in her. She shines with this bubbly joy. And my husband and I have always made it clear to her that the minute she wants to quit, then we'll quit, no questions asked."

"But I don't want to quit," Eden chimes in as she happily munches on her sandwich. "I want to be a star!" Nevertheless, in an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras, as Mickie walks Eden to the stage, she is caught on tape telling the little girl, "It's on you, the whole thing. All the work, all the money — it's all on you."

Eden is one of the rare money-makers in the child beauty pageant world: She's earned about $40,000 worth of cash, prizes, and endorsements during her very short career. Yet, since she's been competing from babyhood, her cash winnings are actually less than $10,000 a year. Mickie admits that she and her husband have probably spent $100,000 on Eden's pageant life, which includes the cost of dresses, coaches, stylists, retouched photos, entry fees (which run up to $2,000 at the bigger national pageants), and travel expenses.

"Some of these families spend $75,000 a year on pageants; they could do a lot more in terms of expanding their daughters' horizons and sense of possibilities with that money," says author Orenstein. "They could take their daughters around the world, and these little girls would get a lot more out of it than they would dressing up and parading across a stage." But just as you can't tell someone how to raise their kid, you can't tell them how to spend their cash. "We have money in the bank, and we see what we spend on Eden as an investment in her future," says Mickie with a shrug. "Pageants have given her something I've never gotten — a chance to experience life outside of Taylor. And who knows what this will lead to — maybe Hollywood."

Despite her enthusiasm, the trophies, the merchandise, and the tours, Eden's chances of becoming a child star in Hollywood are, at best, slim. "The entertainment industry doesn't go for girls who are trained to be fake and manipulative, and I'm sorry, but high-glitz girls are like trained monkeys," says Keith Lewis, the former owner of a Southern California talent agency that specialized in child models and child actors. Lewis, ironically, now codirects the Miss New York USA and Miss California USA pageants. He says he always turns away potential contestants from the high-glitz world. "Even grown-up, they still look and act like mannequins."

Adjusting to life without a tiara can be tough on former pageant girls. "Oh, listen, I had huge withdrawal pains after my career was over," says University of Texas at Austin student Thumper Gosney, who reluctantly stopped doing most pageants when she was 14 and about to enter high school. "I would go back and look at videos of myself as a kid in pageants, and feel numb because my entire identity was gone," she says.

Gosney gave away some of her pageant trophies to the Special Olympics organization to be reused at its contests, but she still keeps some around to remind her of what her life was like once. "I actually told a friend of mine the other day how I wish I could go back and do pageants," she says. Gosney, who is majoring in theater and dance, hopes she can someday be on a stage again. She pauses for a moment, her mind sifting through the memories. "It's difficult to just be a regular girl."

n the packed hotel ballroom, Annette Hill walks to the podium next to the stage, grabs a microphone, and shouts, "Are you ready for your girls to shine?" The crowd roars. Almost all of the audience is made up of contestants and their families from Texas and adjoining states, but a few have traveled from as far away as Wisconsin and North Carolina. Like the Woods, most of them appear to come from modest backgrounds. Yet they, too, have spent thousands of dollars to make sure their daughters are perfectly coiffed and dressed.

Hill announces that the overall winner, known in Universal Royalty parlance as the Ultimate Grand Supreme Winner (the terminology in pageants is as hyperbolic as the makeup), will receive a beautiful "pink Princess Canopy Bed" that retails for $1,000. The girls bounce excitedly up and down on their toes while the parents are all aflutter.

"You can do it, Mia!" shouts one mother, Marina Spargo, as her 4-year‑old daughter heads for the stage to do her beauty walk. The blue-eyed Mia is wearing a giant blond fall, false eyelashes, and a powdery-blue off-the‑shoulder sequined dress that is so puffy, she has to hold her arms out to the sides. It looks as if she might fall over. Yet she calmly hits her marks on the stage and executes all her turns, her smile never cracking. "She's very facial," one mother murmurs admiringly — "facial" being a high-glitz term to describe a girl's beauty. "And look at how she does her pretty feet [a reference to the way a girl stands]. She's the total package."

