IPFS Vin Suprynowicz

The Libertarian

Vin Suprynowicz

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THE NEW KID IN TOWN

Billboards and magazine covers now display teasing images of feminine pulchritude that our grandparents would have considered shocking. Not to mention the far more hardcore material now available to any schoolchild with a few clicks of the mouse.

Whether you brand the trend decadent or just more forthright, the idea of eager crowds gathering today to watch properly chaperoned young ladies cross the stage in modest bathing suits and high heels, followed by baton twirling exhibitions and a series of brief but heartfelt orations on the subject of world peace, seems ... downright quaint.

Indeed, the Miss America Pageant, dogged by financial problems in the face of dwindling viewership, was dropped by ABC television last year, leaving the event without a TV contract for the first time since 1954 ... when the prime time competition was “I Love Lucy,” “You Bet Your Life,” “The George Gobel Show,” and “December Bride.”

The pageant’s stern Leave It To Beaver moral code once demanded contestants be childless, unmarried, never married, and presumably free of surgical enhancements. But the watershed that left the pageant (which featured a musical number in which contestants appeared onstage as “slaves” back in 1923) stranded on the Lawrence Welk side of the cultural divide probably came when organizers stripped Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, of her 1984 crown after it was revealed she’d posed for nude photos -- only to watch Ms. Williams go on to have a recording career that was arguably more successful for the publicity.

Increasingly, the times had left the Miss America Pageant -- devised as a Roaring Twenties publicity ploy to keep beachgoers at the New Jersey shore for one more weekend after Labor Day -- tossed up at the high tide line, bleaching in the autumn sun.

So, after 84 years of crowning beauties on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, organizers announced Wednesday that Miss America is moving ... to Las Vegas.

The Aladdin hotel-casino -- which itself has struggled in recent years -- will host the pageant, which is scheduled to air Jan. 21 on the Country Music Television cable channel.

The pageant may be a good match for a network that still mainlines “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Whether it can fill 7,000 seats with younger folk accustomed to the glitzier new side of Las Vegas, or whether organizers would be wiser to play to the nostalgia of older visitors, remains to be seen.

But it’s a reminder of the vast difference in scale between the two venues that Atlantic City -- still a destination about as easy to reach directly by air as Whitehorse or Yellowknife -- has just lost its signature event, its September streets empty of contestants waving from convertibles, its roaring surf no more a host to the winner’s victory frolic, the weathered planks of its historic boardwalk creaking empty in the winter wind.

While here in Vegas, the imminent arrival of the Miss American Pageant didn’t even qualify as front-page news.

Good luck, newcomers. Here’s hoping it works out. Too bad Bert Parks couldn’t make it.

But will they still sing, “There she is, Miss America, There she is, your ideal. The dreams of a million girls, Who are more than pretty, May come true in Atlantic City”?

Or will it be, instead, “You’re walking away; they’re talking behind you. They’ll never forget you till somebody new comes along. Where you been lately? There’s a new kid in town.”


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