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walked up to me and started a conversation during lunch today?”

ANTHROPOLOGICAL
OBSERVATION #4:
    Throughout high school, one must look good without looking like one is trying too hard to look good, as the appearance of effortless, semi-intentional beauty is highly prized among the adolescent species. This is impossible for most people to accomplish
.
    The rules of the Melva’s Miss Livermush Pageant and Scholarship competition are as follows:
    1. Contestants must be girls who are completing their junior year in Letherfordton County, at either Melva High School or the Letherfordton County High School.
    2. Contestants must have and maintain a GPA of 3.4 or above. The judges evaluate each contestant’s academic record and award academic points.
    3. Contestants must be of “excellent moral character.” (A purposefully vague guideline, yes, but useful in disqualifying girls for all manner of youthful indiscretions.)
    4. Contestants must complete an essay on the topic “What Livermush Means to Me.”
    5. And, most important, the final twenty contestants must compete onstage (humiliatingly!) at the annual Livermush Festival. Each must wear a fancy dress and perform a talent (often stupid), then answer a question (dumbly) during the interview portion of the competition.
    There was one more guideline that you wouldn’t see on the official rules: Although the contest was technically open to anyone, the contest participants were invariably, monochromatically white. This added to the pageant’s overarching antebellum nostalgia. There was a similar pageant sponsored by the Association of Black Civic Leaders that tended to attract any girl of non-Euro ancestry.
    If you meet those requirements, as I’ve said before, there is basically no getting out of the Miss Livermush Pageant. You
have
to participate. Or else. You’re out. Off the island. People would stop inviting you to Sunday lunch at the Country Buffet after church, and you wouldn’t get monogrammed towels from the neighbor ladies as your high school graduation presents. There’d be no invitation to the post—Miss Livermush mother-daughter tea waiting in your mailbox. Which was why my mom was so horrified at the mere idea of my refusal to participate.
    There was also the Livermush Festival Dance afterward, which basically everyone in Melva age sixteen and above attended,moms and dads and grandmas and all. It was the community’s time to see and be seen, and that’s why it was such a big deal.

    ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
Melva, North Carolina, has long been known as the Livermush Capital of the World. Livermush is a traditional Southern favorite — a meat product made of pig liver and head parts (mmm, right?), cornmeal, and spices. To celebrate this culinary tradition, every spring for decades Melva has held the Livermush Festival uptown. (I always forget that often outside of Melva, and definitely outside of North Carolina, people have never heard of livermush.)
    Now that I’d decided to get the inside view of Miss Livermush, I was contemplating my strategy while watching the E! entertainment channel evening news roundup. The E! channel was my major televised source for pop cultural information (a trick I’d picked up from Margo), and it gave me some good topics to discuss with my non-anthropology-minded peers.
    FACT:
Most of the other kids at MHS only knew of the existence of other countries if Angelina Jolie had adopted a baby from them.
    So, I thought strategy. I definitely needed a performable Miss Livermush talent, and I had zero performable talents. The talents I possessed were best practiced in libraries, not on stages. The academic portion of the competition was my only real competitive edge. The judges evaluated your livermush essay, your GPA — but even so, everyone knew that a pretty girl won each year!
    Grabbing a handful of sugary cereal from the box open at my feet, I crunched, turning my attention back to E!. Clips of celebrities in formal gowns