| In September of 1949, The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross travelled to the Bronx to meet Wanda Nalepa, a twenty-two-year-old whose father worked in a furniture factory. Soon Wanda’s boyfriend, Bob, showed up to drive them to Atlantic City, where the younger woman, a recently certified nurse, was set to compete for the title of Miss America. Three-quarters of a century later, the contest—which will crown its latest winner tonight—is sashaying through a long period of cultural eclipse. During the pageant’s heyday, in the sixties and seventies, tens of millions of TV viewers tuned in each year to watch the proceedings; when Ross wrote about the competition, it was still gathering force. Contestants were ineligible if they had ever been married—or if they were Black. “Greater Philadelphia” and New York City got their own representatives, and Nalepa, competing on behalf of New York State, was dismayed to discover that some of her rivals had received financial assistance to get ready. (To pay for her own clothing, makeup, and a modelling class, she had borrowed three hundred dollars from her family.) Not only did pageant organizers disseminate contestants’ height, weight, and bust sizes, they shared calf, hip, and ankle measurements, too, and assigned each “girl” a chaperone. Ross looks slightly askance at the contest’s rules and rituals—which placed a heavy emphasis on constant smiling—but she treats the aspirants with empathy. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” Miss Arizona confides, “and I can frown at people if I feel like it.” | 
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