miss america

Miss America Broadcast Attracts 4.5M Viewers
Cable network TLC says Miss America broadcast attracted 4.5 million viewers


TLC says it's the largest number of viewers of any Miss America telecast shown on cable.

Miss Virginia Caressa Cameron won the crown Saturday night. The 22-year-old emerged from a field of 53 contestants after swimsuit, evening gown, talent and interview competitions.

TLC says the pageant telecast was ranked No. 1 for the night on cable channels, excluding movies.

Saturday's 4.5 million viewers was a million more than last year but far less than the 33 million who watched the pageant on broadcast TV in 1988.

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One of the Miss Virginia sponsors, Tiffany Porter, said she predicted that Caressa would go on to be Miss America when she was only 14, wearing braces and taking part in a southwest Virginia pageant. Tonya Ratliff, Caressa’s personal trainer, added: “I knew the minute I met her. She had this special light.“ Caressa, who had won $35,000 total in previous pageants, won $52,000 from Miss America here.

Caressa said that her own life was a struggle, too, but that’s perhaps where she learned her remarkable “smarts.” She told me: “I have lived a lot of life. My family has gone through so many struggles and because we have been so grounded and because I actually grew up in a time period when I was the only child around, I was always around adult conversation. So I think I am a little wise beyond my years because I was always introduced to a lot of things early. My life, though, absolutely was a struggle.

“There was a time when kids would make fun of me because of the way that I dressed, because we didn’t have lots of money. I was in hand-me-down clothes. I had a unibrow, so kids called me Wolverine. I was made fun of all the time, and for a while, I internalized the things people said about me. I was at a crossroads at a point. Then it was an actual Miss Virginia who came into my school and told me to turn negative energy into positive energy. From that moment on, I threw myself into the arts, and I decided that I was no longer going to allow other people to define who I am and how I feel about myself.

“So that is what I hope to encourage other young people to do as Miss America. Gosh, I am not even used to saying it yet. I hope to encourage people as Miss America to define yourself, pave your way. Be who you were meant to be and not what other people want you to be. Just because your circumstances are a certain way, you don’t have to give into them. You can do something amazing, like becoming Miss America. ”

She laughed that both Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer better look out when she starts her broadcast journalism career. “I hope there will be an eventual door open for me. That I can pave my own way in the anchor world.”

Even though she was separated from her parents and other family members while in the pageant, Caressa took part in a nightly prayer meeting by telephone. She said: “I could not physically be in the prayer group with them, of course, because we are not allowed to see our families, but they made it a point to call me every night before I went to bed. We would say a prayer, and just like I was saying onstage when it was down to the final three contestants, ‘Thy will be done.’