Queen Camp The Hardest-To-Justify Contest In America Keeps On Rolling

Every year it’s the same.

The “Stepford Wives” parade of contestants with hard hair, harsh makeup and pasty, Vaseline-coated smiles.

The pool of third-tier celebrity judges, pretending to care about their official duties when in fact they’re wondering if firing their agents will jump-start their careers.

The talent competition that involves batons flying in the air, Ann Millerish tap dancing and slightly offkey renditions of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.”

The lobotomized replies during the question-and-answer sessions, some of them sounding like lyrics to a Whitney Houston song, e.g., “I believe the children are our future.”

Miss America is high camp and she doesn’t even know it.

They oughta be honest about it and have Boy George sing “There She Is” at the moment of crowning glory, but instead they play it straight - as if the show were a serious scholarship pageant and not a cheese-cakey, anachronistic, made-for-TV event that looks like something Dean Martin would watch from his swingin’ den circa 1961.

Saturday’s pageant marks the 75th anniversary of an event that was born as a late-summer tourist attraction for Atlantic City and has evolved into this big puffy piece of Americana cotton candy - girly-pink, sticky-sweet and as devoid of substance as a wispy cloud.

It’s one of the top bad-TV events of the year, right up there with the Academy Awards and any Barbara Walters special involving a celebrity who cries on camera.

Former Miss Americas you’ve heard of - such as Phyllis George, Lee Meriwether or Mary Ann Mobley - carved out careers as sort of TV housewives.

Ironically, the most famous and successful former Miss America is the one who got the boot - Vanessa Williams, the beautiful and talented singer-actress who has had gold records and was OK in that late-night cable movie I saw about motorcycling bank robbers.

Each year the contestants are so computerized, so programmed, so monumentally one-dimensional they would have to improve their personalities to get to the level of the pod persons in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Nothing depresses them, ever.

The only one who’s allowed to cry is the winner, and of course those are tears of unbridled joy.

In the history of Miss America, no one has ever cussed on stage after messing up the words to “Tonight, Tonight” or “Wind Beneath My Wings.” No one has ever heckled or tried to trip a rival contestant. No one has ever winked at the host and said, “I’ll give you a whole new definition for happiness, big boy.”

In that deliciously awful moment when the final two contestants hold hands and the crowd is buzzing and a drumroll rumbles and they announce the first runner-up and it takes the other one a split second to figure out that means she’s won, watch the face of the loser.

Watch the anguish in her eyes as she smiles and acts thrilled beyond belief to learn that 15 years of piano lessons and dance recitals and sit-ups and rice cakes and vocal training have resulted in her becoming a stage accessory.

Watch her face while the undeserving winner gets to take the walk of triumph, mascara cascading down her cheeks as she struggles to keep the tiara from falling off her prom-queen hairdo.

The look on the face of that runner-up rivals Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” A medley of close-ups of the first runners-up through the years would be more frightening than another Stephen King miniseries starring Rob Lowe.

Every year there seems to be another controversy dogging the pageant, although it’s never much of a controversy. I mean, we never have a drag queen winning Miss Congeniality, or Miss New Hampshire announcing she’s a lesbian.

A few years ago, after much debate they eliminated the high heels from the swimsuit competition, thus removing the Jackie Gleason Showgirl Factor. They also renamed it the “Physical Fitness in Swimsuit” category, as if the girls were going to have to meet the requirements to gain admittance in The Citadel.

In 1992 Miss South Carolina, Carrie Lee Davis - contestants often have three names, like high-profile suspects and country singers - who is a doctor, said two other contestants had asked her to prescribe them diuretics. That time bomb was defused when pageant officials concluded that the two were just kidding around - yah, right.

Last year, the tempest involved Miss South Dakota, Kristi Bauer, a blue-eyed blonde who wore a buckskin and used an Indian burial scaffold in a dance routine that was performed to music from “Dances With Wolves.” Honest.

“The issue here is: You don’t do a dance routine in a cemetery,” said Francis Whitebird, South Dakota commissioner of Indian affairs.

Oh, but you do if you’re a Miss America contestant.

This year’s pageant comes with a built-in controversy: a phone-in poll to determine if the swimsuit category should be banned altogether.

Liberation! As if eliminating the swimsuit parade will suddenly open the “scholarship pageant” to kind, intelligent, talented, 250-pound young women.

That’ll happen on the same day they hire Boy George to sing the big song.

MEMO: Richard Roeper is a columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times and a radio commentator on WLS-FM. His articles also appear in Spy magazine and New Woman.

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