Not many people outside of the American South have heard of the Miss National Peanut competition, but it’s a pretty big deal in southern Alabama – and 17-year-old Allie Phillips wants to win it. She’s a willowy, tall, soft-spoken blonde on the color guard at her high school – the only high school – in Andalusia, a city of just over 9,000 best known for its annual world championship domino competition and its status as the site of singer Hank Williams’ 1944 garage wedding (later invalidated when it turned out the bride’s divorce from another man was not yet final).
Allie’s already won the title of Miss Covington County, among others; the most interesting sash was the one that read Miss Rattlesnake Rodeo, which required her to pose, terrified, as a handler held a live rattlesnake around her shoulders. But the Miss National Peanut crown would bump things up a notch, earning the senior a coveted title in her final year of high school.
And that hope is what has Allie standing in four-inch heels and a $1,000 sparkling silver gown in an Andalusia gym on a sweltering Sunday in September, practicing the walk she’ll display before the peanut pageant judges that will hopefully clinch her the title.
That walk is being critiqued and molded by an unlikely pageant coach – a 57-year-old male lawyer with three grown children whose unconventional side business inspired the new and controversial Netflix series Insatiable. Currently one of the top-rated programs on the streaming service, the show was just renewed for a second season; the dark comedy following the exploits of a formerly obese Georgia teen named Patty who sheds the weight and enters the pageant circuit, helped along by a flamboyant local attorney, Bob Armstrong, who coaches contestants when he’s not practicing law.
The plot twists may be over-the-top and wild, but it takes less than one minute in the presence of Andalusia lawyer Bill Alverson to realize that many of the scene-stealing character traits ascribed to Armstrong – played by actor Dallas Roberts – are firmly grounded in reality. With his distinctive drawl, quick wit, sharp style and take-no-prisoners chiding, Alverson is a larger-than-life anomaly in this sleepy Southern town.
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Lawyer Bill Alverson, 57, coaches 17-year-old Allie Phillips in a gym in their hometown of Andalusia, Alabama, offering pointers on how to impressively walk the stage in a pageant
Alverson was the inspiration for controversial new Netflix series Insatiable, a dark comedy focusing on the pageant world, which stars actor Dallas Roberts as Bob Armstrong - a lawyer/pageant coach modeled on Alverson - and Debby Ryan, who plays his protege
Alverson married fellow Alabamian Doug Benefield, left, in June in a Studio 54-themed wedding; the lawyer was previously married to a woman and they have three adult children
He’s far from the only pageant coach in the US, but he’s perhaps the most unusual and definitely one of the most in demand. Alverson is standing on the matted gym floor in loafers and a suit next to Allie, swaying his hips and looking straight ahead with a jaunty confidence as he demonstrates the type of gait she needs to perfect.
He offers and exhibits the following tips: Make your right arm a trapezoid. Roll your pelvis. Your left arm should disappear as you angle your body and pose. Look ‘up to Jesus’ and sharply turn to give a head-held-high, proud smile. Stick out your backside ‘like a Kardashian.’
Around and around the two of them go, teenage Allie and her lawyer coach, a man who eschews sugar-coated advice for blunt criticism.
A lot of pageant coaches, he says, ‘are all skittles and rainbows – “You’re a cheerleader and let’s make you pretty.”
‘It’s very shallow and superficial, but I don’t do that – I think maybe because I have daughters,’ says Alverson, who is also grandfather to two small children. ‘I just want … the same opportunities for my daughters that my son has. So I kind of come at it a little bit differently.’
He’s as likely to challenge his clients and query them about the Kaepernick/Nike controversy and adoption by gay couples as he is to critique their makeup and adjust their posture – and the contestants he works with have to steel themselves for his inevitable evisceration of their interview responses.
‘There’s a method to the madness,’ Alverson tells DailyMail.com. ‘It comes intrinsically from case preparation, from the legal practice – and that’s what I have that nobody else has.’
He first got roped into pageants more than 25 years ago when his choir director called him up and asked him to coach a local teenager.
‘She knew that I was interested in musical theater and the arts, and she just thought, “He might can help,”’ Alverson says, slipping into Southern syntax. ‘I had already, when I was in law school, already was working with people on how to present themselves for interviews and correcting wardrobe issues – but not really done any interview help, per se. but I guess in conversation maybe I had talked about that.’
