In Miss America’s early days, interview questions were simple enough to accommodate society’s moderate expectations of women. Contestants of the ’50s (still mostly high school students) were pitched softball queries along the lines of “Where do you plan to continue your studies?” and “What are the qualities of a good citizen?”
No doubt because they tended to elicit the dreaded “promote world peace” response, the questions were dropped in 1972. For the next 16 years, a contestant’s best chance at exhibiting native intelligence was not letting Bert Parks adjust her swimsuit. But by the time the questions debuted again in 1988, Miss America’s political propensities had come full circle. The young women of 1988′s America were self-possessed and confident. They were newly-imbued with hopes, dreams, points of light. And after a few near slips into the orchestra pit, they were at last coming to grips with their true feelings about wearing stilettos with swimsuits.
Unfortunately, and much to the chagrin of Miss America officials, it was soon discovered that pageanteers hadn’t gotten all that much smarter in the last 16 years. So the question-and-answer element of the competition was again scrapped, to be replaced in 1989 by rehearsed oral presentations. The evolution from cheesecake revue to political convention soundbite was at last complete. Having perfected their memorized “platform” speeches way back at the state pageant level, the contestants were no longer obliged to publicly humiliate themselves with 30 agonizing seconds of poorly delivered platitudes. Instead, they danced around issues with the skill and shallowness of our nation’s leading political figures.

It’s been seven years since the introduction of the Miss America platform. And it’s taken most of that time for pageant delegates to figure out just how to play this politics business. Many — mostly from the pageant’s old-guard Southern states — still don’t quite get it, but that’s okay in its own Darwinian way. After all, as the Mennonite mother of a former Miss Lehigh Valley once explained, pageant failure quite simply “separates the wheat from the tear.”
Since platforms were initiated, back at the beginning of the Bush administration, Miss America has taken on a distinctively Republican feel. And 1996, in keeping with President Clinton’s recent rightward swerve, was no exception. This year’s platforms pretty closely toed the GOP line. There was much talk of family — mostly from Miss Texas, Michelle Martinez, and Miss Montana, Aubrey Jo Hiller, who chose the ever-popular “family values” for their pageant platforms, and from Miss Vermont, Nicole Juvan, a 22-year-old self-professed virgin who spoke out on behalf of — you guessed it — sexual abstinence.
Then there was Miss Washington, Janet Reasons, whose platform was “Women in Prison.” Since Reasons wasn’t among the 10 semi-finalists, we never learned if she was pro or con.
The Religious Right also made an impressive, late-race showing. Even though Pat Buchanan was silenced by his party months ago and Pat Robertson was kept offstage at the convention, a teeming residue of their ’90s revivalism somehow seeped into this year’s Miss America Convention, in the form of a weird plethora of future seminarians. Miss New Mexico, Trisha Williams, is hoping “to become a world evangelist.” Miss Michigan, Jennifer Lynn Drayton, plans to become an ordained Lutheran minister. And Miss Illinois, Tania Joy Gibson, hopes “to obtain a degree in ministry with a minor in music.” The list continues ad infinitum, with the pageant’s ubiquitous youth group leaders, gospel singers and cheerleaders for God.
There were, of course, a few platform throwbacks — like Miss Indiana, Shani Lynn Nielson, who advocates the “therapeutic benefits of pet therapy,” and Miss South Carolina, Angela Michelle Hughes, who preaches “the power of self-esteem.”
Sadly, though, as we only get to hear the five finalists speak their minds, we may never get the chance to find out how we might benefit from pet therapy — or self-esteem, for that matter. The truth is that, with rare exception (as in the case of “School-to-Work,” an actual government initiative adopted by Miss America 1996′s Shawntel Smith), the platforms, like the politics they mimic, seldom amount to much but rhetorical babble and double-talk. Even the most avid Miss America fans have little clue what contestants are talking about when they drop such important-sounding words as “mentoring” or “intervention.”
At the Ocean One stores, in a ship-shaped shopping mall off Atlantic City’s Boardwalk, a yearly tradition pits store managers against each other in bid-offs to represent various Miss America delegates in storefront window shrines. Frederick’s of Hollywood manager Sheila Keith says she chose to honor Miss Rhode Island, Brown University modern dance major Elana Eve Chomiszak, with a display of nautical-theme underwear because, she says, “she’s into early childhood prevention.” It’s unclear whether “early childhood prevention” is related to the chastity program advocated by Miss Vermont, but it doesn’t matter much. Prevention, intervention — it’s all the same in pageant politispeak.
