Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Miss America. I love the spectacle of the pageant—the women in rows, beaming as they announce the names of their states, and how at home in the peanut gallery (and in later years on Twitter), I’d say things like “she doesn’t have a chance,” and “top ten, for sure,” and “are you kidding me with this?” I loved the talent competition, especially when the contestants strayed from the old reliables—belting Broadway standards or trilling operatic arias or playing the piano or dancing—and dipped into pageant-specific skills, such as baton twirling, Irish step dancing, rhythmic gymnastics, dramatic monologues, or—please, God—ventriloquism, as Miss Ohio did in 2015 (“Performing ventriloquism, while singing ‘Supercalafragalisticexpialadocious,’ ” is a phrase that I could hear The Bachelor and Miss America host Chris Harrison say forever). I loved snarking on the gowns during Evening Wear, I loved going all righteously feminist during Swimsuit, I loved doling out tidbits of Miss A. lore that I’d picked up during years of viewing and research (“Did you know that Debra Maffett, Miss America 1983, competed three times for Miss Texas before she allegedly had a ton of plastic surgery, moved to California, and won her state title there? Do you know that it wasn’t until 1999 that the Miss America Organization lifted its ban on competitors who’ve had abortions?”). I loved the suspense of the slow final reveal, from fourth runner-up, to third, to second, until there were just two women left, gripping each other’s hands as they stood in the spotlight. I loved the inevitable crying, and the way that, after all these years of pageantry and progress, nobody’s figured out a reliable way for the outgoing Miss America to affix the crown to the new winner’s head, which means that each year’s show ends with tears, roses, and endless, result-free fumbling with bobby pins.

  When I was hired at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was thrilled for many reasons, and Miss America was one of them. Philadelphia is less than an hour away from Atlantic City. It’s pageant-adjacent. In 1998, after some patient waiting and some hard lobbying, I was sent to Atlantic City as the Inquirer’s on-the-ground reporter. It turned out to be a big year. Kate Shindle, who’d grown up in New Jersey but won her regional crown in Illinois (she’d gone to Northwestern for college), was the controversial winner. Her platform was AIDS awareness—a big deal for an organization whose representatives usually embraced less hot-button causes. Not only that, but Shindle’s father had been a Miss America board member. Although he’d resigned well before his daughter’s win, this news led to charges that, somehow, the fix was in. If the pageant itself hadn’t been enthralling enough, the behind-the-scenes drama made it unforgettable.

  So that was the love of the love-hate dyad—the pageant, the drama, the way its arrival was a signpost of my year, signaling the end of summer, the beginning of fall, sweaters and colorful leaves, fresh notebooks and new teachers, the chance, every September, that this year would be better than the year before.

  The hate, of course, came from knowing that I could never, ever be that girl. No matter how hard I worked out or how long I dieted, no matter what I did to my face, no one would ever be struggling to stick a rhinestone crown on my head. Miss America doesn’t need to be a beauty—actually, cute, girl-next-door/local-newscaster looks seem to serve contestants better than the kind of ethereal, drop-dead gorgeousness that sells perfume and haute couture. Regardless, Miss America rewarded something I would never have and could never get. It was a yearly reminder that the woman who was what boys wanted, who was what everyone wanted, who represented our country—“there she is,” as Bert Parks used to sing, “your ideal”—was a woman who was pleasant and pretty, admired and beloved; a woman who looked, who was, nothing like me.

  • • •

  There are five judges for tonight’s Miss Boston competition. There’s me: novelist, newspaper columnist, pageant skeptic. There’s our veteran judge, Patty Haggerty, whose short hair, big glasses, and impeccable posture all suggest the principal whose office you don’t want to get sent to. Dr. Danica Tisdale Fisher, who runs admissions for the summer program at Phillips Academy in Andover, is another Miss A. vet. In crisp pants and low heels and glasses, you wouldn’t immediately peg her as a former beauty queen, but that’s what she is—the first-ever African-American woman to hold the Miss Georgia title and a top-ten Miss A. finalist in 2004. With degrees from Spelman, Temple, and Emory, she’s a prime example of what the Miss America Organization likes to say that it’s about: education and accomplishment and giving back, not just looking hot in a bikini. A Miss America crown can lead to big things—Kate Shindle had a solid career on Broadway; Vanessa Williams, who lost her crown after Penthouse published nude photos in 1985, is a singer and an actress. Gretchen Carlson, 1989, was a Fox News anchor and is currently suing the network’s head for sexual harassment. However, the title is no guarantee of future fame and fortune. Google the Miss Americas of the 1980s and 1990s and you’ll find a number of stay-at-home mothers–slash–“Christian recording artists” who live in places like Branson or Nashville and host public-access cable shows, or give speeches in favor of abstinence and against abortion. Dr. Tisdale, with her job at an elite boarding school and her doctorate degree, is undoubtedly one of the stars in the pageant’s crown.

