A busy life
Miss Oktoberfest duties keep winner hopping
KITCHENER — The public appearances pile up and bunch together like the sauerkraut-spattered pleats of a polka-weary dirndl.
“I think I’m at 218 — pretty solid,” said Waterloo’s Holly Pearson, who boarded a limo bus bound for a promotional kegtapping visit to Queen’s Park on Thursday on her next-to-last day as the reigning Miss Oktoberfest.
“I expected to be busy. I don’t know if I expected to be so busy.”
On Friday night, her official busyness comes to an end in an onstage instant.
The next Miss Oktoberfest — picked from 11 candidates aiming to represent the 48th annual Kitchener-Waterloo Bavarian festival on Oct. 7-15 — will be named during a gala ball at Bingemans.
Pearson, a Communitech talent co-
ordinator who majored in speech communications at the University of Waterloo, will hand over the ceremonial crown — the larger of two she wears — to her successor. That sparkling tiara, with its hefty ambassadorial workload, can weigh on a 23-yearold brow.
“My big crown actually gives me a crown dent,” Pearson said of the temporary but noticeable impression it leaves in her hair. “It’s very heavy. It actually leaves a little imprint on my head after I’ve worn it for a little while.”
Twenty years ago, Miss Oktoberfest only fretted over about 100 public appearances.
Maybe that’s because it was a beauty pageant back then and the winner, Jaycie Lee Preskitt, was an enterprising out-of-towner and a self-described “Southern belle” from Alabama. Or so Preskitt’s press kit would have read.
But Miss Oktoberfest went local in 2003. The international pageant format, an expensive $100,000 anachronism, was discarded for a series of speed interviews by judges.
The Miss Oktoberfest hopefuls, mentored by Pearson in recent weeks, must live within an 80-kilometre radius of Kitchener-Waterloo during their anticipated reign, so when Gemütlichkeit duty calls, Miss Oktoberfest will surely be nearby.
This year, one out-of-region contestant is from Dundas.
It used to be Miss Oktoberfest often hailed from Mississippi or Florida or Texas or California. For example, 20 years ago, Georgia’s Paulette Schier passed the Miss Oktoberfest crown to Preskitt.
A year ago, Kitchener’s Lindsay Kalbfleisch turned it over to Waterloo’s Pearson. An Eastwood high school grad gave a Bluevale girl a little advice in the chaos of the moment.
“People just want you to be genuine,” said Pearson, echoing Kalbfleisch’s wisdom.
And that goes whether you are elephant-dancing at the Concordia Club or grinning for a photo taken by a phoneclicking passerby, as Pearson did in a rain-soaked commuter parking lot on Thursday morning. A few hours later, Pearson appeared before Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Liberal caucus in Toronto.
The job goes on for a full year, long after the final festhall mop-up. Pearson is even on-call to fill in for the next Miss Oktoberfest when there are events her successor can’t make.
Naturally, there’s a Miss Oktoberfest alumni group, she said. Kitchener’s Meghan Hennessey, Miss Oktoberfest from 2010, even serves on the Oktoberfest board of directors.
“They stay connected, which is great,” said Pearson, the first cousin of Los Angeles Kings hockey player Tanner Pearson. “A lot of the Miss Oktoberfests go on to remain committee members or engage with the festival and stay connected in some way.”
Her future role with a festival she has grown up with is yet to be determined. But she knows she’ll be at Bingemans on Friday night to pass the crown and sash to a new face.
“It happens very fast,” she said of the split-second tiara turnover.
“You are Miss Oktoberfest the second you get the crown.”
And then, things get a little crazy. The next day, after a dirndl fitting, the appearances start to add up.
There’s one sure approach to survive and thrive for all 218 of them, she said. “You need to be yourself in the role,” Pearson will tell her successor.
“It’s a role that’s been around for about 48 years now. Of course, there’s a lot of history with that. But you need to kind of set that aside and find the type of ambassador you want to be.”