In the end, however, it is not the happy-talking contestant that looks the fool — it’s the rest of us who breathe a deep sigh of collective relief once we know our favorite contestant has successfully avoided answering a simple, personalized question posed by, of all people, Regis Philbin. When Regis asked Miss America winner Tara Dawn Holland, whose issue is illiteracy, what she’d do if approached by a stranger who needed help filling out a job application, her response was classic pageant-ese — but with a cryptic twist. “I would tell them to go to the nearest intervention center,” she said, stumping everyone. Then, as if possessed by some kind of momentary clarity, she miraculously managed to squeeze out a 10-second plug for her own personal product line, adding, “And I would give them a copy of my book and my tape.”
Like the profiteering political missionary she was born to be, Miss America ’97 satisfies the Right’s needs to a T. But even her sequinned train probably isn’t big enough to carry Bob Dole down the aisle in November.

As the Sunday morning sun breaks through the smog, a smelly shroud of salt air and pee descends over the Boardwalk. Even in the absence of mid-summer’s heat, the air is cloying. Every piece of metal touched — a park bench, a pay phone, a newspaper honor box — coats the fingers with a thin drizzle of rust-repelling WD40. Hairdos go frizzy in the humidity, and Boardwalk strollers must resign themselves to feeling dirty.
Welcome, Delegates, to America’s most degenerate shore town — Atlantic City, New Jersey, the 19th-century playland of the rich and powerful, killed by Donald Trump in the ’70s, eulogized by Bruce Springsteen in the ’80s, and populated by poor people forever and ever — or at least until the next wave of casino development plants them firmly on the sidewalk.
Welcome to the spectacular site of the Miss America National Convention 1996.
“Thank God someone’s finally decided to do something about this place,” visitors remark as they pass the glassed-in model of the new Atlantic City Convention Center, on display in the lobby of the decrepit old convention center. The new place, under construction at the end of the Atlantic City Expressway, will complete an uninterrupted ribbon of highway that runs from Philadelphia, to Burger King, to the new Convention Center.
The old Convention Center, a concrete art deco monument whose ceiling tiles fall to earth with regularity, is inscribed with the following cryptic words:
“A PERMANENT MONUMENT CONCEIVED AS A TRIBUTE TO THE IDEALS OF ATLANTIC CITY BUILT BY ITS CITIZENS AND DEDICATED TO RECREATION SOCIAL PROGRESS AND INDUSTRIAL ACHIEVEMENTS.”
Just what the ideals of a city that long ago sold itself to Donald Trump and various mob figures from Pennsylvania and Nevada might consist of is unclear. It’s a question that would be worth posing to those benighted folks who still think the Miss America Pageant — now in its 76th year –is a beauty contest. And there are many. In crowds throughout the Convention Center, the shrill intonation of catty female attendees can be heard echoing the same familiar complaint: “Miss Montana, she’s a dog. What is she doing here?”
The point is — as any pageant official will be happy to inform you (but won’t, because only Miss America Organization CEO Leonard Horn is entrusted to handle such essential press questions as “How many times will Regis Philbin change his clothes during the show?”) — Miss America has changed.
She’s spruced up her airhead image and gone the moralizing-Republican-career-girl route. It’s a move, says CEO Horn, that the pageant made some years ago to honor the “intelligent, sophisticated and goal-oriented, yet wholesome, genuine and truly compassionate” young women currently in fashion on this particular part of planet earth.
And it means, much to the relief of the less attractive women of America, that today’s contestants can be borderline dogs. In fact, judging by the judges’ decisions in recent years, being ugly just might be a contestant’s biggest asset. Ever since profoundly deaf delegate Heather Whitestone took the Miss America mantle in 1995, disabilities have been all the rage. And ugliness, it seems, is this year’s hottest cause.
Like the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the inscrutable rise and fall of Kremlin leaders in the old Soviet Union, fashions in Miss America go in cycles. Miss America’s first move toward progressiveness was introducing African-American women to the pageant mix. The move toward black started in the late ’70s and peaked in 1984, with the crowning (and subsequent defrocking) of Penthouse poser Vanessa Williams. She was replaced — in the last two months of her reign — by runner-up Suzette Charles, who was also black. Having crowned two black Misses since then, the Organization apparently feels it has proven its point: Miss America’s black thing is now officially over.
