I don’t even know where to begin in the awesome description of Miss Kansas, Theresa Marie Vail. Her beauty pageant platform is “Empowering Women: Overcoming Stereotypes and Breaking Barriers.” How does she do it?
Well, let’s pull out the highlights of the pageant resume: She’s a double major in Chemistry and Chinese. She’s a Distinguished Honor Graduate from the Army School of Ordnance and Army School of Health Science. She’s working on getting her pilot’s license, and she wants to be a dentist for the military. She founded the Miss Outdoor Girl brand and website, and she’s a spokeswoman for the Suburban Woodsman hunting company. Not surprising, she’s an expert marksman who can take out squirrels with her gun and wants to take a bear with her bow. Oh, and she runs all-girl archery clinics. She can skin her own deer, and then make a mean stew with squirrel and sauerkraut.
She only got into pageants less than a year ago when her commanding officer suggested that she was a fantastic role model for women. When the pageant found out that her talent going to be archery, they notified her of a “projectile” ban only 2 days before the pageant. The options she was provided? Suddenly find a new talent or just drop out. Her decision? Pull up Nessun Dorma on YouTube and learn it on her own with her only serious prior singing experience was in the high school choir. She won the state talent competition.
She’s making headlines today because she’ll be the first contestant to not hide her tattoos – a prayer and a military insignia. But her resume says so much more about the stereotypes she hopes to break.
I saw her video yesterday. She is….gorgeous. Given that guys my age should stop lusting after women her age, I’ll just say she would make any parent proud.
Most beautiful soldier I have ever seen.
I find her entry into a beauty pageant understandable, from an Alinsyite perspective of making those horrible pageant people accept her on their own terms, with her winning on her application of those terms in a definitively non-standard way.
As a father of a daughter who at 10 wanted to be a ballerina-princess-astronaut-ninja, I note that at 19 my kid needs only a marriage to royalty, or conquest of a monarchical country, to achieve a respectable version of each item on her list.