Word: pageant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jesse Jackson's claim that Vanessa Williams did for the Miss America Pageant what Jackie Robinson did for the Brooklyn Dodgers is absurd [Oct. 3]. Williams lives in a society that has legally abolished racial segregation. That was not the case when Robinson broke baseball's "color barrier" in 1947. Also, Williams did not endure the racial insults or physical intimidation that Robinson did. The two achievements are not comparable...
...Williams, 20 and a Syracuse University student, being Miss America was a practical proposition. She wanted the scholarship money ($25,000), and she wanted the exposure. She wants to be a star. She says until this year she had not given a thought to competing in the pageant. But the executive director of the Miss America Greater Syracuse pageant put the bee in her bonnet, explaining the benefits, and off she went, becoming Miss Greater Syracuse, Miss New York and, ultimately, Miss America, who now, upon leaving David Letterman's studio at NBC, received a hand-delivered letter from...
...much fun, according to many a former winner. You address Rotarians, Lions, Kiwanians, Junior Leaguers, and you appear at Miss America preliminaries. Here a blueberry festival, there a strawberry festival, and the odd hog-calling contest comes into the picture too. And you represent the sponsors of the pageant. This year that would be Gillette, American Greetings Corp., McDonald's and Nestlé. Jacque Mercer (1949) once told an interviewer: "You could take an orangutan, and, with a year's training, it would be a perfectly adequate Miss America...
...which his oldest friend, Georges Clemenceau, stood at his side to cheer him. Monet, 83, has been blind for several years. It is not likely that he will paint another of the remarkable "series" which made him famous. But he has recovered what he chiefly sought in art-the pageant of moving light...
...year-old Alec Guinness, a balding skinnybones with the wide, dashed look of a boy who has just blown his lines in the Sunday-school pageant. In the last six months mild-voiced young Alec has provoked the Old Vic's stage into varied and resonant life. As the Fool in King Lear, Time & Tide found him near "perfection...