Virgelia Productions review: Pageantry 2

Virgelia’s show is a complete dog and pony show. If you are a nice lady who tries to make a difference through pageantry, stay away from this organization. It will drain you emotionally and financially and is totally not worth it. When Virgelia recruits you, she would paint a nice picture that includes women empowering and leadership, diversity and philanthropy but once you are hooked, she will only reach out to you to ask for money and more money. You have to buy a lot of ad pages and tickets in order to win. Yes, I said that right, you have to buy your title. Girls who worked on legitimate sponsorships ended up loosing because they raise as much money as the ones who paid for the ad pages from their own pockets. It doesn’t matter who you are and how you look like, old grandma, crooked teeth, over weighted , jelly belly and full of stretch marks, Virgelia will crown the ones who spend the most amount of money. She created competition amongst group of girls who competed in the same division by sharing texts that gave hints how many pages the richest girl had put in so far and it made the rest feel like they have to pay more to get their feet in. Girls that are honest and worked hard to get legit sponsorships for the hefty ad pages (inside cover pages) were refused to provide W9 forms because Virgelia did not want to pay taxes.

She has mentioned that India and Japan are the 2 biggest markets for her so Indian and Japanese girls tend to take home more sashes regardless of their appearances. Connection is also a big deal, if you have connection with the media that can help her grow her business or recruit more victims for the following years, you are the “it girl”. Virgelia has a log that she tracks how much each girl has spent on Ad pages, tickets, jewelry ..and this is her bible to determine the winner. On top of that, using her photographers, her designers and her pageant coaches are also pushed. She made sure the girls have to show her “merchandises” on stage, meaning her cheap bling that you can get from Chinese websites for a corner of what she charges. In most bikini contests, girls don’t wear jewelry; let’s be honest, who would wear tons of bling to the beach any ways, but at Virgelia Production, these girls are wearing bikinis with heavy jewelry and a big crown that they have to buy from Virgelia. Some of them look like “ Mrs T”

Virgelia is also very rude and obnoxious. She uses a lot of unpleasant words toward the girls and her staff. At one point, she even called one girl “stupid” and told another girl to “shut up” . She yelled at her staff constantly and told the one lady “what is wrong with you?” only because the lady was a bit behind on doing what she was asked. For real,” what is wrong with her staff? “ They all seem to be very nice, why would they put up with her attitudes? It must have been the vanity fair. Not only the delegates, the staff but also the queens from previous years got talked down to during rehearsals. Some of these ladies are educated and smart, they totally do not deserve to be talked down to but they all sucked it in. A lot of girls were upset and they wrote reviews which Virgelia has mentioned “to not talk bad about her and her organization” during rehearsals. You have got to be real bad to worry about what people might say about you like that.

Virgelia has removed so many negative Google reviews, so you don’t really come across them unless you really do research prior to joining but ladies, do your research! Google reviews can be removed but news and articles are still out there . There was an incident when she appointed herself as one of the judges at the last minute to crown the one she already pre picked to win. Another incident that she crowned an out of state girl her state title , which was not on the award list because the girl paid too much to win. Miss California at one point was given to an out of state girl too.

She got so greedy that she added what so called “extension pages” to her souvenir book while these pages were not part of the original handouts and made it clear that you can just pay for your own ads. What about community connections and women empowering and leadership? Lots of girls had to pretend they were sponsored by businesses ; in fact, they just paid for their ads.

The whole production is a chaos. Things are constantly changed at the last minute and communication is very poor. It was done mainly via texts and a lot of time in broken English.

So ladies, be smart! You don’t need the crown to be the Queen!