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62 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 Pamela needed to look smashing in a glittering string bikini that must be glued to her butt to prevent accidental slippage. e music is conversation-stop- ping loud. Men in glittery slingshot bikinis pose onstage, arms and shoulders knotted like great challah loaves, back muscles spreading in gnarly wings from tapered waists. Back- stage, Pamela Tisschy-Napier fidgets, her Texas drawl an octave higher than normal. "I forgot my badge!" she yells, referring to the round badge each competitor wears to identify herself to the judges. Someone's making her another. In the crush around her, bikini-clad women work resistance bands, pumping muscles. Others lie flat on the floor, earbuds in, serene in the chaos. Napier, with dark eyes and dark brown hair that flows halfway down her back, is settling into her spot on the crowded floor. She's about to compete in the National Physique Committee's Kentucky Derby Festival Championship, a noisy, flashy spectacle in the Galt House's Grand Ballroom featuring 550 tight, toned and spray-tanned competitors strutting the stage to earsplitting anthems from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. During the course of this long spring Saturday, some 4,400 spectators will pay $20 to $35 to watch the extrava- ganza. ere will be screaming. Plenty of screaming. Already the morning has been hectic for Napier. It started at 4:30, when the 47-year-old walked downstairs in her quiet Fern Creek home, all six kids still asleep. She opened the baby gate that keeps her two-year-olds, Cheyenne and Camilla, from free-ranging between floors and headed to the kitchen, past "the gated community" that was once her office. Now plastic baby fencing subdivides that room. On one side her desk sits like an exotic atoll in a tight circle of toys. On the other, there's a bit of play space and even more toys: a riding horse, a baby trampoline, Elmo slumped and exhausted in the cor- ner. Down the hall, four or five children's vehicles — orange, acid-green and pink — are parallel parked, leaving just enough space for Mom to open the child-proof gate and enter the large gym that has a leg press; stacked weights on a pulley system; a contraption for abdominals, glutes, hamstrings and lower back called a Roman chair; a Smith machine, which is a self-spotting barbell frame; kettle bells; medicine balls; an elliptical machine; a treadmill; and every size weight you can think of. is may be the only grown-up space in the Napier household. e living room is a primary-color mash-up of plastic toys. e spacious back deck looks like an impound lot for the cheerfully abandoned vehicles of inebriated children. is kid heaven is managed pande- monium, the domain of one determined woman and her husband, St. Matthews Police Department detective Eddie Napier. On any normal morning, Pamela Napier would have been up by 4 to put in a few hours of intense exercise. e week before the competition, she used the treadmill a lot and stuck to lighter weights. She had her last workout ursday, focused on triceps, chest and shoulders, with four to six exercises for each muscle group, four sets of 10 for each exercise. Since then, she has been under coach's orders to kick back. He doesn't want her to take any chances while she's at her peak. In her competitive division, too much muscle definition is a bad thing. So this morning she slept an extra 30 minutes, then was up and running with hair, makeup and breakfast for six children with food allergies serious enough to keep EpiPens within reach. Six-year-old Brock, 5-year-old Braxton, and 3½-year- old Bradley needed uniforms for karate class with Dad. Eleven-year-old Brandon needed a ride to his Cub Scout event. And finally, Pamela needed to look smashing in a glittering string bikini that must be glued to her butt to prevent accidental slippage. Oh, yeah, and the spray tan she got the day before would need a touchup backstage. At the Galt House, Napier and her fellow female competitors look nothing like the women bodybuilders from a few years ago: hulks with masculine shoulders and chests bulked to steroidal extremes. New, sleeker categories in both women's and men's competitions have driven the rising popularity and profitability of shows like the Derby Festival Championship, which is put on by Kentucky Muscle, the creation of IT professional and former competitor L. Brent Jones. is is the sixth year the bodybuilding event is part of the Derby Festival. It is one of the larger non- pro competitions nationally, Jones says, and this year it includes competitors from 12 states, although most are from Ken- tucky and Indiana. Women in the festival compete in one of three classes: bikini, figure or physique. "In bikini class, they want you to look like a model with muscle," says 29-year-old competitor/trainer Autumn Cleveland of Louisville. She turned to weightlifting in response to childhood bullying in Charles- town, Indiana, and has been competing since she was 16. In figure, she says, "ere's femininity, but like a solid athletic look." Women's physique features more muscularity. e category that generated the extreme body types, women's body- building, is rarely part of shows these days and isn't in the Derby Festival. Even men's bodybuilding isn't the attraction it once was. "e division has shrunk," says Jones, who's also the creator of the even bigger Kentucky Muscle Strength & Fitness Ex- travaganza, which takes place in October. "When I started promoting (in 2001), 90 percent of the show was bodybuilding. ey were the main event, and they went on last. Now they're the first people to go onstage," Jones says. "e main events are women's figure and bikini. e increase in popularity of the sport has gone up pro- portionally with women's participation." is year 33 competitors entered men's bodybuilding, less than a third of the 112 bikini contestants. Jones says the evolution of bodybuild- ing competitions really began with the emergence of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the release of Pumping Iron, both the book and the film, which focused on Schwarzenegger's 1975 competition for his sixth Mr. Olympia title. e film catapult- ed Schwarzenegger to stardom and bol-