Beauty Contests

A former dairy princess was sentenced Friday to life in prison, without possibility of parole until 2003, for strangling a former homecoming queen in a jealous rage over a farmer whom both women loved. Lori Esker, 21, was convicted in June of first-degree intentional homicide for the September, 1989, slaying of Lisa Cihaski, 21, who was strangled with a belt in a car outside of a Wausau area motel.

L.A. is not The Place for beauty queens these days. Heads don't always turn when they walk by, agents don't necessarily return their calls, no one is dying to turn them into movie stars or TV talk-show hostesses. Miss USA can't even get a guest shot on her favorite talk show. "Arsenio, are you listening?" asks Gretchen Polhemus as she coils her sinuous, six-foot body toward a reporter's tape recorder, in the hope that her plea will reach Arsenio Hall. But it probably won't--and she knows it.

As a winner of countless little girls' beauty pageants, including Little Miss Colorado, 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey had what pageant insiders knowingly call "the look." A cascade of blond hair. Bee-stung lips. Prominent cheekbones. Wide eyes, not unlike every female lead character in every recent Disney animated movie. (Belle, Jasmine, Ariel, Esmeralda--the list goes on and on.) But more than just looks, JonBenet had that indefinable "it"--a preternatural poise and grace.

Orange County might seem a little less talented, a bit less articulate and a lot less cute this weekend, when 12 local women will be in Fresno competing for the title of Miss California. Miss Placentia, a pianist and aspiring professional snowboarder, will be there. So will Miss Orange County, a hard-of-hearing woman who hopes to use the title to empower the disabled.

Angela Chao Roberson, 22, knew she did not exactly look Chinese, with her cocoa-colored skin, her bushels of curly hair and her curvy figure. But she had no doubt she belonged in the same room with 17 other young women vying for the title Miss Los Angeles Chinatown. Sure, she ate soul food when her father's African American relatives came to visit her family in Victorville, but her family was much more likely to eat rice and stir-fried tilapia with garlic and soy sauce.

It is not a response Justin Rudd expects from a would-be Miss America. But as he coaches Miss Nevada in his Long Beach living room, asking her mock pageant questions about cosmetic surgery and her diet of chicken fingers and fries, he is unfazed by this potential misstep: "What," Rudd asks Crystal Wosik, "do you dislike most about yourself?" Miss Nevada does not pause. "My back fat." Rudd gives no grimace. "And my nose," she goes on. Rudd doesn't blink.

Miss Afghanistan knew she was taking a risk when she strutted across a Manila catwalk in a bright red bikini. "I did understand," said Vida Samadzai, a 25-year-old Cal State Fullerton student, "that it would probably not be acceptable in my society." But she did not know she would be denounced by the government of her native land, criticized by fellow Afghans -- even in the U.S. -- and at the same time hailed by others as a role model for girls and women in the "new Afghanistan."