Miss America Flip-Flops

I’ve long wondered what it is that the reigning Miss America does once her bouquet of roses wilts and the other contestants have gone home to their trailers and burger-flipping boyfriends. I always kind of pictured a “Miss Elizabeth”:http://www.misselizabeth.com/index2.html (may she rest in peace) type situation, where Miss America is just always seen on the arm of some musclehead (or beefcake, as I like to say as much as possible), smiling her Vaselined teeth while cutting the ribbon at the opening of some day-care center in Tuscaloosa. Instead it seems that Miss America is actually more like “Captain America”:http://www.captain-america.us/images/wallpaper/warposters/captain-america-vs-hitler.jpg (may he, too, rest in peace), “posing as an underage girl”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18329652/ in order to help Long Island cops arrest Cosmo Kramer-like pageant obsessives (or perverts, whichever).

But apparently whoever dreamed up this lovely publicity stunt failed to think it through, causing an uproar when Miss America (a.k.a. Lauren Nelson) announced that “she would not testify”:http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070501/NEWS07/70501015&imw=Y in any of the cases in which she acted as live bait.

When I read this I figured that she was probably afraid for her safety, which I think is ridiculous. I mean, come on Miss America, in the eyes of the men you helped put away, you’re already over the hill. You’re nothing more than a MILF, if that, to these guys, so don’t worry about any sort of retribution, or at least any of the sexual predatory type.

Perhaps taking my thoughts into account, Miss America changed her mind yet again, stating that she will in fact “testify against said perverts.”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6601892,00.html And thank God, because I was beginning to think that _Dateline_ had become our last line of defense against middle-aged morons who still think teenage girls they meet on the Internet are ripe for the picking.

No matter how you flip it though, at the end of the day, this is way too much news dedicated to someone who to most people pretty much exists for only one night a year.

(And the funny thing about all of this is that I kept thinking the “deaf girl”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Whitestone was still Miss America.)

What do you think?