Probably Time to Ditch Beauty Pageants as Relics of the Past

I had an inservice to attend yesterday, so I got lazy and didn't put anything on the blog.  These days if I don't find anything worth sharing, why bother to blog?  Years ago I used to spend hours and hours a day on this blog, but now I have cut it down to size.  Blogging is a major time suck if one isn't careful.  Besides, I have other things I have been doing.

Anyway, there is a good article in Feminist Current which asks why the Miss America pageant isn't being eliminated although it has been recently embroiled in an email scandal.  People have asked that question for many years about beauty pageants in general and the moth-eaten Miss America pageant in particular.  The meat market atmosphere of the contest, which, despite claims of it being a scholarship competition, sends the wrong message that women need to trade on their looks to get anywhere in our society.

Probably not a great thing to be pushing in the 21st century.

Speaking of which, I did have a lot of fun watching this very old broadcast of the Miss America pageant which aired in 1958, and crowned Mary Ann Mobley of Mississippi as the winner.  She did have a lot of charm on display, so it wasn't hard to understand why she won the title.  Of course, Mobley, who passed away in 2014, had a long career in acting and was married to actor and talk show host Gary Collins.  I had forgotten that singer Anita Bryant was a finalist in the same pageant.  She was second runner up.  She went on to fame as a singer, and then infamy in around 1977 with her campaign against LGB (no "T" then of consequence) rights ordinances in Dade County, Florida.  Her political activity pretty much killed her career.  She ditched her husband, Bob Green, who she said was the one who put her up to the crusade and later married somebody else, but  her career never fully recovered.

It was also fun to watch a seasoned newscaster, Douglas Edwards, as the anchor or whatever.  He was assisted by Miss America of 1955 Lee Meriwether, who also became famous as an actress.  She is around 83 (!) years old now.  For quite a few years she was married to Frank Aletter, who I mentioned on this blog a couple of times, first when he died in 2009, and then recently when I discussed the DVD release of the hideous 1960s sitcom It's About Time.  As an aside, it really gets me that the title of the show often omits the apostrophe in almost all the episodes.  The word "it's" instead gets "its," and it's the shits when the wrong spelling of the contraction of "it" is used.  No matter if it's "it's" or "its" or even the nonword "its'," it's still a shitty show.

I mostly looked at the old Miss America broadcast because I was interested in watching Bert Parks.  The show was never as charmingly tacky ever again after he was fired in 1979.  The organization wanted a younger look, and old Bert, who had started hosting the festivities in 1955, simply couldn't make the grade anymore.  Johnny Carson spearheaded a protest more or less tongue-in-cheek over the firing, but Parks never was reinstated.  He died in 1992, but he is still remembered as being practically synonymous with the pageant.

It and other pageants are relics of a time long past, but they will probably stick around for the foreseeable future.