By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Stephanie DeFilipp blushes when she admits it: She wanted to be Little Miss Auburn Mall.

She can barely recall the beauty pageant – she was only 3 – but the honor student and cheerleader still remembers how it felt to be runner-up.

“I was wicked mad when I didn’t win,” she said. “I was like, Mooooom!'”

Now a senior at Edward Little High School, Stephanie vows her second try at a crown won’t make her feel the same way. Next week, she and eight other teenage girls will compete for the title of Maine’s Junior Miss in Caribou. Stephanie is determined to have fun.

“Just the experience is the most important thing to me, whether I win, lose or fall. Whatever,” Stephanie said.

Established in the late 1920s, the America’s Junior Miss pageant began in Mobile, Ala., as part of the city’s annual spring floral program. Now national, the 5,000-girl pageant emphasizes education and scholarship over beauty.

Unlike Miss America, there is no swimsuit competition. Instead, Junior Miss judges consider each teenager’s grades and evaluate her maturity and self-expression during an interview. The girls must also send in an essay and will earn points for poise, talent and physical fitness during the competition.

State winners will go on to the national pageant in Alabama in June.

Stephanie, 18, decided last fall that she wanted to join Maine’s competition. The bubbly teen had grown up listening to her mother talk about her own time in the state contest, and she was drawn by the excitement, the experience of meeting new people and the possibility of winning some money for college.

Despite her experience with Little Miss Auburn Mall, Stephanie thought the full-day Junior Miss event sounded like fun.

“I like a lot that it’s focused on academics, not a pageant, not who-wears-the-swimsuit-the-best,” she said.

Although she already had school, work, daily cheerleading commitments, Big Brothers Big Sisters and various community service projects, Stephanie prepared an application so extensive that it filled a three-ring binder.

Knowing that judges could ask anything during the interview, she combed through Time magazine and started watching the nightly news. Stephanie, her mother and her dance coach worked for a month and a half to get her five-minute tap routine down to the competition’s 90-second limit.

On March 12, all the work may pay off.

Stephanie’s odds of winning something are good. There are 12 scholarships available. Nine girls are competing.

Her best friend thinks she could take the big prize: a $2,000 scholarship and a trip to the national competition. But Stephanie doesn’t even want to think about it.

It’s money that she and her family could use, since her older brother is already in college and she wants to go to the University of Maine in Orono next year. But even if she blows the interview (talking to people makes her nervous) or her black outfits turn out to be a downer for the judges (the pageant coordinator advised lots of color), Stephanie said she doesn’t want to worry about it.

She just wants to meet people, dance and have fun.

This time runner-up, or any other place, will be fine.

“I’ll just try to do the best for myself,” she said.

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