Miss America Now a Crass Boor
Scanning the DirectTV guide last night I decided to switch on the Miss American pageant just in time for the winnowing down to the final 10 contestants. As one who despises Survivor and other so-called “reality” shows I was unpleasantly surprised to see the six young ladies being eliminated called out and told goodbye American Idol style.
As the Baltimore Sun reports, crowd fave and Army medic Jill Stevens and her friends dropped and did a set of pushups after her name was called, an uplifting move in an otherwise dismal display of modern non-winner bashing. Granted, the pageant is trying hard to update its look and feel, but frankly the outcome was more than a little crass - a definite step back for the classic American event.
Ah memories. I vividly recall my first Miss America pageant. I was seven years old, visiting my great-aunt in Rock Island, IL, and wanted nothing more than for Rocky, her 19 year old son, to come outside and throw the baseball with me.
“Someday you’ll be old enough to want to watch these girls,” he said with a distracted smile, one eye still on the TV.
Not likely, I thought defiantly. And that proved to be more or less true. During my mid and late teens - prime babe ogling years - I was too busy with sports, friends, and real girls to watch them on the tube. In my twenties, when I might have liked looking at the beautiful young women only a few years my junior my own young, beautiful wife frowned on that sort of behavior in no uncertain terms. Now I’m old enough and round enough that she doesn’t care any longer if I watch the pageant or not. But while the contestants were as lovely as ever last night, if not more so, the format of the show is distinctly less appealing now.
Perhaps at 41 I have vaulted over the generation gap. But I really think that there’s something unsavory about this gleeful eliminating, voting off, and “firing” of contestants, especially in front of a TV audience who, in most cases, have never done anything as gutsy as getting up on stage with 49 of the most beautiful women in American to be judged on national TV.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write this piece at first. Times change, I thought, why fight it? You’re just getting old and grumpy. In fact, I had already switched over to and old Seinfeld rerun when I decided to flip back on the spur of the moment to give the contest another chance.
What was I greeted with? A vocal performance of Feelings or God Bless America? A young American beauty promising to use her crown to foment world peace? I wish.
Instead a young-ish, scruffy-faced dude with a hideous bit of chin stubble sat among the freshly dropped contestants with his mike open.
(I’ve since learned that this was one Clinton Kelly, star of TV’s What Not to Wear, something that explains so much).
Kelly’s scintillating question?
“How did you keep your bikini bottoms from riding up?”
Not exactly Bert Parks, is he?
Well, I’ve got a bit of a consolation for you Marc, it’s not an age thing. I’m many years your junior and I’ve never found the Miss America pageant even slightly attractive. The way you describe it today (it’s been years since I see it) makes it sound even worse.
From my eyes the whole even is so firmly wrapped in plastic that no trace of authenticity has a prayer of slipping through. First you take perfectly lovely young women, and then you lay enough makeup on them to pave a road with. I swear the last pageant I saw they looked more like stepford wives in their thirties than 19 year old girls. Then you paste the most vacous fake smiles known to man and add the most vacous fake commentary known to man and violá, you have the pre-packaged, instantly microwavable, TV-dinner Miss America Pageant.
I’ve nothing against the contest per-se, even if I find it a bit sad that so many girls think that nothing in the world could be as important as being prettier than the other girls. However, whatever redeeming qualities the contest could have, it loses in the tacky style of the whole affair.
The whole Miss America organization suffered a major culture shock when "Reality TV" hit the scene. They suddenly had to contend with the lowest common denominator and decided the only way to survive was to dive straight down into the gutter.
The state level pageants are bad enough and seem to always reward the vicious "In it to win (at all costs)" drama queens, but what they’ve done to the national level pageant has completely destroyed the veneer of respectability Miss America once had.