Mr. Renneisen's proposal to license Miss America slot machines for casinos drew immediate fire from a number of state pageant officials, who characterized the idea as demeaning to the wholesome image the organization has tried to promote.
Ms. Povataj, 27, who runs the Midtown showroom of the decorator F. Schumacher and Company, said she got the idea for the pageant when she went to Kosovo last October to fulfill her father's dying wish: that he be buried in the village where he was born, near Pec.
While the idea behind the pageant was positive (it's a cancer fundraiser, for Christ's sake), it's frustrating to see that women's sexuality is still being reduced to pageantry.
The show's creator, Mike Darnell, has said that his idea was to blend the ABC "Millionaire" show with the Miss America pageant and "The Dating Game".
"My feminist mother was very unimpressed by the idea of a beauty pageant," said Traavik, 36.
The idea for a senior pageant arose 30 years ago when Al Mott, a minister in Asbury Park as well as a singer, was seeking to honor a different kind of beauty, one shaped by a life fully lived, with all its woes, elevated by accomplishments and good works.
"The idea of an inaugural drag pageant for First Nations queens was way too much of an opportunity to pass up," he explains over the phone from Sydney.
To pull the struggling Miss America pageant into the 21st century, Robert M. Renneisen Jr., its chief executive, has proposed some unconventional ideas, like moving the pageant from Atlantic City -- perhaps to an Indian casino in Connecticut -- and licensing a Miss America slot machine.
In a separate letter, the Miss Oregon Scholarship Pageant executive director, Dana Phillips, said Ms. Harman objected to the idea of a Miss America-themed slot machine.
It said the pageants are "a discriminatory and sexist practice", that "reinforce the idea that women must be valued and rewarded exclusively by their physical appearance, based on stereotypes", the Argentina Independent reports.
