Tarted-up little girls gyrate onstage in bizarro fashion show
A gaggle of 6-year-old cowgirls dolled up like JonBenet Ramsey pranced and gyrated onstage yesterday at a Midtown show loosely tied to Fashion Week.
Headlining the bizarre event was pageant queen Eden Wood, 6, a veteran of TLC’s “Toddlers & Tiaras,” who performed three routines -- in which she slapped her rear, wriggled suggestively and whipped off her denim jacket to reveal a rhinestone-studded two-piece outfit.
Kelly Bensimon, of “The Real Housewives of New York” fame, played ringmaster at the Bryant Park Hotel to the event dubbed “The Cowgirl Riders Debutante Fashion Show.”
LORENZO CINIGLIO
WHOA, GIRL! Six-year-old Eden Wood performs at the Cowgirl Riders Debutante pageant for kids yesterday in a glittery two-piece -- singing about “Shak-in’ my boo-ty!”
Bensimon egged on each of the pint-sized performers and even got up on-stage and danced along when one shy girl froze up as she appeared on the catwalk in a cowboy hat, gingham shirt and denim skirt to the opening strains of Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive.”
“How about some moving?” the former reality star said. “Like a rock girl.”
During another blond-haired girl’s routine, Bensimon cooed, “You look like a Ralph Lauren model! If you don’t get that campaign when you’re 15, I don’t know who will!”
Although most of the girls in the show were locals who auditioned, Eden has already made a career of kid pageants.
Asked how long she’d been dancing and singing, she replied in a Southern twang, “Since I could walk.”
“Somebody said that I was beautiful, so my mama put me in pageants, and I done it ever since,” she said. Edeninsists she didn’t take any dance classes and that she’d practiced her complicated routines for two days, but for “only 30 minutes” a day.
As The Post reported yesterday, Eden is already a budding diva. She threw a tantrum at the Allure Fashion Week Lounge after being told she was too young to have her teeth whitened.
She made numerous appearances sporting different looks, including an ’80s Madonna-inspired getup with leopard-print leggings and a black tutu.
She also strutted her stuff, moon-walked and danced like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice to songs including “U Can’t Touch This” and “Ice Ice Baby.”
For the finale, she sang her song “Cutie Patootie,” a shrill rap number that includes shout-outs to Oprah, Facebook and “Good Morning America,” and includes the lyrics, “Cu-tie, Cu-tie Pat-ootie/Rockin’ out the pageant stage and shak-in’ my boo-ty!”
She explained in the song that she’s “lovin’ the attention/but I’m not needy.”
The just-retired kiddie-pageant champ, who racked up 300 wins by age 6, according to her representative, also vows in the song to have a career beyond any beauty contests.
“I got my start in pageants/But I’m here to stay,” she declared.
Bensimon admits the performances -- eerily reminiscent of the finale of the film “Little Miss Sunshine” -- aren’t for everyone.
Asked if she would enter her own kids to participate in such events, Bensimon said only to a point.
“I didn’t want to push my kids into something they didn’t feel good about,” she said. “But these kids were feeling good about it. And they walked away happy.
“They were hugging me and kissing me [after the show]. I think they realized that I was proud and excited for them.”
Asked if routines like Eden’s were too sexy for 6-year-olds, Bensimon defended the pageants.
“People are egging you on, your natural instinct is to go more,” she said.
Note the preparation to yield to peer pressure
“When you’re out there [onstage] by yourself, your instinct is not be reserved and tone it down, it’s to amp it up!”
But Bensimon says there’s nothing wrong with hamming it up.
“It’s the fact that they’re excited about what they’re doing, and therefore amping it up,” she said.
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