Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) (13 page)

Rafko was visibly shocked when she was announced as the new Miss America; in those days, the runners-up and the winner were still announced directly from the top ten, instead of first being whittled down to a top five. Her crowning moment began with the remaining six semi-finalists standing in a line. When her name was called, she manifested the crowning moment fantasy of just about every Miss America fan, radiant with surprise, humility, joy, tears, and sparkles. Unbeknownst to most, however, was the reality that this Miss America didn’t plan on simply going along with the tide.

Shortly after her crowning, Rafko announced that she wanted to merge her year as Miss America with her life as a professional nurse. Not only did she plan to eventually open a hospice in her hometown, she also wanted to discuss the issues that she and other oncology and hematology nurses faced every day. Cancer treatments. Death. The rapidly spreading HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although other Miss Americas had recognized that the title was an avenue for social change, this one purposefully and specifically directed the white-hot spotlight toward things that Miss America was not expected to talk about.

Like just about every other substantive change to the institution, a straight-talking Miss America with a cause elicited a mixed response. Although Rafko received an impressive collection of supportive mail—by her own estimate, “thirty-five to forty letters a day”—she was also a target for public criticism. Although she was indisputably an aggressive and valuable advocate for nursing careers in the
midst of a serious shortage in the field, some detractors felt that her Miss America title compromised the integrity of the medical profession.

Rafko, however, would go on to have the last laugh. Within weeks of her crowning, she “addressed a Congressional subcommittee in Washington, DC, concerning issues facing the nursing community.” Eventually, she would work with organizations like the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the March of Dimes, and speak to the international medical community, from Malaysia to Paris and beyond. Her topic was consistent: not car sponsors or her workout routine or whether the crown was made of real diamonds, but nursing. Later, the American Nursing Association would praise her for her work, saying that she “single-handedly alleviated the national nursing shortage during her reign by speaking out on the need for more nurses.” As her year went on, she crafted a legacy for herself that was not lost on even cynical pageant commentators. In his 1990 book
Hype and Glory
, William Goldman (a judge that year) observed her onstage moments before she crowned her successor: “Kaye Lani is a practicing nurse. But she doesn’t just work for your ordinary GP. She works for the dead and dying. ‘I’m going back to school in the spring, to start work toward my Master’s degree in oncology, which is the study of cancer, with a minor in business administration . . . so that one day I
will
open my own hospice center for all terminally ill patients, both cancer as well as AIDS.’
”

Rafk o’s passion for her work, however, and her eagerness to deal with even the darkest moments of life and death, was not the only significant shift that year. As fate would have it, 1988 was also the first year without CEO Al Marks, who retired after a twenty-five-year association with the pageant; he would die almost exactly two years later from complications after a heart attack.

Marks’s successor, Leonard Horn, was a brash, out
spoken attorney who had spent years as the pageant’s legal counsel and had been the primary voice of the pageant during the Vanessa Williams incident. Now at the helm of the company, Horn decided that it was time to make some changes. Within a few years, he would replace the executive producer of the telecast, tinker with the pageant’s formula, and introduce audience-driven interactive elements to the show. He would eventually tackle what he saw as an outdated image of Miss America, frequently commenting that he was tired of over-styled hair, evening gowns that aged the contestants, and a generally robotic breed of Miss America hopefuls who bore little resemblance to the young women they were supposed to represent. Horn once described the tipping point for his fervor as the moment he walked out to a hotel pool during pre-pageant festivities and saw a handful of contestants sitting around in full hair, makeup, and meticulously planned outfits; he wanted the pageant to find its way back to a youthful image. By 1994, he had even banned professional hair and makeup artists from the backstage areas in Convention Hall. Although it’s a semi-open secret that this change was actually a result of soaring union costs, not pageant philosophy, Horn successfully spun it in the media as a move to embrace a more natural, self-sufficient Miss America contestant.

