THEY'RE BACK ON THE RUNWAY! IN ATLANTIC CITY, IT'S MISS AMERICA'S CLASS OF '88 (2024)

prophet of the superman, have made of this madness on the boardwalk,

this yearly pageant-rite of our old democracy's furious vulgarity, this

winnowing of young womanhood to find the highest possible lowest common

American female denominator?

Then again, who cares? It's certainly not a question that's apt to

be asked tonight of any of the 10 finalists, who are better prepared to

offer their opinions on world peace, the handicapped and the role of

women in "today's modern world," as it's called by pageant people.

Lord knows, though -- the air at the 62nd Miss America pageant has

been full of strange questions all week.

Like: What about breast taping?

That is a question asked at a press conference with Mary Ann Mobley,

Miss America 1959, and her husband, talk show emcee Gary Collins. They

are cohosts of the Miss America pageant on TV, and right now they are

being asked about some contestants' practice of applying surgical tape

across the chest to bolster cleavage and directionality.

Clearly, with questions like this, things are getting out of hand.

So often, nowadays, they do.

Two years ago the press was probing the Firm Grip gunk that the

contestants (not girls or women) were spraying on their derrie`res (the

approved pageant word) to keep their swimsuits (never bathing suits)

from riding up as they strolled the runway in front of 15,000 ticket

holders and 50 million television viewers.

And there was the Saran-Wrapping of thighs for spot reduction, the

hemorrhoid cream to tighten eye bags, the Vaseline inside the lips to

make it possible to smile for minutes on end.

Not to mention Vanessa Williams, Miss America 1984, having posed for

smutty pictures, or Bess Myerson, Miss America 1945, set to go on trial

in New York next week in a bribery scandal, and the Atlantic City

Press discovering that 37 contestants have been arrested for speeding

sometime in their lives, and The Philadelphia Inquirer pointing out that

although it's called a "scholarship pageant" some of the contestants

don't even know their grade-point averages.

Now breast taping.

Suddenly, Miss Mobley rises, a smidgen of a thing with a red sweater

slung over her shoulders and eyes so deep-set that the overhead

fluorescent lighting turns them into black holes. She takes Step One of

emergency action in this kind of situation, which is to say she smiles,

a smile with a conspicuous public vastness reminiscent of the huge flags

you see flying over Cadillac dealerships.

Step Two: "I don't mean to denigrate your question," she says to the

reporter, "but that's an awfully cute beard you have."

She keeps on smiling, bravely helpless or humbly triumphant, or

maybe even triumphantly helpless.

Step Three: "I wish I had enough problem to worry about it," says

Mobley in an echo of the Great American Woman's Chest Obsession, an

anxiety that contestant after contestant will voice unasked ("Flat as a

board," said Miss Mississippi of herself in her high school years, after

winning a preliminary swimsuit competition, going away).

Step Four: "With all due respect, I think we're discussing things

that are irrelevant. I mean, all of us, I've gotta tell you, I put on

makeup today, I probably should have put on more." Her Mississippi

accent thickens.

She puts the backs of her hands on her hips. She pleads for

understanding of the horrible dilemma of womanhood. "Whatever it takes,

ladies, for us to get out there and look good ..." And then pathos

verges on tragedy, a desperate puzzlement to her voice: "Men, don't

y'all like it? Don't y'all wear cologne?"

Well, scoff, oh ye cynics, ye marching feminists, ye climbers toward

an enclave free of the ironies of middle-class American femininity, but:

These 51 young women, ages 18 to 26, have figured out how to fit in

and stand out at the same time; to be famous and anonymous, noble and

common, virgins and dynamos, nuns of the religion that has millions of

American high school students praying daily: "Dear God, let me be

normal."

As Pamela Eldred, Miss America 1970, once said: "I am representing

the typical girl, not someone who's outstanding at all."

"I never said 10 words in high school," says the current Miss

America, Michigan's Kaye Lani Rae Rafko.

"I never said 10 words in high school," says Miss Virginia,

Richmond's April Fleming, who adds: "It's hard to be a woman. You want

to be attractive to men, but to women, too. In school I was in the

in-group but not an attention getter, I was real conservative, I was

just a skinny little thing, no figure, nothing."

They have learned how never to set off the feminine group ego alarm

whose siren goes: "WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? WHO DOES SHE THINK ..."

They tend to come from the America of a million unwritten rules,

surrounded, in the world at large, with a billion unknown ones.

Like everyone else, they have grown up feeling like fools, with feet

in mouth and egg on face, the existential horror of childhood. But

instead of blaming the rules for their misery, they have decided not

only to play by them but to win.

Though more men than women direct state pageants, and a man heads

the national pageant, the rules -- particularly the unwritten ones --

seem to be policed by women. Adult women are 52 percent of the TV

audience, compared with 29 percent for men; the rest are children.

Women form the bulk of the 300,000 volunteers nationwide who make this

pageant happen, and though they make up just half of the judging panels,

they're the ones that contestants worry about, particularly in the

swimsuit competition.

Miss Virginia says: "Men are, 'Ohh, she looks good, give her a 10.'

Women say, 'That doesn't look quite right.' They see you covering your

flaws."

Somebody mentions to Kaye Lani Rae Rafko that the past seven Miss

Americas have all been swimsuit winners.

Flashing a little frown over eyes that cool to about 98.4 degrees,

Miss America says, "Kellye Cash won swimsuit?"

Women also make up the bulk of the pageant haters.

