The Pretender Queen
The year before she took the crown “pretender-to-the-throne” Kathy Gillespie, rode atop a huge float in the 1985 parade, contending the true queen that year, Queen Glenda, was an imposter.
These are precisely the sort of self promoting antics that lift one to the level of SLUG Queenliness–and thus the elementary school librarian was officially elected Queen Kathy in 1986. Her talent was simple—yet now impossible: “I took Polaroid pictures of the judges,” she said.
At the time of her coronation Queen Kathy reminded her public that she was “the only Queen who’s a permanent art object. (You can see Gillespie, clutching a sequined box of Corey’s Slug Bait, in the Eugene Airport’s famous “Flying People” mural by distinguished artist/photographer David Joyce.) Since that time another of Joyce’s flyers has moved from “subject” to Queen. One of his Fairy greeters in the same mural later became southern belle Queen Scarlett in 2004. That guy had an eye for slugs.