His skills translated well, however, when it came to his very first pageant contestant; she won the Miss Covington County Junior Miss pageant. Word got around locally, and more girls and their mothers began approaching him for help. His reputation was further bolstered when he coached coached Miss Alabama and Miss America winners and runners-up and started getting calls from pageant contestants further afield; he schedules sessions via Facetime and Skype in addition to in-person appointments.
‘I kind of had honed it in and word it; first I just kind of did it from the gut, what I thought,’ Alverson says of his coaching regime. ‘Then it was like, I need to have a planned practice; you need to be more like a teacher in a classroom with a study.
‘And that’s what I do; I think ahead before I meet the person or I see what they’re doing. I have specific questions I ask of what we’re trying to obtain, where we’re trying to go and what we can do to correct that and work forward.’
He was also invited to attend trunk shows at renowned formal wear store Lasting Impressions in Columbus, Georgia, where he was ‘the extra incentive: “Come get a gown, but while you’re here, I have a guy that’s coached the last three Miss Alabamas,”’ he quips.
Customers could book in for his advice during back-to-back time slots, and Alverson still participates in such weekends, charging $175 per hour; he has one scheduled in the coming weeks. He’s cagey about his other coaching rates, offering only that they’re cheaper than his hourly lawyer fees.
Last Sunday, Allie Phillips turned up with her mother just past noon at Alverson’s two-bedroom Andalusia home to work on her interview skills. He used to live in the larger house next door with his teacher wife, Cindy, and their three children, but their marriage fell apart about a decade ago – and Alverson came out as gay (without giving spoilers, this topic is also touched upon in Insatiable).
Alverson sits in his home and coaches 17-year-old Emory Garner, who is competing in the Distinguished Young Women scholarship contest; he grills her about controversial current events and urges her to stay up to date with the news so she's prepared for judges' questions
After Emory practices her piano piece for the talent portion of the competition - she's playing Beethoven - Alverson offers tips on how to gracefully rise from the piano bench and exit the stage, emphasizing posture and the need to hold her chin high
Moving from the piano to the dance studio, Alverson helps Emory perfect her moves for the fitness portion of the multi-faceted competition
Though the shows plot lines are over-the-top and fictionalized, the pageant coach played by Roberts, right, undeniably reflects the no-nonsense yet flamboyant personality of Alverson
Alverson does not hold back when it comes to criticism; he berates Allie Phillips and her mother, Kristy Nixon, for not having a correct pageant form, saying: ‘Y’all came up here with multiple outfits but didn’t have the main information sheet.’ When Kristy tries to protest, he cuts her off. ‘Shoulda, woulda, coulda,’ he says. ‘You’re a business woman’
Alverson married another Alabamian, flight attendant Doug Benefield, in June in a Studio 54-themed wedding, and the night before Allie and her mother arrived for their appointment, the couple enjoyed cocktails with gold-flaked sparkling wine, proudly showing off their patio, inground pool and airy house decorated with college diving photos of Doug and Alverson’s family tree that can trace his relatives back to Jamestown.
When Allie arrives with her mother, Kristy Nixon, however, it’s all business – and the lawyer immediately berates them for not bringing a copy of personal information previously submitted to officials of the peanut festival. The festival asks contestants various questions – such as their likes and dislikes – and Alverson wants to know what Allie wrote so they can work on interview answers that align with that information.
She’s not 100% certain what she said, and he’s not happy with the high school senior – or her mother.
‘Y’all came up here with multiple outfits but didn’t have the main information sheet,’ he huffs. When Kristy tries to protest, he cuts her off.
‘Shoulda, woulda, coulda,’ he says, a glass of unsweetened tea beside him. ‘You’re a business woman.’
He turns to Allie and tells her not to rely on her mother to get things done.
‘Your mom has just become Helen Keller in your world,’ he says. ‘You need a hair appointment, you make it – you hear me? You need to go to the gym, you go. You can drive. It sounds like I’m beating up on you; I am … but not just for any purpose.
‘The purpose is, once you take over your life, you’re empowered.’
Alverson insists he wants to get across a feeling of ‘#Metoo, modern women, go, go, go – that’s what we want to see in pretty pageant girls.’
Through animated conversation – mostly on his part, as Allie tentatively answers ‘Yes, sir’ – it’s established that she likes pizza and volunteering, dislikes mayonnaise and rollercoasters, and she wants to be a nurse anesthetist.
Alverson parrots back all of these details to Allie, reshaping them more articulately in a package more palatable to the judges. She’s also dyslexic, and he knows that the condition can very easily help her structure her ‘story.’ He gets her to describe being teased about her inability to read and then learning through older high school students who sat her down patiently – sparking her own interest in volunteering.
