There she is, Miss America.

Last night, in Atlantic City, NJ, Miss New York was crowned Miss America 2014. I had a difficult time deciding whether or not I could watch the televised pageant this year.. It looked more like a halftime show with the loud pop music playing and energetic dancing going on. The introductions, typically my favorite part, were the contestants bee-bopping to a song while shouting some cutesy fact about the state they represented.  And then when I saw that the host was Chris Harrison, creator of the Bachelor, I felt sorry for the girls for the obvious association his selection was going to create.  It was just too much.  But I could not go to sleep knowing that it was on.  My mother grew up a dozen miles from Atlantic City and as a young girl, she studied the historic pageant with devotion.  She dreamed of being Miss America and scrupulously recorded the pageant details with her sisters in scrapbooks.  And then when I was young my sister and I used love sitting with her to watch the pageant together and learn from her all the interesting facts of former winners.  When, Heather Whitestone won the pageant in 1995 as the first deaf Miss America, my mother  cried.  We would also bemoan the changes at the attempts to modernize, because to us they seemed only to cheapen it.  I think that she would have been thrilled to see Miss New York crowned as the first Indian American Miss America.  Her Bollywood dance was truly a show to watch, but I was desperately trying to figure out who would have been her personal favorite to win.  My grandmother sent the postcard below to my mom many years ago, to say hello and with her classic suggestion that this card was worth saving.