  To balance the panel are two middle-aged white men. James McCabe is an executive in the hospitality industry (“he is now back in New York City helping to run the tallest hotel building in the Western Hemisphere,” says his bio), and Paul Shipman heads media relations and brand development for the Connecticut Food Bank.

  Our first job is the private interview competition, which the audience won’t see. For ten minutes, we’ll grill each of the women about her platform, her talent, her pageant experience, the results of the previous night’s presidential primaries, whatever we like. Per our instructions, this gives us the “opportunity to learn as much as possible about the contestant’s Qualities and Attributes to fulfill the titleholder position.”

  The sessions turn out to be a lot like press conferences—not hostile, exactly, but we’re not just pitching softballs. From the high school senior whose platform is accessibility for the handicapped, Danica wants to know, “Why did you write that you were ‘forced to use a wheelchair’? Isn’t that language problematic?” We ask about their politics, their academic ambitions, their travel plans. “I’d love to visit Dubai,” one contender has written on her bio. “Why Dubai?” asks a judge. “With all the places in the Middle East that are so rich in history and art . . .”

  “Oh, I just love shopping,” the girl—the young woman—burbles. “And every time I see those amazing malls they’ve got on TV . . .”

  The five of us have been strictly forbidden from discussing the contenders, or even exchanging glances once they’ve left the room. I suspect that if we could, though, we’d all be rolling our eyes.

  And so it goes. For every piece of Pollyanna-ish nonsense or garbled bit of Scripture (“I am a firm believer that positive energy generates positive outcomes”; “My parents say I was born with the heart of a servant”), for each serving of incomprehensible word salad (“Due to my parents’ divorce, I immensely value cohesive family units, which I have not always had”), for every glaring typo in the paperwork (one young woman’s platform involves “Drub Awareness”), for every platform that sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit first draft (“Dancers for Cancer”), there’s a girl who’s sharp or funny; a girl who’s lived through something difficult and come through it with a story to tell.

  The MIT graduate has, for example, a half dozen different volunteer commitments—endeavors that sound serious, as opposed to mere résumé padding—that she manages along with the pursuit of her PhD. “I’m a foodie,” she says, explaining that one of her life goals is to visit every Michelin-starred restaurant in the United States. She’s got an easy laugh and a figure suggesting that she’s no stranger to bread and butter.

  Another contender, with an anchorwoman’s poise and a politician’s cool, is currently att
ending Harvard. One does stand-up as a hobby. (“What travels around the world but never leaves the corner?” she offers when we ask for a joke. “A stamp!”) Two girls are still in high school; three are in graduate school.

  There’s the girl whose sister is an addict (a quick under-the-table Google shows that the sister has been arrested a bunch of times for crimes including prostitution). There’s the redhead whose eating disorder took her down to eighty pounds, with doctors telling her parents that they weren’t sure she’d survive. The girl advocating for wheelchair accessibility spent years using a chair after doctors misdiagnosed her hip condition as “growing pains.”

  All of this serves as a reminder that it’s hard to be young and female—even in America, even if you’re exceptionally talented, smart, dedicated, pretty. And all of these young women are intelligent, articulate, accomplished, and driven . . . but to my surprise, not all of them are pretty. While there are a few who could probably drop jaws in a crowd and stop traffic on the street, the majority are just regular, healthy, well-tended American girls, and a few have probably occasioned whispers—she does pageants? She thinks she could be Miss America?

  With almost every girl, I ask some version of the same thing: How does it feel to compete for scholarship dollars based, in part, on how you look in a swimsuit? “We’re going to be judging your bodies,” I say, sweeping my arm in a gesture that includes all five of us. “Isn’t that creepy?”