To be sure, Horn could be a opinionated taskmaster, and his leadership and communication style alienated as many pageant supporters as it attracted. But he also started to do a lot of listening. He listened to the media, the pageant’s critics, and most important—at least at that moment—he listened to Miss America. Horn quickly recognized that Rafk o’s nursing and hospice crusade was gaining the very type of acceptance he craved for Miss America: respect from the press, an individual identity for Rafko herself, and appearance requests that went far beyond the traditional autograph sessions and photo shoots with sponsor products. Miss America was still traveling extensively, but in
1987–1988, she was also building a body of work and gaining a new type of fame. Like Jean Bartel, Bess Myerson, and a handful of others, Rafko was becoming a transformational Miss America merely by talking about something besides what she was looking for in a man. Almost by accident, she had leapfrogged over the public’s expectations for Miss America and into a whole new realm. Although there have been plenty of Miss Americas who probably had the ability to do this, 1987–88 was the perfect storm for redefining the pageant: a passionate, nontraditional winner, a higher-than-normal amount of America’s attention as Vanessa Williams began to rebuild her public life, and, most critical, a leader with enough vision to latch on to a good idea when he saw one.

While Rafko was busy passing on the crown to her successor, Minnesota’s Gretchen Carlson (1989), Horn was behind the scenes, cementing this Miss America’s legacy. In short order, the pageant announced a new component for the following year’s competition. In addition to the traditional disciplines of swimsuit, talent, evening gown, and interview, each contestant would be required to develop a community-service initiative. The platform issue, as it became known, was intended to evolve into the focal point of each young woman’s year. This new program would not be limited to Miss America herself, or even to the fifty state winners; it would begin at the local level and fundamentally alter the priorities of each contestant. In addition to studying up on current events, social issues, and various other topics that might arise in the private interview, the young women would now have to become experts on the subject they selected.

The platform issue was nothing short of revolutionary, especially given the public’s waning interest in the pageant. It was one thing to sell the program as a grantor of scholarship dollars, or to point out that the talent competition attracted young women who were well-rounded. Ulti
mately, though, those were just talking points—and boring, unsexy ones at that. With this new addition, the pageant had the potential to restore credibility among its longtime critics. Miss America would no longer simply be famous for winning a one-night competition. In the dawning era of the platform issue, she would have a mission to accomplish and a message to bring to the world. The next generation of Miss America titleholders would have the ability to “matter” in a way that had eluded their predecessors. At the close of the 1980s, it looked like the pageant had found its way back onto the path to relevance.

NINE

By 1998, one refrain is so familiar that it occasionally threatens to become tedious. When in doubt: platform, platform, platform
.

By the time I take over the crown, the platform issue is an essential part of Miss America’s identity. Not that I’m complaining; it is both the most interesting and the most challenging part of the gig
.

My pageant career has been relatively brief: four local pageants over the course of three years, only one of which I actually won. Three months later, a trip to the state pageant in Illinois. And finally, the big kahuna: the Miss America competition in Atlantic City. I have exactly one local, one state, and one national crown; some contestants who revisit their state finals each year until they “age out” have five or six or even seven local crowns. And what do you do with them afterward? I’ve heard of women putting crowns on their wedding cakes, using them to hold the dip at parties, even freezing them, full of water, and dropping them into the punch bowl. That, I guess, is what you do when you have lots of local crowns. I only have one
.

I say this not to brag, but because I believe that there is one simple reason why I don’t win for the first two years and
then explode in the third. Simply put, it is nothing more or less than a growing, passionate, and incredibly satisfying focus on my platform issue
.

