The Shawntel Spectator/ There She Is
Carnegie, M.D.
There She Is by M. D. Carnegie / don't know what criteria the middle- aged white male oppressors were using to select the scholarship kids when I was in college, but they were a good deal different...
...The reference to being "happy" to "parade" was a dig at Smith's support, along with 41 of her co-competitors, for the swimsuit contest...
...There was no Regis Philbin, no babes driving tractors, and, as far as I know, no buns glue...
...She brought unprecedented attention and credibility to the pageant...
...I'd felt that way lots of times before, though, and like all those lots of times before, I was wrong...
...In the '50s and '60s, there was no consciousness about objectifying women...
...Pretty smart...
...Roxanne Roberts might have preferred more Puccini, but the unwashed masses were happy to have it with some cheesecake...
...Pageants like this have become less and less socially acceptable," boomed Myra Terry, who heads the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women and whose name, frankly, doesn't do much for me...
...And pretty, too—how unfortunate...
...And when she flashed Reege her million-dollar bicuspids and told the tuned-in millions that heartbreakingly beautiful blondes like herself should commit themselves to remaining pure and unspoiled, in my heart I felt entirely sure that she was the one...
...CI 90 The American Spectator November 1995...
...Her thinking, I guess, is that women need to be liberated from worrying about how much they eat...
...If I don't want to take the SAT's, then I won't go to college...
...As Kimberly Aiken, Miss America 1994, said, "If I don't want to compete in a swimsuit, I won't be Miss America...
...Because in pageants I depended on a greater faith, which was the Lord...
...Being a beauty queen isn't like earning an advanced engineering degree, but it's a distinction of sorts, and not a bad one...
...Tiffany Stoker lost, and it was Oklahoma's less mellifluous Lacricia Shawntel Smith who made the victory stroll to the sounds of the inimitable Johnny Mathis (in red cummerbund...
...Of course who they are as people is women, which to the Myra Terrys is a statement in horrid taste that is perhaps even criminal...
...Very hard...
...Many try to win their state titles for several years before succeeding, and the casual slights of Myra Terry give one pause to wonder how long such a sourpuss could stay swimsuit trim herself...
...Well, talk about bad taste—how would the girls' families feel about the implication that they don't "value" their daughters' futures...
...I never saw any upside-down tap dancing, and the only people who walked around impersonating Elizabeth I in full regalia were born to be kings, not queens...
...M. D. Carnegie is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Then suddenly a strobe flash glanced off those hundreds of gleaming bicuspids, and I was blinded...
...Whatever you think of these beauty contests—um, I mean, scholarship competitions—there's no doubt that the girls, as they are actually referred to, train hard for them...
...Which suited me fine back then, but when the 75th Miss America pageant came around last month, I found myself robting for California's Tiffany Stoker anyway...
...I grew spiritually...
...Now there are so many people who value their daughters' futures and who they are as people...
...Knowing a sure thing when they saw it, the organizers instead advertised that the pageant would feature a call-in segment: two different 900 numbers, one for Yes and the other for No...
...well, enthusiasm...
...And, unfortunately, not much else...
...Pretty, sweet, and sincere—how unfortunate...
...She is supremely lovely, and superbly named...
...There certainly weren't many coeds whose platform was a "commitment to sexual abstinence...
...A fresh-faced, corn-fed gal from Oklahoma happy to parade down the runway in a swimsuit and strong on...
...Why is the National Organization for Women afraid of women who are beautiful...
...Roberts predictably praised outgoing champ Heather Whitestone, who is deaf, as "the first woman with a disability to win the Miss America crown...
...I flipped quickly to the late-night feature presentation, a nice dark film noir, already in progress...
...Nowadays a lot of American women see nothing but such darkness in the idea of feminine beauty...
...And Helen Goldsby, the only black semifinalist, gained Roberts's esteem for her "knockout aria from Puccini's 'La Rondine.'" But pretty, sweet, and sincere Shawntel Smith...
...As everyone knows, a good deal of public pressure—read "media blitz"—was placed on the administrators of the pageant to do away with that sexist nonsense this year...
...She said the kinds of things "you would expect a former cheerleader to say," Roberts wrote...
...There She Is by M. D. Carnegie / don't know what criteria the middle- aged white male oppressors were using to select the scholarship kids when I was in college, but they were a good deal different from whatever the judges use in the Miss America "scholarship competition...
...That didn't sit too well with the not badly named Roxanne Roberts, a writer for the Washington Post Style section who wrote, with the hipper-than-thou sarcasmthat is Style's only style, that Smith was a woman who "personifies all the old beauty-queen stereotypes: pretty, sweet, sincere...
...Yes triumphed 79 percent to 21, not counting the more than two million people who couldn't get through because the phone lines were swamped...
...Mathis smiled, and Tiffany smiled, and the other forty-eight losers smiled, and Regis smiled, and Shawntel really smiled a whole lot...
...I grew personally," Shawntel Smith said of the seven years of grueling competition she went through before nabbing the Miss Oklahoma title earlier this year...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
