All beauty contests need a pageant coordinator-someone to perfect the contestants' outfits, fine-tune their talent presentations, show them how to sashay down the runway. And that's just what Suzie Woodward does, for a group of contestants who usually don't strut in high heels for judges: men. Suzie oversees A Few Good Men, Chester Rotary's Womanless Beauty Pageant, though she does not like to be described as the coordinator.

"I like to call myself the go-to girl," she says.

This year's event, the third annual pageant, is scheduled for Saturday, April 6 at 7 p.m. at the Chester Meeting House. While previous winners John Williams and Charlie Greeney are not entered, there are a number of returnees, among them Andy Landsman, Bob Babicz, and Paul Indorf, who has come in second at both the earlier pageants.

"I'm a glutton for punishment, but it's a lot of fun," Indorf says, adding that win or lose, this will be his last year.

Suzie says she was tapped to work on the pageant because of her background in community theater in her native Michigan. Her husband Ron is president-elect of the Chester Rotary. Part of her job, she says, is to dispel the contestants' fears and make them feel comfortable on stage, with one goal in mind.

"I want to make each of them into a star," she says.

Part of that incipient stardom involves nurturing the psyches of the contestants unused to wearing high heels and dresses.

"It's about giving each of them permission to flesh out their stage character. Some come by it naturally, but we want them all to take that character and run with it," she says.

Although the contestants have several rehearsals before the night of the pageant, Suzie says that some of the best moments are completely spontaneous, among them Paul Indorf's trying manfully (or would that be womanfully?) to learn to skip on stage last year.

The fun is real, but the purpose is serious. The pageant raises funds for Chester Rotary's ongoing contributions to more than 20 local organizations, among them the Chester Community Fund, the Shoreline Soup Kitchen, and Tri-Town Youth Services.

Suzie came to Chester in 2010, when she and Ron married. Since then, she has discovered not only the beauty pageant, but also a whole new career as an artist. She fuses together discarded objects to produce fanciful animals she calls metal quarks. Her current creations use rusted horseshoes, a pre-aerosol bug sprayer for the once-ubiquitous insecticide Flit, and the top of a claw hammer. She doesn't get ideas and then look at objects that fit her notions. Rather, she lets the objects dictate the final creations.

"I look at them and they tell me what to do," she says

The hammer became the head of a dog that also uses small rusted springs for legs and a circular letter holder for a body. The Flit can, fittingly, turned into a mosquito that also featured a pair of child's scissors, and the horseshoes formed the body of an owl filled out with a metal kitchen grater. She affixes a small tag to each animal with an appropriate name. The hammer-head dog, for example, is Clawd, the Junkyard Dog.

Suzie also uses pieces of discarded metal to create large decorative signs. Women, she says, like the ones that spell out things like Love or Joy using wrenches, handles, and hooks, but she has one the appeals particularly to male buyers. It reads Man Cave.

In addition to her metal work, Suzie creates mosaic borders for mirrors from broken pottery and shattered glass, and combines sea glass with old jewelry to create new pieces. She had never seen the water-weathered glass until she came to Connecticut. Now she has fallen in love with it.

"I'm obsessed by sea glass," she says.

Since she has never formally studied art, Suzie was hesitant to call herself an artist, even when her work appeared in local galleries. Now her constructions are at Connecticut River Artisans in Chester. She credits Bill Vollers, an artist who sculpts with larger found objects, with convincing her to use the term.

"He told me it was assemblage art," she says.

When it comes to the womanless Beauty Pageant, Suzie doesn't want to be either seen or heard, nor does she let anyone backstage to view the contestants before the show starts.

"That's part of what makes it a success-it's all a surprise. There is such excitement in the Meeting House that my cheeks hurt laughing," she says.

Once the men prepare to strut out on stage, her work is over.

"They are all geeked up and ready. I just tell them to go out there and break a leg," she says.

Chester Rotary Third Annual Womanless Beauty Pageant

Saturday, April 6 at 7 p.m.

Chester Meeting House

Tickets, $35, are available in advance at Ceramica, the Chester Package Store, and by calling Susan Wright at 860-526-3294.