The mother of all beauty pageants

Added: 11/06/2006

Beauty pageants have become a unique phenomenon in this day and age. Every major city has them, you can find organizations that exist to find contestants for them, and they have become an icon that has spawned a huge industry. You can look through most Newspapers these days and find beauty pageants for contestants from toddler age to senility, but the mother of all Beauty pageants still revolves around Miss America.

Beauty Pageants are a huge industry these days. In fact, they are one of the hugest sectors of the entertainment industry. There are beauty pageants for babies, there are beauty pageants for children, there are beauty pageants for luscious young ladies, and there are beauty pageants for octogenarians. There are services that give you the tools that you need to enter these aesthetic competitions, there are even services to help train you for the various events you must enter, navigate, and win to do well in these pageants. Hard to believe all of this hoopla stems from a marketing ploy to attract tourists to town during the dead time of year in a New Jersey Beach Resort back in nineteen-twenty-one, when it was taboo for women to show there legs, there was barely a right to vote for women, and prohibition was scarcely over. In fact, the first picture of the contestants for the Miss America Pageant, the first known beauty pageant, look more like a commercial for winter coats than a contest known for the image of a beautiful girl dressed in a swimsuit and a tiara.

The sight of fully dressed women in hats is a far cry from the swimsuit clad supermodels in waiting that win the Miss America Pageant these days, as they tremble full of nerves awaiting their fate. Today the pageant is all about pageantry in deed, from rhinestone swimsuits to celebrities to prime time television. The mother of all pageants is indeed grand, with an eighty-five year history behind it to boot. It’s really hard to believe that there are that many drop dead gorgeous, intelligent, thoughtful, caring women in the world, but there are at least fifty representing each state every year, and they are the cream of the cream of the crop, often as gorgeous as any creature that God ever created, and smart as any Doctor.

Of Course anything as successful with as much staying power spawns copycats, hence the industry that thrives today. For every Miss Utah there are hundreds of thousands of girls that compete in smaller pageants. And of course there’s the all important Miss Universe Pageant, but being a knock-off of the original New Jersey fare, the nod has to go to the Miss America Pageant as the premier Beauty Pageant in the World. A list of past Champions reads like a who’s who of the modeling and film Industry.

From Cloris Leachman to Jeri Ryan, many a superstar has lost the event, but look at some of the winners, Lee Meriwether, Vanessa Williams, and Susan Perkins, and you see timeless beauties that went on to have fabulous creative careers.

The beauty pageant road is a long, tough, winding one that most often ends in tears, but for women like Cybill Shepperd and Martha Stewart, it was a rigorous start to a public life. To reach the pinnacle of success in the industry, Miss America, is a once in a lifetime miracle, many contestants staring with competitions when they were infants or small children, but the over all competition, the discipline instilled must have some positive merit. How could so many beautiful intelligent successful women be wrong?

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