PRPG:

The Talented Miss America

February 23, 2016

The Miss America Pageant added the talent portion to the contest in 1935. Most contestants sing or dance, but some display more unusual skills.
Miss_America_2015_contestants
1957: Amanda Whitman (Miss Tennessee) did a gymnastic tumbling and trampoline routine to the theme from The Third Man.
1959: Elizabeth Holmes (Miss New York) did an impression of French singer and actor Maurice Chevalier. Miss New Jersey, Beverly Ann Domareki, did an impression of a beatnik.
1960: Ann Susan Barber (Miss New Jersey) did a comic routine about a hillbilly attending her first baseball game.
1961: LaVerda Garrison (Miss Idaho) gave a dramatic reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
1967: Jane Jayroe (Miss Oklahoma) conducted the orchestra in a rendition of the #2 hit “1-2-3” (and she won the pageant!).
1973: Ellen Meade (Miss Florida) did a ballet sequence from Swan Lake…on roller skates.
1977: Julie Houston (Miss Alabama) played the banjo. The song: the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies.
1981: Angelina Johnson (Miss Tennessee) did impressions of the lead characters from TV’s Laverne and Shirley …with ventriloquist dummies.
1982: Laura Matthys (Miss Oregon) twirled a rifle to the tune of a traditional folk march from Herzegovina.
1987: Aurelie McCarthy (Miss Massachusetts) played “Hava Nagila” on the marimba.
1989: Tammy Kettunen (Miss Arizona) performed a “freestyle roller-skating” routine to “Amazing Grace.”
1992: Shannon Boy (Miss Arkansas) played the theme from Star Wars on the flute.
2011: Lauren Cheape (Miss Hawaii) performed acrobatic jump roping to the Hawaii Five-O theme.
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