Year after year, folks congregate at the Mower County Fair to be in the talent contest.

Monday, August 14, 2000

Year after year, folks congregate at the Mower County Fair to be in the talent contest.

They pick out their costumes, practice their acts and cross their fingers in hopes of getting that $50 prize and the title of first-place winner that comes with it. This year I congregated with them – to watch. On Sunday, I could have been found amidst a large crowd of other curious viewers watching the Talent Show Showcase on the Fair Square stage.

My original impression was that I was about to see the final talent contest of the week, but I was ill-informed. After mingling a little with the first-place winner from the teen division, Bethany Larson, I learned that it was a showcase of the top three acts in each division. Larson’s act was seventh.

I had performed a little before and I knew how a big crowd like Sunday’s could really rack your nerves so I asked Larson whether she was a little nervous.

"I love singing for people," she told me. "I get nervous before I go on but as soon as I start singing, I’m alright."

When I asked the same to Laura Davis, the first-place winner of the preteen division, she said it got easier as she went along.

"My first time at the contest was hard, but this time it’s a little easier," she said.

Vandy Newman, coordinator of the Mower County Talent Contest, said that getting kids to start dealing with nervousness was a big benefit of the talent contests.

"It’s good for kids to get up in front of people," she said. "The more they do it, the more comfortable they become with the stage."

After watching some of the acts, I concluded that a lot of the contestants must have really learned from getting up in front of people because they seemed so comfortable on stage. I saw children as young as 8 years old singing their hearts out with complete control over their audience; well, over me at least.

Stephanie Kasel was one of those children. She was the second-place winner in the preteen division singing "Tomorrow" from Annie and she seemed to belong on the stage. My attention was immediately drawn to her costume. Her long red hair had been curled up into tight ringlets to look just like the real thing and she had a costume with little black Mary Janes to match. I later asked her mother, Barbara, what they had to do to get her to look that genuine. I found out that Stephanie’s mother and grandmother, both non-sewers as they claimed, had put together Stephanie’s red dress with white trim from scratch.

"We worked for numerous days on it," Barbara Kasel said. Stephanie’s hair had taken two hours to set with 75 rollers that were left in for two days.

Stephanie is a young 8-year-old, but I learned from Newman that she wasn’t the youngest competitor in the talent contest. Six-year-old Victoria Torkelson had the least amount of years behind her of all the contestants in the preteen division. She had also performed "Tomorrow."

One thing that always worries me about contests is dealing with the competition. Sometimes it’s hard to be friendly with someone who could potentially stand in your way for the first-place prize. But Larson assured me that this was not the case in her experience.

 

"The people I competed with were really nice," she said. "We all encouraged each other."

Perhaps it’s all in the attitude. Davis told me that she got some good advice on her act from the daughter of a family friend who told her to "do what comes to you and just have fun with it." Not taking things too seriously and just having fun can make a competition a lot less for the competing and more for the experience.

According to Newman, the experience is what really will take a performer far. She pointed out to me that this year’s Miss Austin, Elliott Sailors, was a talent contest competitor three years in a row.

After watching the showcase and finding out what happens behind the scenes, I realized that there’s a lot more to a competitor’s act than meets the eye. I was impressed by the amount of work contestants put in for their five minutes of fame. But I also learned that all the work was for more than just five minutes. It was for an experience that people who love to perform crave.