Snap Review: The Ms. DC Pageant – Few Contestants Knew Anything About DC

Q: How come in a “chocolate city” like DC (apologies to George Clinton), African-American contestants were outnumbered 3:1?
A: Most of them likely came here to try for the Ms. DC crown because they thought it would be easier to win than their own state pageant.

Note: How do I know pageant contestants do this? Ms. America 1990, Debbye Turner, told me in an interview that year that she moved to Missouri to participate in Missouri’s pageant after being runner up in her native state. It was her victory there that qualified her for the Ms. American Pageant, which she won.

Another reason I believe that most of the DC contestants aren’t really from here is that most of them could not answer any questions about DC that were related to their “platforms.” One contestant was asked about a DC institution, musical group, performance group etc which inspired her. Her answer: The Kennedy Center. How completely trite, and it doesn’t even require any knowledge of DC to say that. There are a million things she could have said including HR 57 – the Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues – after all, she claimed to be influenced by Jazz and blues in her interview and her talent was vocals.

I’m very pleased that the girl who won, Shayna Rudd, obviously was was familiar with DC and beat the others.

The pro-life contestant, Ashley Ahlquist, came across as borderline racist. Her platform “Providing Positive Solutions for Crisis Pregnancies” basically boils down to tricking poor women who want an abortion into entering a center where she will be lectured to and threatened with eternal damnation. Regardless, her question was along the lines of “How would you make DC safer for women?” Her answer: “I would increase police presence in certain areas” and used the phrase “certain areas” two other times in relation to how more police in “certain areas” would reduce crime. I wonder to which areas this Catholic University student was referring? Hmm. Anyone else care to hazard a guess?

On to the review:
The audience was composed primarily of contestant's family members and supporters, and had a surprisingly low number of drag queens in attendance Though one did seem to have more than a passing acquaintance with the outgoing Miss DC. (Oh for the good old days of Zigfield’s).

I have only this to say about the rest of the interviews: those girls need to learn better grammar, and it would be nice if they bothered to learn a thing or two about our fair city beyond the typical crap any tourist could tell you. (I know, it’s ironic because I sometimes use bad grammar, but my excuse is drunken blogging, not that I don’t know better).

The talent portion was surprisingly trite (including a Mariah Carey song and “All that Jazz” from Chicago) until one of the contestants sang a Porgy & Bess song.

In the Miss Teen DC Pageant, the dramatic readings were powerful. And all of the girls had great poise and posture throughout the show, and the little Princesses (girls 4-12) were of course adorable.