Miss America 2016

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by LXA SE285

Were you thinking of Paige Phillips, Miss Alabama 1981? Her routine was corny as hell, but she killed it from a technical standpoint. She got something like a 5-minute ovation. Locally everybody thought she was a shoo-in, but she ended up first runner-up.

There's a video of this on Youtube somewhere--I watched it a while back. I'm generally not super-impressed by ventriloquist acts, but she was legitimately amazing. She did voices for both her dolls, they had entirely distinct voices from each other--while singing!--and you couldn't see her lips moving at all. I think she actually works at least part-time as a ventriloquist now, or at least did for many years. It's ridiculous good.

Originally Posted by Sister Havana

Miss Vermont actually performed a science experiment for talent at this year's pageant. Here's the video from preliminaries. (Too bad she didn't make the finals! I will take that over bad singing any day.)

Yeah, that's what got me thinking about it. It just seems so silly that some of these women are so talented in so many ways, and yet the pageant definition of "talent" remains pretty narrow. I remember watching a Miss Wisconsin who was a doctor at the age of 22, who ended up playing a violin solo for her talent (and was surprisingly good at it). She was a 22-year-old doctor, isn't that enough talent? Haha.