SIMPLI Royal’s Miss Mash Queen ‘National Pride’ costume competition, which was initially set for February 13, has been postponed to February 20, the very night as the Miss Mash Queen 2022 coronation ceremony where a new queen will be crowned.

‘National Pride’ will see six participants strutting in ceremonial dress and their versions of national costumes created by local designers, who will put their creativity and patriotism on full display.

This competition is one of several categories that the young contenders are competing for in their quest for the crown.

On February 15, the young ladies will take part in “Le We Talk” a virtual personality interview. The Coronation Night competition includes the opening introduction, talent, swimsuit, and evening gown segments which eventually lead into the top three finalists taking on the ‘question and answer’ segment.

The delegates will also participate in a “Last Lap”, motorcade around the capital city on February 19.

The Buzz caught up with some of the young pageant stars earlier this week, as they shared their excitement on being part of the pageant experience.

“There are many advantages of being in a pageant such as building your self-confidence, meeting a lot of interesting persons, and exploring the world. Those are some of the reasons I decided to take part in this pageant.

It’s been challenging but it’s something nice for young women to explore and I’m really looking forward to boosting my self-confidence more,” Jowanna Barkoy, 20, told The Buzz.

This will be the first pageant walk for the aspiring entrepreneur who currently works as a Customer Service Representative at ITEL Guyana. She hopes that her unique personality will give her an edge in the competition.

Unlike Barkoy, this will be the second pageant for Zariah McCalmon, 20, who walked the stage of the Miss Linden Emancipation in 2017, where she finished as second runner up. Given her performance in that pageant, she was encouraged to enter this one.

“A lot of persons reached out to me and said to do it since I had the pageant experience from before—so, I said ‘why not!’ I’m really looking forward to bringing my originality and being ‘extra’. I get 100 per cent on everything that I do, so I look forward to this,” a confident McCalmon shared.

The other contenders in the pageant are Shenica Manawarkan, 23; Tamasha Oxford, 19; and Eschalla Massiah, 21.

The Miss Mash Queen Pageant was founded by pageant house, Simpli Royal, headed by Guyana’s “mother of pageantry” Pamela Dillon. Dillon’s brainchild is praised for being a home-grown pageant that represents Guyana’s ‘Mashramani’ festival.

“I get excited about hosting this event annually,” Dillon shared in an interview with The Buzz. “Mashramani is the one all-inclusive festival that brings Guyanese together, and must be celebrated and commemorated.”

Ms Pam, as she is more widely referred, hosted the first edition of the pageant in 1998. The most recent pageant queen was Aquaila Rupan in 2017. The organisation took a break after 2017.

“We needed to go back to the drawing board to reconceptualise the production, so we took a sabbatical… but then [there was] COVID-19 and we held off for two more years in an effort to understand what we were dealing with,” Dillon explained.

With things beginning to return to some amount of normalcy in Guyana and around the world as we learn to live with the virus, Dillon believed it was time to move forward with the pageant.

In October 2021, a call for contestants was published with an orientation process extending from last December to early January 2022.

“We were looking for young ladies to represent [the pageant] who liked to challenge themselves, who had a talent in the performing arts, who was (sic) between 18 to 26 [years] and had an outgoing personality,” Dillon further explained.