There’s a moment from the new Elton John biopic, Rocketman, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s when Elton (Taron Egerton) comes out to his mother, Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), via a phone-booth call just minutes before performing at Royal Albert Hall. Sheila’s response is less than enthusiastic: She tells her son—now a global pop icon—that she’s always known his sexuality, and he’s “choosing” a life of loneliness.
As a gay man myself, it’s a hard scene to watch. I was fortunate enough to have a positive coming-out experience, but I know all too well this isn’t the case for everyone. Realizing that even Elton John, someone who paved the way for many LGBTQ+ people, had a painful coming-out journey is a reminder that no one is safe from homophobia. Even now. My friends who have had similar conversations with their families are proof of that.
The weight of this moment wasn’t lost on Bryce Dallas Howard, who talked to several people about their coming-out stories to prepare. And when the scene finally wrapped, she was relieved. “It’s not fun, something like that,” she tells Glamour. “So we did it with just a small number of takes and got that pretty quickly.”
It’s a quick moment, sure, but a powerful one. Not only does it inform so much of what Elton does in the movie; it crystallizes Sheila’s character: This is a woman whose profound unhappiness with her own life prevented her from being the mom she needed to be. That’s Rocketman‘s interpretation, at least. I’m sure the real-life Sheila, who passed away in December 2017, had her own viewpoint on things.
Bryce Dallas Howard as Elton John’s mother, Sheila, in Rocketman
“I feel like sometimes in life—and certainly in movies—we look at people in a very binary way; they’re either good or they’re bad,” Howard says. “And the truth is everyone is normally a little bit of both. And in the case of Sheila, she’s someone who had a very big personality, was extremely charismatic, witty, funny—but then also was a very unhappy person. As a result, she was able to inflict a lot of damage.”
How Sheila reacts to Elton’s sexuality is, hypothetically, enough for viewers to write her off as “bad,” but Howard’s performance ensures this doesn’t happen. “It was important to not just go pure villain and yet also paint a picture of ‘Yeah, this was not a happy childhood.'”
When we meet Sheila, she’s lively and energetic but harboring a lot of frustration. She’s unsatisfied with her marriage to Elton’s father, Stanley, who ultimately leaves her to start another family. Sheila eventually remarries too, but the movie paints her as never fully recovering from Stanley’s indiscretions. That’s why I think she responds to Elton’s coming-out in the way she does: If she doesn’t have a positive outlook on her own relationships, it’d be hard to have one on Elton’s.
This dynamic illuminated something important to Howard about her actual life as a mom. (She has two children with her husband, actor Seth Gabel.) “It’s a healthy reminder, as a parent, to see what the impact can be on a child when the parent is perpetually unhappy and they’re not managing their own mental well-being,” she says. “How that can snowball into a dynamic that is very difficult to extricate yourself from. Kind words—they go far within a family.”
Tom Bennett plays Sheila’s second husband in Rocketman, while Gemma Jones plays her mother.
Kind words and an open mind. Two things Sheila didn’t have with Elton—in this fictionalized version of his life, at least—but Howard has with her kids. “My children get revealed to me over time,” she says. “Just because I’ve happened to know them since they were born doesn’t mean I know everything about them. Make space for that, as well, to be surprised—to be taken on an adventure by your child. To go places and in directions and explore things you never thought you would. But it’s because this person is in your life, and you’re connected to them forever.”
As I wrapped my hand around a pole on the subway a couple of weeks ago, an older lady pointed at my left hand and said, “Fabulous ring.” It would’ve been a welcome compliment on its own, but it was doubly so because I bought my engagement ring myself.
If this is a surprise, it shouldn’t be, but even in 2019 it feels like a weirdly bold statement.
It’s no secret that marriage is still a particularly traditional institution, and one that’s accompanied by a long list of things small and large that are expected of people (but mostly women) who enter into it. Some of those assumptions have, thankfully, evolved over the years. (Can you imagine being forced to give up work just because you’re married?) As many of us are choosing to keep our names and get married on our terms, these norms are dissolving. For example, it’s no longer expected that a bride’s family will automatically foot the bill for the wedding. And yet, for all the progress we’ve made, it still feels as if engagement rings are a frontier we haven’t breached.
Even as women have started to increasingly outearn their partners, the thought of a woman paying for her own ring still feels wildly taboo. Maybe it’s because of the myth that any woman who plays an active role in facilitating her engagement is tragic or desperate—thirsty to lock a man down or a demanding shrew. Instead, we’re left to wait and wonder near every Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and anniversary if this is the moment. For plenty of women, a surprise or grand gesture is romantic. For others, the whole thing is about ceding power to a man (and is made worse by well-meaning friends and family who ask, “Do you think he’ll do it then?” before every big vacation).
