Contestant No. 4 wore a flag of the Bahamas and sang a song that I assume was the national anthem. I had no idea what the song was supposed to sound like, although I was quite sure it wasn’t supposed to sound like what I was hearing.

Contestant No. 5, dressed as the sun, wore a yellow leotard complete with a swim cap on which Styrofoam rays of sunshine had been glued. She discussed the beautiful weather in the Bahamas, sharing statistics on the number of days of sunshine and inches of rain.

The last contestant wore a blue dress and read a poem she had written about the ocean. “You are blue, we love you, what would we do, without you . . .”

By the end of that segment, I wished Scotty could beam me up. Instead, the swimsuit competition began.

Swimsuit competitions go against everything that is right and decent in this world. We’re told that beauty is on the inside and that who we are matters far more than what we look like. But could you please just put on this bikini and walk around on high heels so I can judge your inner beauty? I don’t know which was worse, to be a contestant or a judge. I wanted to stand up on the table and tell the girls to take off their high heels and hurl them at the organizers of this event, demanding that the pageant be replaced by a spelling bee. Instead, I just sat there and prayed for the end.

For the last part, the deep-question segment, the girls had to answer a question drawn out of a hat.

“What would you do if you were selected as Miss Bahamas?”

“If you could solve one problem, what would it be?”

I’d been hoping the questions would be more interesting.

“If you were to design a theme park around the crashed drug plane, what would you call it?”

“Besides turtles, can you think of any other endangered species that we could cut up and fry?”