In the beginning, I don’t really know what my platform should be. I’ve attended, and liked, Catholic high school, especially its focus on ministry and volunteerism. My faith has never been something I shout about from the rooftops; after all, we Catholics are a little more under-the-radar when it comes to spreading the Word than many of our Protestant counterparts. But since I’ve generally stayed out of trouble, and since I largely credit that to the lessons I learned from the priests and nuns, my first platform focuses on encouraging youth morality. It’s hard not to look back and judge that, knowing, as I do, what will eventually follow. More than anything, it is well intentioned but utterly toothless and generic. I don’t know the first thing about the challenges some kids face—those who barely have parents, those for whom it’s much easier to give in to a life of crime than it is to make it through tenth grade, those who never get to college. I’ve never gone to class hungry in the morning, or gone to bed hungry at night, because I only get one meal a day, in the school cafeteria. I’ve never walked home worried that a hail of bullets would suddenly be launched at me from a passing car. I’ve never laid eyes on drugs, let alone been pressured to try them. So the truth is that my first platform is basically preposterous. Because even though I believe that good things are possible if you make the same choices I have and avoid the same risky behaviors I’ve avoided, I have no context in which to understand why lots of kids don’t. It’s a bullshit platform that sounds good at the time, chosen merely to satisfy a requirement and have something to write on the appropriate line on my pageant application
.

The second year, I try a little harder. Motivating youth (or whatever version of that phrase I actually use) may have been just as sterile and undeveloped . . . but at least I can look back and say that it was less judgmental. Better, I think, to
say “yes, you can!” than “no, you shouldn’t!” The problem, once again, is that I really don’t spend any time on it. I still don’t learn much about the seedy side of teen complacency. I genuinely believe that anything is possible if you work hard for it, but I fail to factor in the reality that some kids—like me—come from circumstances that make achievement far easier (unfortunately, it’s still going to be a few years before Malcolm Gladwell writes
Outliers,
which could have made all this much easier)
.

The platform I end up with, the one that ignites my passion, doesn’t actually start out as a platform at all. It starts with a class at Northwestern. “Rhetoric of Social Movements” fulfills a credit requirement for the second major I’ve picked up, in sociology, and it piques my interest. The professor, Scott Deatherage, has a major résumé as a debate coach; in fact, when he dies in 2009 at age forty-seven, I will learn that he’s the “winningest coach in the history of national collegiate debate.” I’m not all that interested at the time in learning how to debate, but I’m fascinated to learn the ins and outs of social activism. It’s a class with a lot of reading and very few tests. The big assignment—basically the make-or-break for your whole grade—is to volunteer for ten hours for any initiative you like, and then write a paper on it. When I go back to Northwestern for my post–Miss America homecoming celebration (and then later, for my senior year), I don’t run across him. One of my few regrets: I’m not sure Scott Deatherage ever knows how significantly he changes my life
.

It’s early spring 1996, my sophomore year, when I start researching organizations that will let me volunteer for them. I don’t know much about AIDS at the time, although what I do know is impactful and fairly personal. I’ve lived in a cocoon that’s been free of the epidemic for much of my life. When I graduate from high school, I don’t know one person who is even openly gay, let alone HIV-positive—at that time,
the two are still so linked in the public consciousness that it seems sensible to connect them in my mind
.

Showing up in an established, successful university theater department is a different story. Practically since my arrival in Evanston, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been elbowing its way into my immediate universe. On the first day of orientation, the chair of the theater department gives a speech to the incoming freshmen. Aside from the typical welcome-to-the-neighborhood comments, and his ruminations on being an artist, Bud Beyer (who will become my acting teacher for the rest of my time here) spends a few minutes talking about the need for us to be careful and safe in the midst of getting to college and letting our hair down. I remember that he specifically says “AIDS is
here.
” I remember not knowing exactly what that means, and also that the look on his face tells us he’s not messing around
.

It turns out that shortly before I’ve arrived, a beloved and respected dance professor has died of an AIDS-related illness. It’s not the first time this theater program has lost one of its own to the disease, but it is particularly painful this time. I realize that, indeed, AIDS
is
here. And by “here,” I don’t mean “at Northwestern”—I mean “in the life of Kate Shindle, an upper-middle-class, white, Catholic, conservative teenager who’s never thought she’d have to worry about HIV.”