I wouldn’t expect or want my partner to choose my wedding dress for me. To get the style, the color, and not to mention the fit so right that it’s perfect. Why should a ring be any different?
Over the past year and a half, various people have, sweetly, asked me how my now-husband proposed. I feel like I’m short-changing them when I tell them there’s no story because there was no proposal. Or rather, the proposal was a conversation about whether we wanted to get married (yes) to each other (yes), when we wanted to do that (maybe late summer or early autumn?), and a mutual agreement that maybe a year ahead of that rough date we would need to start planning. This is not a good romantic story.
The romance is all the other bits of our relationship. It’s how he makes me laugh every day before I’ve even gotten out of bed. It’s how I’ve never made my own coffee in our home because he always does it for me. It’s never asking me to go to a gig with him, because he knows I hate live music. It’s his handmade birthday cards and making sure I appreciate the significance of every achievement I make, which I have a tendency to downplay. It’s even, I would argue, in respecting my preference to be actively involved in the planning and logistics of things that happen to me—like getting engaged. My husband is the kindest, sweetest, best person I’ve ever met in my whole life. And the best part is, he knows exactly who I am.
Our timeline of starting to think about a wedding roughly coincided with my receiving the advance on my debut novel. It was a pleasant but not life-altering amount of money, which weirdly made me feel more inclined to do something at least semi-impulsive with it. So I decided the least-frivolous frivolous thing I could do with that chunk of money was to buy an engagement ring.
The author’s engagement ring
I looked at a few gorgeous Georgian pearl cluster rings, but given that I’m fat by today’s standards, I’m certainly fat by vintage ring standards. And although they can be resized, I wasn’t willing to commit to something for which I had no idea what it’d look like on my hand.
After that, it didn’t take long for me to go back to an old favorite: Tessa Metcalfe, whose style seems to perfectly encapsulate the rough decadence of London. I’d bought a Tessa Metcalfe ring before. It was a gold-plated band made of two pigeon claws holding a freshwater pearl. I wore it so much that the gold plating came off and the metal turned silver. It was big, bold, and beautiful and just felt so right for me. A perfect solution, then, seemed to be a version of this ring, except one actually made to be worn every day. I asked Tessa to make one of her ready-to-wear rings but in solid gold so it wouldn’t tarnish, clasping a huge rose quartz with natural rubies set into the claws. It’s so perfectly me that I’m not surprised old ladies on the subway want to tell me how fabulous it is.
Never once did it occur to me during this process that it was inherently my partner’s responsibility to handle.
I would’ve felt guilty at the thought of him spending several hundreds of dollars on something that would only benefit me, when I was perfectly capable of buying it myself.
I very much know what I like. I work with clothes, I love fashion, and I occasionally design collections of my own. Through a combination of my day job (I work in marketing for a plus-size fashion brand) and the money I make from writing and hosting events, I earn more than my husband. This isn’t uncommon, and it doesn’t cause any friction or difficulty in our relationship. (In 2019, why should anyone assume that the man in a relationship is the breadwinner?) I would’ve felt guilty at the thought of him spending several hundreds of dollars on something that would only benefit me, when I was perfectly capable of buying it myself.
We talked about it briefly, and he was fine with it. It wasn’t a huge blow to his male pride or ego, because he is a sensible, rational person. To me, it felt like a particularly neat solution: I get something I want using money I earned myself, and he doesn’t even have to worry about guessing what I might like enough to wear for the rest of my life. It simply didn’t make sense for him to pay for it, let alone choose it.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Bethany Rutter
The author and her husband on their wedding day
Think of it this way: I wouldn’t expect or want my partner to choose my wedding dress for me. To get the style, the color, and not to mention the fit so right that it could be described as perfect. I took so much pleasure in picking out my dress—a kelly-green satin 1940s-inspired midi that also bucked tradition—and my ring feels no different. Although it’s absolutely the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought, it was still considerably less than most engagement rings (probably due to the lack of diamonds) and a tiny fraction of the number that would result from the outdated wisdom that an engagement ring “should” cost “your man” three months’ salary.
I’m thankful that for the majority of people in my life, this was unquestionably just another decision on our path to being happily married. The only people who have been surprised or taken aback when I’ve tried to explain it are people who are either quite a bit older than me or people who don’t know me very well. Women my age in particular have been overwhelmingly supportive of my choice to buy my ring myself.
Last week, Carrie Underwood fans in the U.K. found themselves wishing her a speedy recovery after she canceled two performances due to an unspecified “illness.” According to People, Underwood’s record label made the announcement on Facebook, revealing that the singer would no longer be performing at the Long Road Festival or Radio 2 Live at Hyde Park over the weekend.
