Spork Dresses and Smiles: The Ladies of Tonight's Miss America Pageant

It’s possible you may have been going about your business entirely unaware that one of those rare calendar events is upon us. Much like the appearance of Halley’s comet or the upcoming convergence of Thanksgiving and Chanukah, Sunday night marks the second Miss America pageant of 2013.

I know, right? Mind: blown.

I was, naturally, in Vegas last January, where I watched Miss New York Mallory Hagan tap dance her way to the crown. And then the Miss America powers that be went and got all crazy on us. After an almost eight-year sojourn in Sin City that will no doubt go down as something akin to the Pam Ewing-realizing-it-was-all-a-dream episode of Dallas, the pageant announced it was headed back to its longstanding home in Atlantic City. And to its traditional mid-September date. (Pageant in September, corn be heavy soon, isn’t it? Or is that something else? Never mind.)

So here we are, just eight months later, all abuzz with excitement over who will win the coveted tiara. I mean scholarship. One of the umpteen aspiring broadcast journalists? The Princeton student? The clogger? The “electro-acoustic violinist?” Or one of the two – count ‘em! – Bollywood dancers? Personally, I’m waiting for the day contestants start embracing more contemporary talents like Candy Crush and competitive hot dog eating. But I digress.

Unfortunately, convincing my long-suffering husband that I needed to attend two Miss America pageants in the course of a year may have been a bit much. So I’ll be watching from my living room Sunday night, drinking cosmos with my girlfriends and probably doing some live-tweeting. But just as I do every year, I have scoured the field, sifted through the buzz, and analyzed what awaits us. And that included spending embarrassing amounts of time in the amazing Voy forums, where people know and care more about the Miss America pageant than you ever thought humanly possible, so you’re welcome. (In the forums, comments like “Georgia is everything for me. Everything,” and “Any list without CA and VA is HIGHLY SUSPECT,” and “It is laughable – ludicrous – that anybody could call either VA or NJ consistent” are par for the course. Not to mention: “I haven’t seen this look on a contestant’s face since Kirsten [Haglund, Miss America 2008] in swimsuit. I gotta tell ya…I can see it in her eyes. I think she may have this folks.”)

The mainstream media has already pounced on the tattooed, squirrel-cooking Army sergeant Miss Kansas who aspires to be a prosthodontist (a sentence I feel very confident has never, ever once been uttered before this very moment) and the pretty Miss Iowa who was born with one arm, but don’t you worry your pretty little head. I’ll tell you everything you really need to know.