Pageant officials have complained for years that the media is too dismissive of the pageant's generosity in scholarships, that elitists sneer about the contest's exploitation of women but never seem to laud the fact that the eventual winner is almost never the best-looking in the bunch. But if the media weren't listening, this independent batch of pageant judges sure were.

On Wednesday night, in a typical preliminary evening, Miss America 2002, the beloved Katie Harman, comes out and, after telling us that she's "looking very, very forward" to returning to Portland State University for her junior year, paid for by the $75,000 in scholarship funds she garnered the year before, she breaks into a medley of patriotic songs: "America the Beautiful" into "Yankee Doodle Dandy" into "This Land Is Your Land" into "God Bless America." Harman has a real hammy, Vegas-y delivery that, again, makes her seem at least a generation older than a coed.

With that, the night is over. All the preliminary scholarship awards have been given to each of the three groups' winners in each of five categories: swimsuit, evening gown, talent, interview, and onstage knowledge and awareness. The judges now have an idea of whom they like, whom they think could be one of the final 15. They retreat to a private room at the Trump Taj Mahal with a black lacquer desk surrounded by Ernst & Young auditors and two women from ABC-TV standards and practices. They review their scores, and pick the 36 women who will open the show by announcing their name and dreams and desires -- only to have their Miss America chances summarily dismissed.

The unlucky 36 will then retreat backstage where they'll stuff their faces with pizza and donuts and be grilled by former "Entertainment Tonight" reporter Julie Moran about their disappointment. They'll also get to vote on which of the five finalists they would prefer to see win -- and their votes will count for 10 percent of the total score.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Show us your shoes!"

It's Friday evening and men, women and children yell this catchphrase as the contestants drive down the boardwalk in the annual Miss America Parade. Each contestant then lifts her leg in the air, revealing an ornate shoe-apparatus of some sort. Miss Massachusetts has lighthouses on hers; Miss California sports little surfer figurines.

Nowhere do they yell the shoe entreaty with more verve and actual shoe-lust than at the intersection of the Boardwalk and New York Avenue, below a couple of billowing rainbow banners in what used to be Atlantic City's gay mecca. Four drag queens -- not "To Wong Foo" drag queens, more like "Mrs. Doubtfire" drag queens -- stand cheering, surrounded by other trim, presumably gay men.

"Show us your shoes!" they yell.

"That's how it got started -- the queens," says Gary Lee Boas, a photographer who has been coming to the pageant for 30 years, professionally snapping shots of the contestants for the last 13. "Now everybody yells it and nobody knows where it came from."

The official Miss America program refers obliquely to this phenomenon on a page about the parade. "Show us your shoes," it says, "began with a group of spectators in the early 1970s. Each year, they would watch the parade while dressed up like Miss America, but they could not see what type of shoes the contestants were wearing under their long gowns. And so, to the amusement of all the Boardwalk spectators, they shouted, 'Show us your shoes!' Joining in the fun, the contestants simply raised their feet to show that they were indeed wearing no shoes at all or simply a pair of bedroom slippers."

However pussyfooted around they may be in the program, gays are a huge part of the pageant -- not only as hairstylists, costumers and choreographers, but as a loyal band of fans. "Sometimes there are more queens in the audience than onstage," Boas jokes.

And every Sunday following the pageant, local gay bar Studio Six holds its "Miss'd America" pageant, which Miss America 1998 -- the stellar Kate Shindle, whose controversial AIDS awareness platform included condom distribution and needle exchange -- even attended.

"There were 10 gay bars on this street" when the pageant started, says Doug Lambert, 41, who, as Chlamydia Liverpool, was Miss'd America 2001.

Why is Miss America so big in the gay community? "Well, why not?" asks another drag queen, Mortimer, Miss'd America 1995. "Glamour, shoes, gowns and big hair!"

"Plus it's for a good cause," lisps Ms. Dareena Ho, a contestant in this year's Miss'd America pageant.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Across Pacific Avenue, yards away from the Boardwalk Convention Hall where the crown will be awarded, stands the grim strip joint Bare Exposure. Back in the 1970s, when feminists would picket the pageant on the Boardwalk, the contestants would literally be sandwiched between scolding Ellen Jamesians and down-and-dirty Atlantic City strippers rolling their eyes at the goody-goodies competing for the crown. Is this not where America often finds itself, leading the world in both Puritanism and pornography?

Ask a feminist why she disapproves of the pageant and she'll ask why the leading scholarship program for women requires contestants to strip down to bikinis and shake their booties for a bunch of judges. It's a valid question -- even if the pageant now refers to the category as "lifestyle and fitness in swimsuit," and judges contestants on confidence, poise and muscle tone.

But just as fair a question is: Are women judged according to their looks only within Atlantic City's city limits? Are attractive people in general not born with a leg up? Would Bill Clinton have been elected if he looked like Paul Tsongas? Would George W. Bush have won if he resembled Steve Forbes?

Pageant officials once gave the American people the opportunity to eliminate the swimsuit competition in 1995, and almost 1 million viewers phoned the two 900 numbers available for registering their votes. Seventy-nine percent voted to keep the swimsuits. One pageant official whispers to me that they would be glad to be rid of the swimsuit bit, but then ratings would take a dive, and then networks wouldn't pay for the telecast, and then the contest -- and scholarship money -- would vanish.

Thing is, for all the hoopla, the contest is a rather unsexy affair. After the initial shock of seeing the 51 in white gowns, parading to the platform at the start of the prelims, it was like showing up at the best sorority formal I'd ever been to -- I got bored kind of quickly. Bathing suits, shmathing suits, the sexiest moment for me actually came when Miss Maryland strutted around the stage while demonstrating her brilliance with a violin, which I guess is kind of the point.

Recent Stories