This week, Underwood shed some light on the health condition that led to her last-minute cancellations. “I don’t cancel shows. Like, I will drag myself on the stage and perform if I have the flu, or whatever,” she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Thursday night (September 13). “In the U.K., we had to cancel a couple shows. Basically, I got, like, a viral thing, and I woke up, I had vertigo, and I could not stand up, and it was crazy.”
“I ended up in a German hospital for three days,” she added. “They were so sweet and so nice. And we were, like, in our rooms, like, trying to learn German and trying to communicate with the people….I learned one phrase. ‘Kein fleisch, bitte’—’No meat, please.’ I don’t eat meat, so they would come in—that’s all I learned. That’s all I got.”
Watch Underwood explain this for yourself, below:
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A few months ago, Underwood revealed she had seriously injured herself in a fall last November, requiring 40 to 50 facial stitches and metal screws in her broken wrist.. “I honestly don’t know how things are going to end up but I do know this: I am grateful. I am grateful that it wasn’t much, much worse,” she wrote in a blog post at the time. “And I am grateful for the people in my life that have been there every step of the way…. It’s crazy how a freak random accident can change your life.”
After spending several months in recovery, Underwood returned to the stage in April with a triumphant performance of her new song “Cry Pretty” at the Academy of Country Music Awards, receiving a long standing ovation and later winning Vocal Event of the Year with Keith Urban.
Shortly after winning the Miss America swimsuit competition—and making the top 10 in the pageant overall—I was signed by my first television agent, who was a senior partner at one of the best agencies in the business.
It was 2003, and back then—before Instagram, YouTube, and the sheer volume of reality TV we have now—talent scouts all watched pageants to suss out the next big thing. At 37, I am among the most senior of the millennials. Coming of age in the nineties and early 2000s, before social media existed, a surefire way for a young woman with no celebrity connections to make it on TV and get her voice heard was by having a title like Miss Virginia or Miss New York. Pre-Twitter, the pageant was one of the few remotely feasible outlets that let you “go viral” in a positive way.
Thus, ambitious, talented young women across the country, myself included, saw parading around in high heels and a swimsuit as a semi-inconvenient hurdle to jump over to achieve our life goals. We were future award-winning journalists, rocket scientists, esteemed actors, lifesaving oncologists—and we all thought that spraying our bikinied behinds with “butt glue” to keep wedgies at bay and painting our teeth with Vaseline to keep lip gloss from staining our bright white smiles was a great way to move toward these goals.
Nancy’s first wave after being crowned Miss Virginia
Over time, with the rise of social media as a platform, and especially over this past year of #MeToo and Time’s Up, that age-old system has officially stopped working—last week the Miss America Organization canceled the swimsuit competition.
“We are no longer a pageant,” Gretchen Carlson, the organization’s new board of trustees chairwoman, announced. “We are a competition. We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That’s huge.”
It is huge. While its clout has been diluted over the years, and despite rebranding efforts, the Miss America title is still synonymous with a beautiful, hot body. Rebuking swimsuits, as Miss America has done, along with nixing the evening gown competition, means that essentially the original purveyor of American beauty standards is saying #EffYourBeautyStandards.
It is an unexpected enigma, to say the least, and I welcome it wholeheartedly.
When I competed for Miss America 15 years ago, 10.3 million viewers watched ABC as I was called into the top 10 (about 5.6 million watched last year’s show). As I tottered gingerly on high heels that I never fully managed to dominate, Bachelorette sweethearts Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter excitedly told the audience that I had won the preliminary swimsuit competition, which to the world meant that I had the best body in my group.
I did not, not by a long shot. In preparation for the pageant, I lost over 50 pounds during my senior year at Harvard, where I majored in women’s studies and wrote my junior thesis on minorities in the Miss America Pageant. While I looked great, even my youthful 21-year-old skin hadn’t fully snapped back from the weight loss without some sagginess. Nor did my weight loss cure my self-esteem issues—I hated my body as I walked that stage, a fraught discovery that became the impetus for my career as the best-selling author of photography-driven health books Pregnancy, OMG! and Body Drama, which feature tons of un-air-brushed images of women of all body types.
And I definitely didn’t have the best walk; in fact, I stumbled and nearly fell on the nationally televised Miss America stage—a nightmare fuel that haunted my dreams for months.
What I did have, however, was the “best” #thinspo story, which I honed for months with an interview coach who reminded me constantly that the Miss America swimsuit competition was won “from the neck up.” (Meaning that if the judges liked me in my interview and wanted me to do well in the pageant, they’d be more forgiving of the spray tan streaks and stretch marks.)
