While seated completely at ease with a group of strangers, it's as if somehow Marra created a pageant atmosphere that feels similar to a family meal with your lovable, boisterous, imaginary Italian family.
The greatest of these, "Star Spangled to Death," is a an assemblage of almost seven hours that intercuts all manner of found footage with original material to create a vast underdog pageant of 20th-century American history.
In "Wait for Me!" she corrects and extends the record, creating a personal pageant of the last century.
In the City, new kinds of architectural bigness are creating a beauty pageant of towers and groundscrapers in an urban cabinet of curiosities which may ultimately lobotomise our interest in the effects, good and bad, of change.
There might be something dangerous about such a film, creating a stirring pageant out of war – and that was definitely a concern that critics of the time, notably the Manchester Guardian's CA Lejeune, felt deeply.
One player complained recently that he created a beauty pageant but that a character named Cheerleader Sue came in dressed as a hillbilly and ruined the talent competition with a flatulent version of "Camptown Races"; he had to block Cheerleader Sue from his environment.
"In all kinds of religions they have music and pageant to create a sense of peacefulness, and I think this is what this work is doing".
The show's set (Eugene Lee), lighting (Jean Kalman) and video design (Jeff Sugg) meld to create a homey dreamscape that eloquently matches the play's double-pronged focus as family drama and national pageant.
He amassed recollections of hog pageants, Chickenmobiles (a big van with a rooster tail that circles the town of Decatur, plugging a local fast food chain), scout camps and high-school crushes to create a thoroughly convincing narrative.
Then I tripped over Trump's Miss U.S.A pageant, which is the Miss America pageant without the class.
