A long-running dream

The day’s rehearsals are winding down, and Atlantic City’s

Convention Hall is emptying as Miss America’s 50 contestants drift off to find dinner and fresh tubes of Pepsodent. But I can’t leave my seat. All afternoon, my eyes have been riveted to the real star of the pageant.

The runway.

There it is: 140 feet long, 15 feet wide, 2,100 square feet of pure spectacle. Shiny and black, smoother than hockey ice, lined with spotlights and vibrating with promise, it’s more symbolic of the pageant than over-sprayed hair.

“Isn’t it something?” says Val Shinkle, an official from the Miss

Washington State Pageant who’s been watching the rehearsals with me.

“Seeing that runway, as a little girl, is what got me into runway modeling,” says her friend Arlene O’Neall, a retired looker who still carries herself like she’s balancing a book on her head.

“It’s amazing,” I say, feeling transported back to childhood, when I’d watch the pageant on the basement TV with my five sisters, fantasizing that one day I, too, would walk Miss America’s plank. Those dreams evaporated when I hit my grubby teens, too cool for taffeta.

Still, to this day, wherever I am, I usually flick on the TV for the pageant’s last 15 minutes to see the changing of the queens: that over-the-top ceremony where the departing Miss America walks the runway for the last time, returning to plant the crown on the new monarch’s head, who then takes her first weeping wobble.

For sheer drama, you can’t beat it with a sceptre.

But organizers of other pageants, I hear, are ditching their runways as they cater more and more to their television medium. It’s awkward manipulating heavy cameras around a runway, and it messes up sightlines for the attending audience. More convenient, they say, to stick to conventional staging.

This is an insane move!

As Tara Maginnis, Ph.D., points out in “Fashion Shows, Strip Shows and Beauty Pageants: The Theatre of the Feminine Ideal,” the runway moves the queen from icy, onstage distance to chummy closeness with her audience. The walkway’s elevation, though, subconsciously reminds the riffraff of her stature. So Miss America is simultaneously both subservient to and above Her People.

Sort of the way strippers and models are, concludes Maginnis, drawing a comparison that would surely offend the gracious Val and Arlene.

“What must it feel like up there?” I ask the gals, the germ of an idea forming in my questionably feminist brain.

What’s it like, during the “Parade of States,” to announce your hometown, then haul butt down that indoor jetty to cheers and whistles? What’s it like to be the one girl for whom this group strut is to be mere preamble to the lone, adoring stroll she’ll take once crowned, when deafening applause and blasting flashbulbs nearly shake Convention Hall into the Atlantic surf?

I must find out. I owe it to my five sisters.

We were raised on the pageant, gleefully rating hairdos and costumes, smiles and walks. We didn’t know it back then, but the pageant played out on a grand scale the competition we unconsciously lived every day.

Who was the prettiest among us? The smartest, most talented or liked? Who, when you got right down to it, was the Favored Daughter, the one Mom and Dad loved best? Watching the pageant, I’d feel a swell of affinity with the new queen.

“That’s me,” I’d think, unaware I was even doing so, “both equal to and more special than my sisters. One day, everyone will understand this!”

My sisters, of course, were thinking the same thing.

I haven’t thought about that in years, but looking at the runway, it all comes back. And I sense it’s time to come full circle.

“Go for it!” says Arlene.

“Excuse me,” I ask a production person young enough to be my daughter. “I’m 42 years old, 20 pounds overweight, and I’ve never been in a pageant in my life. Can I walk the runway?”

She nods.

I take the runway stairs two at a time, and, I gotta tell you, it’s overwhelming up there. Convention Hall’s vaulted ceiling, the countless tiers of seats, the awesome echo of the place — I feel a surge of respect for any girl who can traverse the runway without throwing up on her roses. I close my eyes and imagine that I have been voted most special, the Chosen One.

I pull my cell phone from my pocket and, one by one, dial up my beloved sisters: Peg, Pat, Fran, Marylou, Rosie — my lifelong posse, my team of aging, basement-TV beauty queens, each worthier than the next to wear a crown.

Are you sitting down?" I say to Franny, the first one who answers. "Because you will never, ever guess where I'm calling from."