It was on the boardwalk here that the legend of the burning bras

began after a demonstration by feminists in the late 1960s, back when

the bras that Miss America types wore were a symbol of oppression and

the body hair they tweezed, shaved and depilated was a symbol of

liberation, as in the Ms. magazine article "Body Hair -- The Last

Frontier." The current issue of Ms. has an article about Michelle

Anderson, the Miss Santa Cruz who in the Miss California pageant reached

into her evening gown and pulled out a banner saying "Pageants Hurt All

Women."

Feminists have installed a permanent flinch in pageant officials.

One day Leonard Horn, pageant chairman, compliments a Cable News Network

reporter on her eyes. She says it's a sexist remark. Horn takes her

seriously -- she's wearing pants and a Luftwaffe jacket, after all, and

he says, "Who's sexist? Somebody told me the other day I had beautiful

eyes."

"I'm kidding," says the reporter. "I'm kidding."

"We're very sensitive about that around here," Horn says.

In any case, feminism is fading, the bra ashes have been hauled

away, bluestockings pale to lavender and the pageant remains, defending

the swimsuit competition with preposterous claims that it demonstrates

fitness, that sort of thing. But it is still going strong. It is still a

rinky-dink nonprofit corporation with only 12 full-time employees. The

atmosphere is less that of some cultural juggernaut than of a Las Vegas

night at the Moose Lodge, and still Miss America glows like an

archetype, an anima figure in girlhood psyches.

Night after night, the crowd at the preliminary judging in

Convention Hall is shot full of girls who have been Little Misses,

Junior Misses, Miss Wallala County Teen, untold crownings in the Miss

America locals, the Miss USA system, the Miss Universe system, the Miss

Teens Encouraging Excellence Nationwide (T.E.E.N.) and so on in all the

minor leagues of pageantry.

There are girls as young as 13 who split the colors on their eye

shadow and mascara their lashes until they spread apart with frozen

suddenness like the smoke from fireworks shells; who wear utterly public

smiles and hair in twists, who sit there watching and never yawn or

crack their knuckles, not even during the baton acts or the acrobatic

dancing, all of it done in the spirit of small boys taking their

baseball gloves along to an Orioles game, and done too because they know

the rules.

Like the contestants, they aren't that great looking, on average.

Not knockouts. And it goes without saying that if they had any major

talent for singing or dancing or whatever it is they do, they wouldn't

be doing pageants. But they stand out. They fit in. Both at once. They

can't get enough of the monster.

"Just by being here I'm more motivated," says Samantha John Fetters,

20, of Fayetteville, N.C. She is wearing one of her two Barbara Barbara

dresses, along with pendant earrings, blond hair, eyes the color of

light blue bathroom tile with a light dusting of talcum powder on it.

She has wangled a press seat by the runway and she is staring up at

the tense sashays of the swimsuit contestants. She says: "Now that I'm

here, I see it can be done, see what I'm saying? I was Miss Fayetteville

and Miss Cumberland County High School. I won enough scholarship money

to put me through a year of private college, Methodist College in

Fayetteville. I couldn't have done it without it. It's a business, it's

just like a business.

"My father is a heavy-equipment mechanic. We're just a middle-class

family. I've had a job ever since 10th grade. I kind of envy the girls

whose parents have given them everything, you know what I'm saying? Like

the Steve Yearick competition gown I got, I worked two jobs to get it. I

wanted it, I got it. You want to hear something funny? I drive a 1977

Ford Granada that's worth about $700 but I've got a $3,000 gown hanging

in my closet."

There is so much to learn, nailing down that runway walk, which is

precisely the walk any woman would want to have if she had to walk

through the Port Authority bus terminal at 1:30 in the morning to be

greeted by a father she is delighted and relieved to see, but who just

might be drunk. It is devoid of sex, this walk, like almost everything

else about the contestants. As one astute pageant watcher once pointed

out, winners of ancient beauty contests would be given to the great

Khan or somebody as a prize.

Nowadays, Miss America gets the prizes, the $150,000 in scholarship

and speaking fees for a year.

But imagine, for a moment, how we'd reel with horror and fascination

if Gary Collins announced that immediately after traipsing down the

runway with the roses, Miss A was going to be delivered to the highest

roller of the day at the Atlantic City crap tables, or, yes,

helicoptered out to the yacht of Donald Trump himself.

N-O no! That is not the point of the pageant, and stop that

immediately!

Better instead to marvel at the variety of smiles that must be

mastered: the standard happy-surprise flaring of mouth and eyes (with

optional blown kiss) when you're pretending you see someone you know in

the crowd; the full-bore princess smile, one that makes you think less

of orthodontists than piano tuners, for proving that no amount of

wolf-whistling from the crowd will challenge your poise as you parade

around in your swimsuit; a stately pleasure smile created by dropping

the jaw and then baring the lower teeth (the current Miss America is

particularly good at this); a cool and medium smile for still

photographs, with face idling in a sort of neutral.

And, should it be necessary, there is the ultimate smile, should you

be named the winner -- the anguish-of-joy-and-astonishment finale smile,

beginning with gasp, supernova eyes and lifted eyebrows, then closed

eyes and the frown of humility with slight twist of jaw to the side in

preparation for the tears, then perhaps a lip compression followed by an

inverted smile with the corners of the mouth pointing down and eyebrows

tenting up toward each other (possibly accompanied by a placing of the

hands in a little steeple on either side of the nose), followed by a

suitably brief oval of ecstasy converting into a figure-eight that leads

to the obligatory sob.

These women will talk about almost anything personal, but is there

one who would admit to practicing this look in the mirror? Perhaps there

are some things better left secret.

But stare at the monster long enough ...