YOUNG MISS ARAPAHO COUNTY

excerpted from ARAPAHO
by Quintan Ana Wikswo

first performed at Pete’s Candy Store, April 2013

The guys know all the dirty jokes, all the innuendos. How to pinch a nipple that doesn’t have a breast behind it yet. How to pick a lock on a locked door, open it and come in and throw their body weight around, how to hold down a hand when it tries to claw and how to calculate the trajectory of a punch so it lands square and don’t show.

Her job is to go to Costco to buy diapers. She has to buy about thirty cases of diapers each week: There are so many sizes. Sizes for the premature and newborn, for 3 month and 6 months, for toddler and up to twenty pounds of baby. She finds this good because she has all sizes and weights and ages of babies.

She has to buy so many diapers, she can’t use a shopping cart, but instead a handtruck. She has to buy so many diapers, she gets a volume discount at a volume discounter. She has to buy so many diapers that even in Costco, an outsized temple to overconsumption, to mass purchases, people are stunned and amused.

She begins dressing inappropriately for her Costco trips.

She clears out the disposable diaper aisle of Costco wearing a beauty pagent tiara that says YOUNG MISS ARAPAHO COUNTY in tall plastic silver glitter letters.

A floor-length purple taffeta ballgown over combat boots and a gold sequin burlesque corset.

The kind of sequins that say a city.

But instead, they’re broken in the bottom of this broken washing machine because it’s hoping she’ll give up, too.

It’s hoping she can wash herself out and get wrung up on the line.

It’s hoping she’ll blow away in a tornado and they’d all be free of her.