dress

Date:   8/15/2016 4:51:44 AM ( 8 y ago)

This started out as a story about a girl who won a beauty pageant in a $12 plus size formal dresses.

It’s still that. Fifteen-year-old Precious JoLynn Elaine Girsch -- she goes by the first of her two middle names, JoLynn, and often as just Jo -- picked up the used dress at a thrift store in Missoula.

“I’d rather spend $12 than $1,200 on a dress I might wear one time,” says the St. Ignatius teenager.

Since she had to pay for it, and for the two other dresses she wore in the Miss Teen St. Ignatius competition, out of her own pocket -- her mother’s rule -- the thrift store find helped her keep her total investment in pageant fashion below $95. The other two she bought off the internet for $50 and $30, with free shipping.

A two-figure budget for three dresses -- one red, one white and one blue, to go with the pageant’s theme -- was important to Girsch. After all, she’s already working two jobs to pay for the car she recently bought, a 2009 Chevrolet Impala.

Never mind that she can’t drive the car alone yet (she only has a learner’s permit). The day she does earn her driver’s license, Girsch will drive away in a car she’s buying herself, with gas she’s paid for herself.

The St. Ignatius High School sophomore-to-be washes dishes and occasionally waits tables at the Old Timer Café, and cleans the home of a senior citizen, to earn her money.

She also volunteers with the local summer school program, serves as manager of the high school varsity and junior varsity football teams, competes herself in basketball and softball, all while maintaining a spot on the high honor roll -- a good place to be if you want to attend medical or dental school one day, as Girsch does.

That was the pitch Girsch’s single mother, Diana, made when she sought recognition for her daughter being crowned Miss Teen St. Ignatius last month in a contest featuring five other girls.

“I’m just a proud mom,” Diana said, probably not realizing that it was the thrift store dress that initially set this apart from stories told by many other proud mothers.

And then, it turns out, the dress may be the least interesting thing about this story.

Less than two months before the Miss Teen St. Ignatius competition, JoLynn and her older brother, Jessie, lost their father.

John Joseph Girsch Jr. was killed in a motorcycle accident in Arizona, where he lived. JoLynn sang “Dancing in the Sky” at her father’s funeral.

Once she was back home in Montana, preparing for the pageant didn’t exactly distract her.

“It kind of made me forget for a minute,” JoLynn says, “but it didn’t help me deal with it.”

The “Jo” in JoLynn is for her father’s, and grandfather’s, middle names.

“Lynn” is her mother’s middle name, “Elaine” is her mother’s best friend’s name and “Precious,” Diana says, “was for myself, because that’s what she was to me, precious.”

Only later, Diana says, did she realize that her daughter’s initials spelled out PJ LEG.

“I was under the influence of an epidural when I named her,” JoLynn’s mother says now.

Diana says she first used heroin at the age of 9, and soon became a methamphetamine addict as well.

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She abused those, and other drugs, pretty much up to the time she became pregnant with Jessie, at age 37.

“I thought, ‘Oh Lord, I’ve got to do something,' ” Diana says. “I’ve been clean for 17 years now, and it’s not the struggle it once was. I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I can tell you the grass is pretty green on this side. I’m not ashamed of it.”

Jessie and JoLynn were born 11 months apart, and not long after, Diana decided staying clean meant starting over.

Her husband chose a different path back then, she says, and so she bought a motorhome so used it only cost $600, and set out from California for Butte, where a friend lived, with her two small children.

When the friend decided to move to Salt Lake City three weeks later, Diana decided to stay in Montana. She rented a “tiny trailer” in Ronan from an aunt and uncle of the friend, and got her first local job, detailing vehicles at a car dealership.

She later found a trailer rental in St. Ignatius, and in 2007 she bought three-quarters of an acre on the east side of town and a double-wide to put on it when a local bank “decided to take a chance on me,” she says.

Today, Diana works three jobs to take care of her three children -- she adopted 8-year-old Sierra, her great-niece, when Sierra was 2 -- and her 84-year-old mother, Beverly.

JoLynn has previously been named Little Miss Good Old Days in St. Ignatius -- as has Sierra -- and her crowns may have long been in the cards.

In 2007 a young woman from St. Ignatius, Stephanie Trudeau, represented Montana in the Miss USA Pageant, where she was named Miss Congeniality. Back home, Trudeau asked a handful of young girls to join her in a parade, and JoLynn was one of them.

Diana cut up a white bed sheet and made her daughter a sash that read “Future Miss Montana” for the parade.

Years later, JoLynn wore the red dress she bought online for the formal wear portion of the Miss Teen St. Ignatius competition, and the blue one for the talent portion, where she sang “Amazing Grace.”

The white one from the thrift store was worn as her “outfit of choice.”

“Some girls had shoes that cost more than all three of her dresses combined,” Diana says.

JoLynn’s boyfriend, Korbyn Hernandez, who will soon be a senior at St. Ignatius High School, “inspires me to be my best,” JoLynn says.

“When she won, Korbyn was jumping up and down and hooting and hollering,” Diana says. “I thought, ‘Hey, that’s my job!’ I’m proud of her, and what she’s overcome.”

The feeling, it turns out, is mutual.

As the story of the family’s past came out during an interview this week, they were told Diana’s addiction did not need to be included in the story if they weren’t comfortable with it.

Diana says she’s never hidden her past, but left it up to JoLynn.

Her daughter didn’t hesitate. As far as she's concerned, it's fine if people know that part of the story too.

“I’m very proud of my mom,” said the girl who won a beauty pageant in a $12 plus size prom dresses.

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