Enjoying their ‘age of elegance’
Print Edition
BEAUTY pageants may conjure up images of young women in bikinis, but in Atlantic City a roomful of sequined grandmothers and great-grandmothers are putting their best stiletto forward.
From an ex-CIA employee to Whitney Houston’s childhood choir director to a marathon runner, Ms Senior America celebrates women aged 60 and above who defy stereotypes of what it means to be ladies of a certain age who in past years may have sunk into a rocking chair.
“This is our age of elegance. It’s the beginning. Not our end,” beamed 73-year-old Carolyn Slade Harden, a former recording artist crowned Ms Senior America 2017, resplendent in cream silk.
With some members in their 90s, Ms Senior America is a family of sisters who have experienced not just the pleasures of life but the pains — surviving cancer, going through divorce, losing husbands.
But if Ms Minnesota needed crutches to get on stage, this year’s finals showed no one is ever too old to tap dance, sing or show off their curves in a sequined gown with a crown glittering on coiffed hair.
Senior America Inc was founded in 1971 to promote the positive aspects of aging and has championed women in their age of elegance ever since.
There were 47.8 million people aged 65 and over in the United States in 2015, or 15 percent of the population — a number projected to rise to 98.2 million, or nearly one in four residents by 2060.
Glittering in strapless gowns, mermaid dresses and princess frocks, state finalists from across the country flashed winning smiles, bedecked in a haze of sequins, hair spray and immaculate make-up.
“That’s our mama!” yelled one man in the crowd as Ms Florida took the microphone. “I’ve never seen so many rhinestones in my life,” confided another.
Judging spans four categories: an interview, 35-second philosophy of life nuggets — for example let’s all be the reason someone smiles today — evening gown and a talent.
It was the talent segment that elicited the biggest wolf whistles from adoring friends and family in a hotel theater in southern New Jersey.
Ms Tennessee danced ballet, complete with pirouettes and arabesques to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Ms Massachusetts dressed up in a can-can skirt to sing Jumbo Italiano.
“Hollywood thinks youth,” purred Ms Senior District of Columbia Frances Curtis Johnson, 68, a community activist and executive assistant, who has no intention of retiring until at least 70.
“They need to look at the beauty of growing old.
“To live is to get older, and we should take that and use it and embrace it.”
Ultimately it was Ms Senior New Jersey with a megawatt smile and enviable skin, who carried the day, buoyed by a home-state crowd two years after the death of her husband of 51 years.
In the gym every morning at 7am, Slade Harden said there was no magic answer to looking fabulous in your 70s. Pray, eat healthy, she said.
Mother of two, grandmother of three and great grandmother of one, she was a recording artist in the 1960s, knew Dionne Warwick, directed a young Whitney Houston, got two degrees and set up her own company.
“I think the word pageant scares some people away because they say ‘oh no it’s a beauty pageant’ but it’s much, much more than that,” she said.
“It’s beauty from within.”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
