Generalized Loveliness ★: MR. PANTHER PAGEANT

What a night! It feels like my life lately has practically revolved around Mr. Panther dance practice, planning, video making, and tech supporting but tonight was finally the night! I am so beyond blessed to have been a part of it. Every year, it is my high school's tradition to have a "Mr. Panther" (panther is our mascot) pageant to find out who the top boy at the school is. The senior class student council is behind ALL of the planning and preparation. The 7 of us girls worked our hearts out to get sponsors, find advertisers, print flyers, print posters, buy sashes and flowers, film videos, choreograph dances, get pretty dresses, and keep the boys in check. The 10 boys worked so hard too! I applaud their commitment and dedication to helping make this the best Mr. Panther I've ever seen. It feels like just yesterday I was a little freshman swooning over the senior boys and wishing I was as pretty as their escorts. Now I'm there. Don't blink guys. By far the hilight of the night was when Bethany Bulloch (our amazing class president) quoted our advisor, Mr. Read's famous line, "This is your senior year guys! Just take it all in and enjoy it!" The other best part was when the hostesses announced Mr. World Wide was the winner and all of us, the boys, escorts, and theatre techs started dancing on stage to the Jellyfish Jam from Spongebob (its in the vlog if you care to see it hah!). It felt like we were all so united for those few minutes and all on the same nostalgic page about our high school days nearly coming to an end. It is so fulfilling to do big projects in student council like this. The preparation is such hard work and in the moment it is really rough, but on the actual night it always seems to pay off when I'm on the stage and seeing the audience's reactions to what we sacrificed so much time for. I feel like student council has truly given me the high school experience!

we spent a lot of time getting ready (both for the night and on the night)

saved snapchats from when we were getting all primped to film a part for the video (linked at the bottom of the post)

how to get the perfect high POV picture (a step by step manual by Madison Pritt):
1. put your camera on a tripod at the top of the stairs
2. set up the self timer to go for as long as it can (in my case, 10 seconds)
3. press the button and run down those stairs as fast as you can and take your position. Be sure to act natural
4. run up the stairs to see how it turned out.
5. after completing step 4, if you aren't happy with the results, repeat steps 2-4

All of the girls originally got dressed up and went to Bethany's house so that we could shoot essential parts of the intro video (another video linked below hah!) but while we were there we obviously had to have a little photoshoot too.

more getting ready

such a golden group!

There were two things I absolutely loved about these couple of minutes- the first is that Bethany thought to say a prayer before we all went out. Of course everyone joined in. It was so touching and powerful to know that our Heavenly Father hears our prayers and seeks to answer them no matter how seemingly insignificant they might be. Learn more about that here The second thing I loved was that after our little prayer, when it was time to have a cheer, Easton Bunker led everyone in saying "I'm doing this for Madi Pritt!" It was so flattering to know that the boys recognized how hard I (we) worked on this night.

I seriously was so so happy with how happy the video made all the boys. Probably the best feeling of this whole thing was one of the contestants (Mr. Not So Average Josh) saw me with my camera gear on the first day shooting and exclaimed, "WE GET A MADI PRITT VIDEO!?" I was so confused because he did not seem like the kind of person to know anything about that part of me and I was even more shocked when he went on to talk about how the Winter Wishes video was his favorite. I was so flattered at this unexpected compliment. It just goes to show that you never know who's watching. I'm so grateful to know that my videos are appreciated by more than just 16 year old girls hah! My other most flattering experience was getting a call on a random night from one of the boys asking if he could have a sneak peek of the video. I told him to feel free to come over and at about 10:30 after hearing a knock at my door, I found 6 of the boys in addition to him dying to see the video again. The amount of confidence in my little projects has increased tremendously through this opportunity and I am so grateful for it!

CONGRATS TO THE WINNER, JACOB JUDD (formally known as Mr. World Wide)

Even surrounded by all these boys I couldn't forget about mine! Jacob was the sweetest throughout this entire time. He was so patient when my whole schedule was consumed with preparing for the night and made it a priority to come out and see the work we did!