Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (18 page)

And then . . . Donald B. Kravitz/DBK Photo
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As Miss America 1998, I gave speeches. And speeches, and speeches, and speeches. Here I am with Denver mayor Wellington Webb. Author’s collection
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Kids loved the crown. I was pretty sure they liked me too, but let’s be honest: the girl in the white shirt isn’t
that
excited about getting to meet
me.
Spieth Photography
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Sans crown, I chatted with then-Senator John Kerry . . . Author’s collection
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.
 . . and somehow kept on smiling when Senator Strom Thurmond got a little handsy. Author’s collection
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By day, riding down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in a horse-drawn carriage in the Brach’s Holiday Parade. Author’s collection
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That night, I caught up on sleep on the floor of O’Hare International Airport. Author’s collection
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Is there life after Miss America? September in Atlantic City, for a former Miss America, is basically the equivalent of
Cheers:
everybody knows your name. In 2002, future Harvard Law student Erika Harold took the crown and posed with fifteen previous Miss Americas (I’m in the back row, far right.) Author’s collection
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Part Three

THE UGLY PAGEANT

ELEVEN

Most of my year has passed before I get the unpleasant surprise of finding out what seemingly everybody thinks of me
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The late 1990s have been, to say the least, an explosive time for the Internet. My first exposure to it happens in my sophomore year in high school, when I look carefully at a syllabus in British lit class. The teacher, Ms. Cecil, lists an e-mail address as one of the ways to contact her, while cautioning that she only checks it “sporadically.”
E-mail,
I remember thinking
. What, exactly, is e-mail?

Not that I’m unfamiliar with computers. The trusty Apple IIc at home has brought many documents to life underneath my fingers. I’ve saved them to big floppy disks, secreting away the ones that contain my angst-y preteen poetry and—notably and somewhat embarrassingly—what would now be called “fan fiction” (which I then called “stories”) about the New Kids on the Block. There is absolutely nothing racy about the stuff, but I am nonetheless terrified that someone in my family might discover my most precious, private flights of imagination. As far as documenting one’s life, I’m part of the first generation who find typing to be a faster and clearer way of expressing myself than writing in long
hand. All these years later, despite a more-than-adequate collection of typing skills classes, I still call myself the fastest two-finger typist I know. Which should probably be mortifying, but, hey, it works
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By the time I get to college, the Internet has been growing at a steady pace. There aren’t websites, exactly, but there’s something called a listserv where people gather virtually to trade information. The 1995 Sandra Bullock movie
The Net,
in which computer pros execute tasks that can now probably be done by most twelve-year-olds on a smartphone, blows my mind with the scale and scope of its technology. I’m a sophomore in college when it’s released
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So it really doesn’t occur to me to check the Internet when I start to have success in pageants as a college junior
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After I actually become Miss America, I live most of the year in blissful ignorance. Sure, I occasionally check the daily paper in whatever town I might be visiting, to see what the media’s absorbed from my activities. Usually, the most appalling thing is how the reporter in question has misquoted me; I take great care with grammar, etc., lest the media have an opportunity to brand me with the same bimbo-airhead stereotype that has plagued every Miss America since before I was born. Our daily and monthly schedules arrive by fax, or as hard copies overnighted to the hotel. Aside from checking my personal AOL account and writing speeches, the only time I regularly spend on my laptop is when I bust out my tissue-box-sized printer to create thank-you notes on personalized stationery
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Then I find the chat rooms
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I’m not sure why I go looking in the first place. I may have typed my name into a search engine out of curiosity; after all, there are enough websites by this time that report the news. Plugging my name into one of them is probably a smart idea. I’m keenly aware that there’s a fine line between effectiveness and irrelevance, between success and skep
ticism. It makes sense to keep tabs on as much chatter as possible
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But what I find completely deflates my twenty-one-year-old cache of optimism and satisfaction. They—and I’m not sure who “they” are, only that they have a long history with pageants and, presumably, access to an ethernet port—find me lacking
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It’s humiliating. The people who feel like I shouldn’t have won . . . in fact, some of them think that because of my family’s background as Miss America volunteers, I cheated to win. The people who think I’m a terrible singer, that I looked “like a man in drag” on the biggest night of my life (when actually I looked in the mirror and, for once, liked what I saw). That the first runner-up should have beaten me without breaking a sweat. That I’m the beginning of the end of the pageant, regardless of the thousands of hours I’ve spent trying to do good things that continue to build Miss America’s legacy. It’s like a fever dream come to life. In black and white, for the world to see, stated with purpose and certainty by the anonymous masses
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I spend a few days trying to defuse it. But the reality—and truly, a word to the wise here—is that there are few things more transparent than attempting to defend yourself, or your friend, or your kid, in a chat room or on a message board. If I spent some time, I could probably come up with a better explanation than Spidey Sense . . . but really, that’s what it amounts to. The other, less genteel explanation is that it’s like porn: you know it when you see it. The reasoning is too personal, the examples are too specific. It’s actually painful to read the defenses of those who are just trying their best to convince someone (the greater pageant community? their state volunteers and boards of directors? themselves?) that they have worked hard and deserve . . . what? A crown? Credit for what they’ve accomplished? Acceptance? In every way that matters, it’s a no-win situation, because the more
you explain, the more they attack. Not all of them, of course; there are some nice people who post on these forums. There are some reasonable ones. There are some smart ones, with a talent for putting it all into perspective. Not that many, though. Given this knowledge, I cannot imagine what it’s like to be famous—really famous, not Miss America famous—and have the circle of critics expand exponentially
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