  Nobody’s got a perfect answer. Responses range from versions of It’s a necessary evil to It is what it is. I get excited when one girl—woman—mentions the male gaze, and I wait for her to elaborate on her discomfort with pandering to it, but her response trails off into a mishmash of politically correct words and phrases—confidence and poise and you have to get used to people looking at you. At first that last part sounds meaningless . . . except it’s not meaningless, it’s true. Whether you’re a beauty-queen contender or a would-be news anchor or just a college freshman walking across the quad, simply existing as female means that people will be looking and judging and making determinations about you based on how you appear to them. Given all that, it probably makes perfect sense for these young women to spend hours, weeks, years of their lives trying to conform to that gaze, to be the thing it wants to see, its perfect object of desire, its ideal.

  • • •

  Getting through all fourteen girls’ interviews takes up most of the afternoon. By five o’clock, I’d kill for a nap. Instead, we grab a quick meal in the hotel restaurant, with the judges from the Miss Outstanding Teen contest. Then we head up to the ballroom for the big show (Patty Haggerty has traveled from New Hampshire with a garment bag that turns out to contain a black satin sleeveless sheath that displays her slim figure and toned arms. Once a pageant girl, always a pageant girl).

  The show, I am delighted to learn, is more or less the Miss America pageant in miniature, complete with opening dance routine, set to the Black Eyed Peas’ song “I’ve Got a Feeling,” where it’s easy to tell which competitors had dance training versus the ones who don’t dance between pageants. The girls wear black dresses and high heels. They form lines and parade across the stage, moving their arms in time to the music, smiling politely at the emcee’s banter.

  The first onstage component we judge is the “onstage question.” Each contender has submitted a question, which one of her competitors will answer. Donald Trump and gay marriage are covered, with varying degrees of success. The Harvard undergraduate gives a thoughtful reply about whether lowering the drinking age might cut down on drunk driving. “And after I’ve spent all day in classes, then at work, why are my elected officials allowed to tell me I can’t have a glass of wine?” she asks. I’m confused, until I remember that, even though she’s got the poise and presence of a forty-year-old, she is, in fact, just twenty.

  She also has something weird going on with her makeup. Maybe it’s the lights, or some odd reflection from her giant, Pageant-with a-capital-P earrings, but her skin looks . . . gray. In Swimsuit, in Evening Wear, as she plays the piano during Talent, I keep staring . . . and, yep, she’s gray. Like, corpse-colored gray. Weird.

  Some of the girls—women—are truly gifted; some have more personality than they do native ability. The MIT girl doesn’t have the best voice, but she sings a song about believing in oneself from La Cage aux Folles that brings down the house. “I am what I am. I don’t want praise, I don’t want pity,” she sings, with such nuance and conviction that it’s her performance we remember, not the belter who tears through a Céline Dion song, not the conservatory student who dances and sings “The Laughing Song” from Die Fledermaus in a halter top and harem pants decorated with dangling gold coins.

  The five of us—and the rest of the audience—quickly learn the difference between a national-champion-level step dancer and a girl whose parents probably dragged her to step-dancing lessons one summer during elementary school. One of the modern dancers is so strong and flexible that her performance resembles a gymnastics floor routine, a dizzying series of backbends and bouncy round-offs. Another’s dance relies so heavily on sultry looks and a lick-your-lips-stick-out-your-chest pose that I wonder whether her preparation consisted of repeated viewings of Aerosmith videos.

  There are a few standouts—a “comedic monologue,” a performance of a scene from Waiting for Guffman, which could have gone horribly wrong, but was so funny that it’s all I can do not to clap (judges are forbidden from applauding). The Harvard girl plays a tricky Bach Solfeggietto, delivered with a precision that’s dazzling and also, somehow, grim, like Liberace, if Liberace had no sense of humor and would maybe rather be doing your taxes than playing the piano. It’s technically impressive, but joyless; showy but no fun, which is sort of how I’m feeling about this Miss herself, only maybe, I tell myself, it’s the odd clay-y makeup.