After last year’s Oklahoma City bombing, was there any doubt the Sooner State would clean up on collective national guilt? Sure enough, the judges predictably worked the disability angle by selecting Shawntel Smith, a freckle-faced redhead from Oklahoma, to represent their romantic vision of America as a land of survivors. Besides, it had been 52 years since the last red-haired Miss America was selected.
This year’s selection is a bit harder to figure. Tara Dawn Holland of Kansas, an aspiring teacher of “middle school chorus,” free-lance vocalist and waitress by trade, is beautiful and clearly not disabled. The more conspiracy-minded of Miss America-watchers see a dark significance in the fact that Kansas is Bob Dole’s home state. In all probability, however, Ms. Holland won simply because once in a while, a regular old-fashioned beauty queen has to take the crown. God forbid the pageant gets a reputation for awarding titles to women who really need the ego boost: The pageant would devolve into a freak show in five years’ time.
This year’s back-to-basics festivities, clearly aimed at restoring the pageant’s venerable glory, featured a parade of unimpeachably all-American judges — Nancy Ann Fleming, Miss America 1961 and star of PBS’s Sewing Today; soap opera star Joe Barbara; motivational speaker Barbara De Angelis; oft-fired news anchor Deborah Norville; Olympians Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Janet Evans; and U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady, the man who, as you may recall, lived off bugs for a week after getting shot down in his F-16 over Bosnia. The whole flag-waving deal reflected the happy confluence of the Summer Olympics, an impending presidential election, a burgeoning war in the Middle East and Regis Philbin’s ceremonial dethroning of defunct American (and former pageant co-host) Kathie Lee Gifford.
This year was Miss America’s Roots Extravaganza, but next year the status quo will have to go. After all, the pageant must, in the immortal words of Leonard Horn, keep “in step with society today.” The most likely coming trends are the selection of Asian and Hispanic Miss Americas. But that demographically-inclusive day might be long in coming, for only one of this year’s delegates (Michelle Kang, Miss Virginia) was Asian, and only one (Michelle Martinez, Miss Texas) Hispanic. There were two black contestants — Veronica Duka, Miss Kentucky, and Michelle Tolson, Miss New Hampshire. The odds were clearly stacked against a minority win, but one thing was clear from the start: Were a minority to snag this year’s Miss America title, the odds were pretty good she’d be named Michelle.
But skin color isn’t everything these days. As Horn himself is quick to add, the modern-day pageant is first and foremost a philanthropic affair — the Miss America Organization is the world’s biggest scholarship fund for women. And the focus of the pageant’s enlightened judges is on the politically-driven insides of a delegate, and not her sequiny exterior. According to Horn, the contest in its present form is all about “providing young women throughout this country with a venue that enables them to achieve their goals.” But there are, of course, requirements: every young hopeful must actually possess a goal — one that she can articulate, preferably in complete sentences; she must not be woefully hard on the eyes (though she can come awfully close); and she must at all times act as if she’s vying for a spot in Bob Dole’s cabinet.
Actually, Miss America didn’t get smart until just after World War II, with the introduction in 1947 of the impromptu question designed to measure contestants’ “intellect” and “personality.” (It would be, though, another two pageants before — after a freak accident involving Miss Montana’s horse — animals were banned from the fledgling talent competition.) Who says chicks haven’t come a long way in the last half century?

There are a few important insights to be found in Peter Whitmer, Ph.D.’s ultra-serious dissertation about the inner life of America’s greatest trailer-trash hero. But even the most diehard Elvis fans may lack the attention span necessary to wade through nearly 500 pages of Elvis-related pop psychology merely to discover that the icon possessed a smaller than average penis and a colon four times larger than most.

“The Inner Elvis” is impressive in its scope, if rarely in its acuity. Whitmer strains for deep-think analyses of such subjects as Elvis’ interest in the martial arts: “Psychologically, karate can be viewed as an athletic extension of one’s body boundaries, where someone ‘invading’ will actually be physically harmed, or even killed.” Even more loopy is Whitmer’s take on Elvis’ shamanistic impulses: “In the study of circumpolar shamanism, there is a universally acknowledged ‘watch out’ sign, an indication of the waning of the mystical powers. Such a decline usually parallels the personal deterioration of the shaman. He finds it necessary, for example, to resort to heavy use of drugs in order to enhance his therapeutic potency. . . Again, Elvis Presley fits the prototype.”