When the time came, I squeezed into a perfectly tailored $400 gold-plated sunshine-yellow size zero bikini and pranced around the stage for about 20 seconds in heels purchased from a quirky Manhattan store that seemed to cater exclusively to drag queens and pageant girls. My performance was enough to snatch that coveted diamond-shaped Lucite award and $2,000, which was, ironically, about half of what I had spent on personal training, spray tanning, seaweed wraps, and body waxing to get my body “swimsuit ready” for the Miss America stage.
PHOTO: Debra Morrison
Nancy with her husband, actor Rupak Ginn, and their two children, August, six, and Nancy, four
Despite my many substantive accomplishments since, even today as a grown woman with a legit mom bod who rocks an XL bathing suit, I am often introduced to new people, whether in auditions or at wine nights with friends as “a beauty queen.”
I didn’t just win a onetime swimsuit award; I had won a lifetime of societal acceptance.
I am extremely proud of how I’ve used my smidgen of social capital to stand at the forefront of the body-positivity movement and help many women, and myself in the process, find self-acceptance. During my reign as Miss Virginia, I marched for choice, performed in The Vagina Monologues, and visited countless schools across the state, where I spoke to thousands of young women and men about a variety of topics important to me, including the then revolutionary concept that feminism wasn’t a dirty word and that boys could be feminists too.
The only reason any of these kids listened to me was because I had a crown on my head, the 2003 version of 150,000 Instagram followers. Would I have been just as successful as I am in my adulthood even if “Miss Virginia” and “swimsuit winner” weren’t in the first paragraph of my biography? The answer is probably no. But for this next generation of young, ambitious women, it’s different.
Time is up for the pedestaling of an individual based on looks. I recount my experience not to lambast the Miss America pageant of yesteryear but to showcase how far the organization has come.
Options to inspire and motivate young people have expanded infinitely. We don’t need a Miss America anymore—the many screens we are tethered to show us a diverse array of wonderful female role models like Tarana Burke, Issa Rae, Gabi Fresh, Michelle Obama…the list goes on and on.
Time is up for the pedestaling of an individual based on looks. I recount my experience not to lambast the Miss America pageant of yesteryear but to showcase how far the organization has come. The first Miss America was crowned in 1921, a mere 11 months after American (white) women gained the right to vote. Increasingly, the nearly 100-year-old event, which started as an Atlantic City tourist draw, has often seemed like a societal anachronism, flying in the face of each new wave of feminism. But it is important to not discount the fact that the diversity of its 91 winners is evidence of its incremental and meaningful evolution. Long before the commercialization of the body-positivity movement and corporate-mandated inclusive advertising, back when the peach crayon in the box was almost always called “flesh,” the Miss America pageant introduced the world to the idea that deaf women, black women, women with short hair, Asian women, opinionated women, children of immigrants, and more could all be considered “beautiful” and “successful” on a global scale. For hundreds of thousands of women from all walks of life, the pageant’s influence on beauty ideals, while nowhere near perfect (considering the limited range of body types), was and remains mind-boggling powerful.
Nancy won the Miss America swimsuit competition in 2003.
Even if Miss America’s rallying cry for a new era of equality turns out to be a swan song for the competition at large, they have determined that it is better to go out in flames on the right side of history, and this is an honorable and brave call.
The loss of a tradition is worth a future of possibility.
GLAAD-award-nominated on-air personality Nancy Redd is the best-selling author of the new book Pregnancy, OMG!, the first-ever diverse photographic guide for expecting women. Nancy’s other books include Body Drama and Diet Drama. Two weeks after graduating from Harvard with a degree in women’s studies, she won the title of Miss Virginia and became a preliminary swimsuit winner at Miss America 2003. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
In 2017, celebrity style was pretty hard to ignore. Yes, the red carpets always deliver on over-the-top glamour and fashion; but this year, all of your favorites seemed to pour as much heart and soul into their downtime outfits, too. No matter the time of day or where they were going, celebrities didn’t shy away from a good lewk. So we have to take a moment to acknowledge the true style stars of 2017—women who not only served outfit inspiration at all hours, but who really seemed to have fun with their fashion, using clothing as a form of self expression. Familiar faces like Gabrielle Union and Selena Gomez approached 2017 as a year to completely re-up their style game (and oh, did we notice); others, like Millie Bobby Brown, were up-and-comers. They each have their own aesthetic, their own designer preferences (and allegiances), and their own sartorial point of view. But whenever they stepped out, we watched—and took some serious notes. Take a look back at the nine women who were our fashion MVPs of 2017.