  In the end the women stand onstage, hands linked, in their evening gowns. Some are purchased-for-the-pageant confections, encrusted with sequins, in TV-friendly jewel tones. Others look like repurposed prom gowns. While they wait, we’re totaling our scores. Take your private interview score, multiply it by 2.5, add it to Lifestyle & Fitness in Swimsuit, which is multiplied by 1.5, plus Talent times 3.5, plus Evening Wear times 2, then the onstage question times 0.5. (“You can just add up your scores,” a sympathetic emcee whispers as he hears me muttering under my breath about how I hadn’t been told there’d be math.) My top two are the curvy MIT grad and the Waiting for Guffman girl, a college freshman in musical theater who attended a performing-arts high school in Georgia. As it turns out, she’s the only one of my two who’s made the composite Top Five, and she ends up as our Miss Boston, with the Drub Awareness girl—pretty and poised and also, it should be noted, from a southern pageant state—as Miss Cambridge.

  The MIT girl is the fourth runner-up. She also wins Miss Congeniality, the prize her fellow contestants vote on, and seems genuinely touched to get it. The eating-disorder survivor wins a prize for her talent and accepts it with a tremulous smile, seeming to want nothing more than to get off the stage and go home.

  At the end of the night, back in the judging room, the five of us debrief with Dana and Rocky. “What happened with Alissa?” Rocky asks, sounding crestfallen. Alissa is the Harvard girl. “She won Talent. She won Swimsuit. I’m going to have a difficult conversation with her.”

  We talk about her assurance—how it teeters on the line between impressive and arrogant. We praise her smarts, her talent, her poise. Then there’s silence. Then finally someone—me—blurts, “I think maybe her makeup could have been a little bit better.”

  The floodgates open. What was that? asks another judge. Contouring powder? Contouring gone horribly, horribly wrong? “She looked gray!” “She WAS gray!” “What happened?” “It was awful!”

  “She doesn’t have any homosexual men in her life,” Rocky reassures us. “We can work on that. We can fix it.” This we know—at the beginning of the day, Rocky explained that he and his team of
coaches and trainers and voice instructors can fix just about anything, except a young woman who gives a bad interview (“Just don’t give me stupid,” he pleads).

  And what about the MIT grad? he asks, sounding still a little scold-y. Turns out, we all loved her. Some of us—me, I think—more than others. I hold my breath, waiting for someone to say something about how she was, clearly, at least twenty pounds heavier than the next-biggest girl, that her hair, fine and a little limp and clearly unenhanced by extensions, didn’t look like pageant hair, how she needs a diet and a trainer and a makeover, but no one says it. The closest to body-shaming we get is Danica’s mild suggestion that her two-piece did her no favors. “She should wear a one-piece, if that’s where she feels comfortable.”

  Rocky nods. “I tell them all the time, you can win Swimsuit—you can win the whole thing!—as a three,” on the one-to-ten scale. “It’s all about confidence.” He seems—he is, I’m pretty sure—unhappy that the curvy, funny girl wasn’t one of the winners, and his sorrow is shocking, in a wonderful way. If this is who the expert, the pageant guy, wants as his Miss, maybe there’s hope. Maybe there could have been hope for me. (And, as it turns out, there’s even a second chance for Alissa Musto, the Harvard girl who steps up to replace Miss Cambridge after Miss Cambridge decides to focus on her studies and, in July, goes on to make Rocky and Dana the happiest men in the Commonwealth when she becomes Miss Massachusetts. By the time you’re reading this, there’s a chance that she could be the first Miss Mass to go all the way and that someone will have jabbed, unsuccessfully, at her head with bobby pins—that she could be, in the end, our ideal.)

  At the end of the night, there’s time for the local title-holders from all over New England—who, it seems, comprise half the audience—to take the stage and greet the crowd. Again, I’m pleasantly surprised. There are traditional Misses—big hair, little bodies, crowns and sashes and big, shiny grins—but there’s a young woman in a sweater-vest and gray pants and flats who looks like she came from a part-time job at a library, and another in a vintage-style skirt and sweater set who’s a dead ringer for a young Adele. Up close, you can see that these could be any girls, at any high school or gymnastics meet: there’s bad skin underneath the makeup; padding in at least a few of the bras; imperfect bodies teetering on high heels. And, even in New England, there’s a black winner, a Miss from Rhode Island with a wild Afro, who walks up to the microphone holding her six-year-old cousin’s hand. “I wanted her to see how wonderful pageants are!” she says, and lifts her hand in a practiced gesture. Her cousin smiles and gives her own shy, tentative wave. I smile back at her, trying to make eye contact. I wish I could give her a crown. I wish, a little ruefully, that someone had given me one.