Pageant News Bureau - Geoff Tucker

The remarkable Mr. Tucker

Photos courtesy of Geoff Tucker

Geoff Tucker with Heather Whitestone, Miss America 1995.

Geoff Tucker often jokes that he's a "former pageant hater." He may be exaggerating a bit, because he strikes us as too much of a gentleman to have ever hated anything. But at the very least, his old attitude was like that of Rhett Butler: "Frankly, my dear . . . "

Though he's from Alabama, where pageants abound, Tucker always took the beauty queen stereotypes as gospel. To him, pageants were a silly pursuit for shallow people. It was all harmless enough, he assumed, but definitely not something that a grownup would take seriously.

Geoff Tucker with Rachel Boston, Miss Tennessee Teen USA 1999 and star of "American Dreams."

Geoff Tucker with Katy Johnson, who was Miss Vermont (America) 1999 and Miss Vermont USA 2001.

There were other things in life to interest him. He initially studied for the Christian ministry, and got into radio broadcasting while in college. Later he took up acting, writing and art and became an aficionado of science fiction. But his training and experience in communications eventually opened a door into the pageant world, and he walked through it without even thinking.

In the early 1990s, a friend asked Tucker to emcee a beauty pageant. "I looked at it as a way to make $50 and kill a Saturday morning," he recalls. He was prepared to tolerate the people he encountered, though his expectations were low. But that morning, all his prejudices took a tumble. The contestants weren't losers, not even those who lost; many were downright impressive. And the event was fascinating.

Geoff Tucker with Miss Alabama USA 2000, Jina Mitchell.

By now, as you may already know, Geoff Tucker is a fixture in the business he once disdained. He may be best known for founding Starshiners! Productions, a speakers' bureau and pageant production company.

Tucker is a talent broker, a man who makes connections between the pageant world, the modeling world and the rest of the entertainment business. He's a bridge-builder between pageant producers and the pageant media. He manages always to be at the center of whatever is happening.

Two cases in point: He runs a fan club for fast-rising Hollywood actress Kristina Hughes, a former Miss Connecticut USA. He also organizes reunions of former pageant contestants. His current project is bringing together the girls of Miss USA 1998. It's tentatively scheduled for Labor Day Weekend 2003.

It has occurred to some people that a man with Geoff Tucker's connections belongs on the West Coast instead of Birmingham. But he remains in the South, always busy and always smiling. Maybe he's waiting for Hollywood to come to him. And by golly, it just might.