‘Now you’re telling me something real,’ he says, though his criticism isn’t finished; at one point he accuses her of ‘garbling garbage’ and at another he chides: ‘I’ve already fallen asleep. You’re saying real stuff, but this is lack of practice.’
Pageants themselves, however, helped Allie with the self-confidence problems that came along with dyslexia, her mother says.
‘When Allie works with Bill, it’s like getting her oil changed,’ Kristy Nixon tells DailyMail.com. ‘She’s a different person. He’s very direct, and she listens well, and ever since she started working with him, you know, she has just grown in leaps and bounds, matured as a young lady.’
When they finish practicing interview and walking, Alverson dispatches Allie home with instructions. She has to brush up on current events; she has to try to organize a visit with some of her fellow students to a nursing home; she has to get a copy of the sheet she handed to pageant officials; perhaps most importantly, she has to learn more about peanuts before the festival, visiting a farmer with peanut baked goods in hand and asking to drive the tractor.
Then he’s off to a dance school five minutes away to work with another client, also a senior, who is preparing for the Distinguished Young Women scholarship competition. There’s more of a scholastic and academic element to this particular contest, but the pageant aspects undeniably remain; next client Emory Garner arrives with her mother for more practice.
She quickly heads to change into a gown from her outfit of white pants and off-the-shoulder blue shirt (her mother texted Alverson to make sure it was okay for her daughter to wear white the week after Labor Day before they left home and he said yes).
‘She was very scared when she first started working with him,’ her mother, Becky, laughs. ‘She would go to his law office and they would have sessions there, and I’d text him and say, “Now she’s coming, but she’s scared – so just start out easy on her.” Because I knew how he was going to tell it straight.
Allie, who hopes to win the title of Miss National Peanut, has won numerous other pageant crowns - such as Teen Miss Rattlesnake Rodeo, which required her to pose as a handler held a live rattlesnake around her shoulders
Alverson picked Emory's piano piece, Moonlight Sonata, and advises her playing as well as her posture and presentation
Emory, left, is a head cheerleader at Andalusia High School and hopes to study environmental engineering; Allie, right, is in the color guard and wants to become a nurse anesthetist
Allie's mother, right, tells DailyMail.com: 'When Allie works with Bill, it’s like getting her oil changed ... She’s a different person. He’s very direct, and she listens well, and ever since she started working with him, you know, she has just grown in leaps and bounds, matured as a young lady'
‘She’s kind of timid; he has brought her out of her shell a whole lot. She says she’s 5’10, but I would dare to say she might be a little taller than that – but one of my favorite things he’s doing with her is he’s taught her how to own her height.
‘He’ll say: “In my family, we celebrate height” – and he’s taught her to do that. She used to refer to herself as a giant, and now she knows that it’s an advantage.’
Becky, a teacher, says of Alverson’s brash admonishments: ‘She knows just to laugh it off, because he means the best for her, but still take his corrections seriously. So she lets it roll off her shoulders.’
She smiles when recalling how Emory turned up for a session the day before the Distinguished Young Women of Covington County competition.
‘She puts on her gown and he wants to practice her entrance and exit – and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, you walk like a cow. You don’t look like a cow, but you walk like a cow.” And he taught her how to walk. And I’m telling you, she’s a quick study, too – but between the two of them, just from the day before to that very day of the competition: black and white. Totally transformed.’
Today, Alverson is helping Emory – who wants to be an environmental engineer – with her talent and fitness portions of the competition. When she returns in her flowing white gown, perfectly sitting on her tall frame, she enters a room with a piano she’s never played before – a deliberate move on the part of Alverson so she’ll get comfortable with an unfamiliar keyboard.
Before she sits down to play, however, they have to work on a graceful walk – and her departure from the piano bench and the stage will soon get the same attention. Before that, though, Alverson strips a hair tie from her wrist in a fuss; that’s his ‘pet peeve,’ he says. (He also hates flip flops, among other things.)
The song she’ll be performing was, unsurprisingly, picked out by Alverson (who plays piano himself): It’s Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and a difficult movement at that. She plays it repeatedly, almost flawlessly, then raises herself daintily up from the bench, faces away from the piano and, chin up, gives a graceful sweep of the arm and bow before proudly carrying herself away.
Then she changes again to practice a fitness routine down the hall, Alverson still giving pointers; his advice ostensibly knowing no bounds and stretching across myriad subject areas.
