Beauty School Dropouts
Showcasing unconventional good looks at the Catwalk Tragedy Tour.
Victor F. Rodriguez Jr.
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[ models the cat dragged in ]
The recipe for the Catwalk Tragedy Tour is anything but conventional: Choose 28 women and 12 men, dress them in clothes that would never grace the pages of Vogue, add tattoos (optional), dispose of society's standards for beauty (required) and then give them a catwalk to strut down.
"The idea came about drunk and on no sleep, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at 4 a.m. at the Manayunk Diner," says co-creator JoAnna Marmon. "We got to talking about how Miss America just wasn't right."
But what started as a joke in 2005 (the judges were originally billed as "four fat guys and a rockstar") quickly grew into a legitimate success — fans lined up at the Grape Street Pub to see the show.
Marmon had somewhat inadvertently found a niche: People sick of being spoon-fed such a narrow idea of beauty were ready to see something different. "Miss America is pretty consistent — you get a specific type of shape and look in your mind," Marmon says. "Catwalk is everything and anything that people are — it's a chance for people to represent themselves and be celebrated for being themselves."
This show will be the fifth in Philly; Catwalk Tragedy also had one-night runs in Orlando and New York. The judges will score the contestants' first two walk-offs, and then choose two winners based on the crowd's response to the 15 finalists. "In the third round, you do whatever you want to get the crowd to go crazy," says Ana Lewis, who — as Ana X — will be a third-time contestant this year.
While the show is technically inclusive of all kinds of non-mainstream beauty, model manager Kellie Taylor admits that it tends to favor a particular alternative look. "The girls that are covered in tattoos or piercings or other kinds of crazy stuff are usually the ones who do the best," she says. "People like to look at them."
The Catwalk Tragedy contestants don't look anything like the hopefuls on America's Next Top Model, but several have already successfully used the show as a springboard to professional modeling careers. "There's absolutely a market for this, and the market is growing," says Marmon, adding that a Catwalk Tragedy reality TV show is currently in the works.
Despite its growing popularity, the Catwalk Tragedy Tour hasn't lost sight of its original raison d'être. It's still a long, long way from Miss America. "In regular pageants, the girls are all proper and look like Barbies," Lewis says. "This is more like Barbie gone wrong."
(lauren.friedman@citypaper.net)
Catwalk Tragedy Tour Philly 2009 | Sat., May 2, 7:30 p.m., $16-$20, Trocadero, 1003 Arch St., 215-922-5483, myspace.com/catwalktragedytour.
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