When Mia finishes, the 38-year-old Marina, who's wearing orange drawstring sweatpants and a black T-shirt, grabs the arm of her husband, Ray, a strapping man who works in the maintenance department of a demolition company near Lake Jackson, TX, a town south of Houston. In 2004, looking for a wife, Ray used the Internet to contact Marina, a pretty blond Russian who lived a thousand miles north of Moscow. He flew to meet her, proposed to her in Moscow's Red Square at the end of his two-week visit, and, seven months later, brought her to Texas, where they married. In December 2006, Marina gave birth to Mia, "but she felt so isolated and alone, barely knowing any English, that I thought she might move back to Russia," recalls the 53-year-old Ray. "I saw a newspaper ad for a children's beauty pageant at a local mall, and I signed us up, thinking, Maybe this will give Marina something to do."

Marina, who had never before been to a beauty pageant — she was a cross-country skier in Russia — put Mia in a new dress, stood onstage, and held her before the judges, who started smiling. "I said to my husband, 'Let's do this again,' " recalls Marina in a thick Russian accent. "We did it again, and we almost won. I was very excited. I thought, So this is America!"

Now Mia is one of the up-and-comers on the high-glitz circuit. She practices every day on a little plywood stage her father built for her in the backyard and often sits with her mother in front of a computer, studying videos of Eden and other high-glitz stars. At the Universal Royalty pageant, there's buzz around the ballroom that Mia has a shot at beating Eden. And she is genuinely charming when she later comes back for her talent act, pretending to be a Russian doll who escapes from her dollhouse to dance to Russian music.

But then Eden hits the stage, and she's so preternaturally poised doing her beauty walk, the entire room goes silent. For her talent presentation, she performs "Underpuppy," an original song written to strike back at her critics. There's even a reference to Sharon Osbourne, who had implied to Mickie Wood that the pageant mom was a bad parent:

They said I would never be anything

but pageant queen.

They said no matter how good,

You won't get to Hollywood.

Jealousy, hypocrisy,

Why you gotta be so mean?…

Root for me, cheer for me.

'Cause I'm the underpuppy…

You sneered when I sang "Cutie"

Why you got to be so snooty?

Not everyone is Ozzy's groupie…

Your judgment makes me stronger.

Listen — that's my career,

getting longer.

Although her untrained voice is a little screechy, with a barnyard twang, Eden sings with such enthusiasm while dancing all over the

stage that the crowd gives her a standing ovation. "Get it, girl!" shouts Mickie, who has planted herself right

behind the judges. "Smile, girl!"

By the end of the day, many of the younger girls are asleep on their parents' shoulders as they await the results. Some have to be roused to go up and claim their trophies. And everyone does get a trophy from Hill, who graciously refers to each loser as "one of our finalists" or "a future winner."

Finally, it's time to announce the Ultimate Grand Supreme Winner. The girls who got the highest scores from the judges, including Eden and Mia, are called to the stage. Almost shaking with nervousness, Marina puts her hands to her mouth.

Hill reads the judges' final tally and announces that Mia scored highest in her age group, 0 to 5, and is a runner-up. Tears spring from Marina's eyes as Mia gets a sash, a crown, a trophy, and a teddy bear. Then comes a surprise: Eden scored highest in her age group, 6 and up, and is also a runner-up. The winner is Alex Howe, an 11-year-old girl from Louisiana. Despite the diversity of kids in the room, all three finalists are blond and blue-eyed.

Eden tearfully runs out of the ballroom. "I wanted to win the pink princess bed and sleep in it tonight," she blurts out to Mickie. But in the hotel room, her tears are soon gone. Mickie later tells her that the bed manufacturer wants to create a special Eden Wood Edition of the Princess Canopy Bed that will have Eden's picture on the pillows and her signature on the footboard. "And Eden, honey, they'll give you a bed for free," Mickie says.

"Yay!" Eden shouts, and soon she's in her bathing suit, headed to the hotel pool to swim with the other girls.

After Marina, Ray, and Mia pack up for the ride back to Lake Jackson, Mia climbs into the backseat, next to her trophy. Someone asks her what she's going to do when she gets home.

"Go outside and practice on my stage for my next pageant," she says.

"That's my girl," says Marina with a laugh. "That's my beautiful girl."