Finally, after a long day, it’s back to Alverson’s home, where this time Emory’s in the hotseat – and Alverson ramps up the difficulty level for a competition so focused on the cerebral. Paul Manafort, Trump’s border wall, gay adoption, Kaepernick, Brett Kavanagh, illegal immigration … all the hot-button current issues are thrown at the 17-year-old head cheerleader, whose confident seated position – likely a testament to Alverson’s coaching – never waivers. She, too, is tasked with brushing up more on politics and recent events, and she’s also given homework: Watch CNN and not just Fox News, the favored channel in her household.
Alverson is clearly pushing boundaries to force these girls to think outside of the box and their comfort zones.
Alverson deliberately had Emory practice in her gown on a piano she'd never played before to help her become comfortable with unfamiliar keyboards before the competition
'Emory tells DailyMail.com: 'He is straightforward and kind of harsh at times, but at the end of the day, I realized how much of an encouraging heart he has … he’s doing everything he can to make me the best I can be.’ She adds: ‘He really treats his hometown girls right’
Emory's mother, Becky, says: ‘She’s kind of timid; he has brought her out of her shell a whole lot. She says she’s 5’10, but I would dare to say she might be a little taller than that – but one of my favorite things he’s doing with her is he’s taught her how to own her height'
The lawyer says other pageant coaches ‘are all skittles and rainbows – “You’re a cheerleader and let’s make you pretty” - It’s very shallow and superficial, but I don’t do that – I think maybe because I have daughters. I just want … the same opportunities for my daughters that my son has. So I kind of come at it a little bit differently’
Allie overcame dyslexia as a child, and she says the help of older students as she learned to read sparked her interest in volunteering; her mother also credits pageants with a boost to her confidence when she previously struggled academically
‘Going into it, of course he’s intimidating, because he’s just had so much success,’ Emory tells DailyMail.com. ‘So I knew that he knew what he was doing.
‘He is straightforward and kind of harsh at times, but at the end of the day, I realized how much of an encouraging heart he has … he’s doing everything he can to make me the best I can be.’
She adds: ‘He really treats his hometown girls right.’
Insatiable, however, has brought the world of pageants – and Alverson’s personality – to a much larger stage. He did a short-lived TLC reality show before the Netflix program called Coach Charming; both of them stemmed from a 2014 New York Times profile that labelled him the ‘pageant king of Alabama.’
The phone calls started piling in from production companies and interested parties, and CBS purchased his life rights. He didn’t find out Insatiable would air on Netflix, however, until June 2017 – and he’s an avid fan of the show, even visiting the set and sharing drinks just last week in New York with the actor who plays him when Alverson and his husband visited his youngest daughter, a freshman at NYU.
Alverson – who shares a law practice with his son in Andalusia – loves the attention and the opportunity, and he’s good-naturedly taken it all in his stride.
What he doesn’t actually love, however, comes as a bit of a surprise: pageants themselves.
‘A lot of pageant coaches come out of being pageant contestants themselves; they just love pageants and want to go to pageants,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘I could give a s*** about pageants, to be honest. They bore me.’
Instead, he likes coaching the girls, bringing them out of their shells, capitalizing on their strengths and helping them be ‘the best version of themselves.’
‘It’s a part-time job; it is not a full-time job, and I wouldn’t want it to be a full-time job, to be perfectly honest,’ he says. ‘When I do those concentrated weekends, I do live on a lot of Red Bull or energy drinks or coffee – because the girl at eight o’clock at night has the same reason to have the same guy at 11 o’clock in the morning. So I’m really conscientious, as a parent, of: you’re getting what you pay for.’
He has no interest in competition between coaches or the snarky backbiting scene that can happen off-stage – which features heavily in the fictionalized storylines on Instatiable.
‘I’m one of these people, I have a real life,’ he says, later adding of any critics: ‘When they’ve been married, divorced and they’re gay, and they practice law at a significant level and they have three kids, I’ll be concerned.’
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2018/09/13/pageant-king-with-insatiable-urge-to-win-meet-the-lawyer-who-inspired-controversial-netflix-series/
Main photo article Not many people outside of the American South have heard of the Miss National Peanut competition, but it’s a pretty big deal in southern Alabama – and 17-year-old Allie Phillips wants to win it. She’s a willowy, tall, soft-spoken blonde on the color guard at her high school – the only high school...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves US News HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/09/13/15/500DBF1100000578-6164453-image-a-92_1536850641025.jpg
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