Beauty and the Beasts

It was a tough job, but I did take part in what has become an annual event for Miss Texas on her way to the Miss America Pageant: a mock grilling by local media folks to prepare her for the East Coast media hordes. Titled “Interview From Hell,” the two-hour session allowed four cultural elitists to pepper Miss Texas-Amy Parker of Carrollton-with nasty questions about breast augmentation, the possibility of posing nude, virginity, sleeping with judges, etc.

“Whoever becomes Miss America is immediately given celebrity status,” explains Carol Beck Edgar, assistant vice president of public affairs at Methodist Hospitals of Dallas, who has helped prepare Miss Texas for the past three years. “And if she doesn’t have training, she can come across as a blithering idiot. It is a very different world.”

That’s a world Parker entered this year, after her third try at the Miss Texas crown. But if those previous trips through pageant land didn’t prepare her for the media crush, did we? “They definitely helped,” says Parker, who was not one of this year’s 10 finalists. “Other contestants went through mock interviews, but not with actual press people. In Atlantic City, there were a few [reporters) who were just trying to get dirt, but I didn’t dig myself into any ditches I couldn’t get out of.”