The Miss America Pageant swears it won’t be a different animal when it moves to Country Music Television (CMT).
The winner’s traditional morning-after dip in the Atlantic City surf, pageant officials assure us, will not be replaced by a ride on the bucking bull at Dollywood.
In the spot where Bert Parks once crooned “Here She Comes,” we will not hear the Bellamy Brothers sing “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?”
But for the contestants themselves, I would suggest, the biggest potential impact from moving to CMT is this: It means they can eat lunch.
We all know there are places in the world, like New York, Paris, London and Hollywood, where the fashion and media mafia decided a few years back that a woman should weigh less than her clothes.
Therefore, most hot, hip and trendy clothes are designed so no woman can wear them if she is wider than the bottle of water surgically attached to her hand.
Now some say this message peaked on TV a few years back with shows like “Melrose Place,” where every woman needed to be a size 2. But while recent shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “reality” programs are more balanced, fashion and celebrity media still tell us the norm is not back to normal.
Miss America, it should be acknowledged, has never given extra credit to women who live on two egg whites a day.
But if it ever entertained any such inclinations, the move to CMT should eliminate them, because country music, and country music on television, have always cottoned to ladies who look like they sit down to dinner and actually eat it.
That includes the wide-eyed gals in the cutoff bluejeans in the cornfield on “Hee Haw,” but more importantly, it has traditionally included country singers themselves.
Whether they’re as purty as Loretta Lynn, Trisha Yearwood and Shania Twain or just regular-looking like Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette, they’ve never had to whittle down until they could fit their whole self into one leg of a pair of pants.
That doesn’t make them beach balls. It makes them normal. Whatever the other implications of Miss America going country, it frees her up to eat a hamburger.
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