“What kind of article are you writing?” the Miss Tri-Village pageant coordinator asked skeptically when I began questioning her about her involvement with the Miss Illinois program. She had me there. I’d been hanging around at the pageant’s “leadership conference” all day, and aside from a bad case of the snubs–which I’d received from everyone from Miss Illinois herself right down to one of the contestant’s moms–I didn’t have much to write about.
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Thus the first annual Miss Illinois Leadership Conference, where pageant contestants and their local contest directors listen to speeches on issues like child abuse, homelessness, drug abuse, and AIDS. This year’s conference ran for only three hours–from two to five in the afternoon–but next year, says Fran Skinner-Lewis, the pageant’s executive director and a former Miss Chicago, “I envision that it will expand to a whole day.”
Skinner-Lewis planned the conference for a couple of reasons, one of them purely practical. In order to have a Miss Illinois who can make a good showing at nationals, Skinner-Lewis needs solid material to work with in the state competition. That means the directors of the local pageants have to be prepared to school next year’s Miss Winnebago, Miss Kankakee, and Miss Macomb in writing informed, politically weighty platforms. To judge from this year’s batch–which includes examples like “Abstinence,” “Conflict Resolution,” and “Traditional Values Instilled by Parents and Effective Discipline”–the leadership conference couldn’t have come too soon.
I got the frankest assessment of the swimsuit ordeal from the least experienced contestant–Julie Guzowski, at 17 one of the youngest girls in the pageant. When I approached her and asked if she was a contestant, she said “Can’t you tell?” and gestured disparagingly at her jeans, T-shirt, and high school letter jacket. Apparently she hadn’t yet put to use the $600 clothing allowance that she received, along with a $1,950 scholarship and the $200 Miss Illinois pageant entry fee, when she was named Miss Hoffman Estates. She already had the required swimsuit–made by the Rose Marie Reid company, it can be found only in shops catering to pageant contestants–but even so, her worries about this part of the competition were only beginning. “You feel so…naked,” she said. “So exposed. It takes a lot of confidence to go up there with your head high and not feel the least bit like, ‘Does this look OK? Is everything OK on me?’”
What Skinner-Lewis doesn’t mention is that this full-time job has no salary. Martin apparently subsists on occasional honoraria from her speaking engagements and TV commercials for the Joe Rizzo car dealership. That isn’t to say there isn’t plenty of gravy once she gets through the year–aside from the $75,000 in scholarships she’s collected from the Junior Miss, Miss Illinois, and Miss America competitions, Martin says one of the biggest perks of being Miss Illinois is all the contacts she’s made.
Needless to say, I never heard from her.
