It was also an all-night-long pageant performed by the institution that knows the least about the lives of ordinary Americans -- your cable teevee news heroes and heroines.
"The modern Southern belle," the sportswriter Frank Deford once said, has "long been the Pageant ideal".
In the "lion and unicorn", Kenneth Rowntree's Freedom mural, a long, large, painted pageant showing scenes from English history, was the unifying feature.
Not long after last fall's pageant, ABC said that it would not renew its one-year contract with the Atlantic City extravaganza because, as one senior program executive, put it, "It simply was not performing for us".
"Lincoln," released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, is a long, lavish, talky historical pageant, featuring some of the finest and best-known actors in movies, written by an eminent playwright (Tony Kushner) and directed by a man (Steven Spielberg) whose name is virtually synonymous with large-scale, blockbuster entertainment.
Watching any public event on the national broadcaster is an ideal opportunity to shout at the television set, particularly when the event in question is so long-winded and time consuming as a record breaking, four hour long, rain-sodden riverside pageant.
On Monday the cable channel TLC became the latest broadcaster to drop the long-running Miss America Pageant, Reuters reported.
Jay Wegman, the center's director, says that although the old-style pageants are long gone, the theater often has productions featuring young people, like "The Nutcracker" earlier this month.
Above the whirring of the jerry-rigged power supply, the minister of tourism assured the shaken competitors of a long-scheduled Miss Europe pageant that the show would go on and the proceeds would go to the rebuilding effort.
