Pageant News Bureau - Miss USA 2003

As sharp as they come

A lot has happened to Camille Young since PNB first profiled her in 2002. Most notably, she has been crowned Miss Pennsylvania USA.

The title has changed her life, and not necessarily in the way you might expect. "It's improved my time-management skills," she told us recently. "I used to be a procrastinator."

Now that's an attitude we like! Ms. Young takes the stress of being a famous beauty queen and she turns it into a means of self-improvement.

If you think this young beauty is smart and hard-working, you're so right. When we caught up with her just a few days before she headed to San Antonio, she was in a library. Not a beauty parlor, not a gym, a library. "Midterm season," she said.

Camille Young with Miss Pennsylvania Teen USA, Taylor Young

Although Ms. Young comes from an entertainment family, and is a model and entertainer in her own right, she's a scholar at heart. She's going to be a professor and change the world. It's not a "pretty" career choice, she said playfully. But we think Camille Young would make anything pretty.

Photos courtesy of Miss Pennsylvania USA

Cleared for takeoff

In 1903, after years of trying, the Wright Brothers finally got their homemade "aeroplane" off the ground. They landed again after only a few seconds, but they had lifted humanity into the age of powered flight.

Now, a century later, another great American is taking flight. Her name is Taylor Carlisle, and she's Miss Arkansas USA.

Photos courtesy of Taylor Carlisle

This is not just a figure of speech. This girl flies, in a plane. And she's at the controls. She earned her pilot's license in high school, and she's now a senior at an aviation college, on her way to becoming a commercial flier.

"For a long time, I wanted to be a doctor," she says, and as a teenager she did volunteer work at a hospital. But she would come home crying about the suffering of little children, and she decided medicine was not for her. Meanwhile, she had taken up flying, because she wanted to have an activity she could share with her dad. And she found a career up above the clouds.

About the same time, she got into pageants and modeling, encouraged by a teacher who was a former beauty queen. "I was a weird-looking kid," Ms. Carlisle insists, "and I couldn't believe I could win anything." But she did. Before capturing the Miss Arkansas USA title, she was a finalist at Miss Arkansas Teen USA and at Miss Arkansas (America).

Ms. Carlisle told PNB that she really enjoyed the wacky movie "Airplane," though she hasn't seen it in a while. "But normally I hate watching movies about flying," she admitted. "They're just so unrealistic."

We have to agree. In most movies about planes, there are no beautiful pilots.

Sweetness and style

Allison Bloodworth says competing in pageants "is almost a given when you're growing up in Mississippi." But her state has an unusual record -- lots of success at Miss America, no success at Miss USA.

She hopes she's the Miss Mississippi USA who will finally break that jinx. And there's a little friendly rivalry close to home: Her college roommate is a contender in the Miss America system.

Friendly rivalries are the only kind Ms. Bloodworth would be involved in.

With distinguished pageant emcee Dana Rosengard

She has the sort of never-met-a-stranger, never-forgot-a-pal personality that makes Mississippi queens so charming. She even made a point of mentioning to PNB how nice the taxi drivers and waiters have been during her reign. (We bet they'd say the same about her.)

Ms. Bloodworth started in baby pageants, but dropped out as a child. "My mother never made me compete." When she decided to try again, she won a high school beauty review and began making up for lost time. She was Miss Mississippi Teen USA 1999 and has also been World Catfish Queen and second runner-up at Miss Mississippi Hospitality.

Her mother owns a pageant dress store, and Ms. Bloodworth is very knowledgeable about clothes. She's studying fashion merchandising and plans to work for an upscale department store. Her "dream job" is interviewing movie stars at TV awards programs and commenting on their outfits. But she would be careful not to hurt their feelings.

When she was in Atlanta recently putting together her pageant wardrobe, a gown company offered her $150 a day to model its line. Ms. Bloodworth just didn't have the time, but she turned them down very politely. "I'll always be a Southern girl," she says, and that's the way we like her.

Photos courtesy of Allison Bloodworth

A queen without boundaries

In the 1960s, there was a TV sitcom called "The Patty Duke Show," about the zany adventures of two lookalike girls from different countries. American actress Patty Duke played both roles.

If that show were being remade today, it might be about the zany adventures of an American beauty queen and a Polish beauty queen, two girls who look exactly alike.

Agnieszka Zakreta, Miss Illinois USA, could play both roles, because she has lived both roles.

She was born in Gdansk, Poland, which is also the birthplace of the Solidarity movement. She grew up in Chicago, where she's a student of graphic design. When she speaks Polish, she sounds very Gdansk. When she speaks English, she sounds very Chicago. And when she competes in pageants, she very often wins.

Agnieszka Zakreta

She has competed in both Poland and America, and even in Southeast Asia. A list of her titles should illustrate the point: Miss Polonia USA 1998, Miss Tourism International 1999 (competing as the Polish representative), Miss Polonii World 2000, Miss Illinois USA 2003.

As a result of her global pageant career, Ms. Zakreta has become something of a goodwill ambassador between Poland and the United States.

She has danced with Dick Cheney, attended George W. Bush's inauguration and been a guest at a mini-summit between the U.S. and Polish presidents. But she takes pains to point out that she's non-political. "I'm not even interested in politics," she says.

She's good-natured about her first name, which has tripped up many an American tongue. We pronounced it Ag nee ESH ka, and she laughed and said, "that's close enough." Her English nickname is Agnes. She likes it, but many Americans tell her it has a grandmotherly sound. To us, it sounds exotic and glamorous, at least when she says it.

Photos courtesy of Agnieszka Zakreta