And now...what you've all been waiting for...

    Miss Illinois USA 2007!

The Big Day has finally come!

 I am SO excited and thrilled and I can't even describe how I feel, the picture will have to suffice! My first pageant! WOW! And don't you like my make-up? Heidi Pierpont was SUCH a sweetheart and came over to my house (yes room service!) to do my make-up! Heidi you saved me $20 bucks cuz I would have had to get up super early and go to a salon to get them to do it. I just can't get the hang of eye make-up yet! Heidi you made me look good that day, and I didn't even know we had a photoshoot right after getting there! Aaahh!!

Why oh WHY did I procrastinate on these forms?! I never do that! I had everything else done long before. I even had my bags packed A MONTH before! Since I had to have 7 copies of the form (one for each judge) then I had to write everything 7 times on the way to the hotel! ah! Not doing that again. 

This sweet man cam runing up to our car as soon as we pulled up, he opened my door, helped me out and then got all my stuff, and let me say HEAVY stuff, all th e way up to my room. I already felt like a queen!

Here is my view from a little corner of the ballroom where I was finishing up my Interview (the questions you get in your Interview are based on what you wrote on your paper) and Production forms (what they read about us while we're walking out on stage in the evening gown).

THANK GOD for BIG bags!! yeah! This cute Burberry bag is courtesy of Vanessa Myers! Vanessa, I can't imagine what the pageant would have been without it! I carried it everywhere with everything in it: stilettos, curling iron, make-up, snacks, tooshbrush, toothpaste, jewelry, camara, perfume, pageant program, pageant book, and lots more!  

Alexis, was my very FAVORITE of ALL the Teen girls! (Too bad I wasn't as cool as her when I was a teen. lol!) She was SO friendly to me from the start, has never met a stranger in her life, and just as soon as she saw me there she just proped herself up and started talking to me and showing me her mega-huge snack bag. She's like, "So if you ever get hungry, come join me and we'll pig out together!" haha she is a SUCH a cutie and so energetic and just vibrant, she just stole everyone's hearts. 

Upon arrival we were told to put all our stuff in the ballroom, until given further instruction to go to our rooms.

So here is the mob of girls and girl junk when we made the massive move to our rooms.  

#706 will be a number I will never forget as long as I live.

This lovely Victoria Davis (Miss Teen Illinois)! We just call her Tory, she is SUCH a sweetheart and I just loved her, almost as much as Mia. :) But I am biased there because Mia is our girl!

Friday--The Interview

Here I am getting ready for my interview. Honestly I'm not really nervous because I don't quite know what to expect and you're only in there for like 3 minutes so it's pretty fast!

Girls everywhere! Getting ready for the interview.

Half the fun was getting all dolled up together in the dressing room!

If you notice that some girls are dressed in their coctail dresses instead of interview outfits. That's because they already had their interview and interview- photoshoot. After that we would immdediately run back to the dressing rooms and get in our coctail dress for the coctail dress photoshoot. That sweet Spanish girl on the left would loan me her make-up when I didn't have time to grab mine, and I loaned her my curling iron. It was like a bunch of girly sisters in a huge house!  

Doesn't the girl on the left look Romanian?

I told this gal should be a model for American Eagle or Hollister or something. You should see her in casual clothes, that is totally her! She was fun to hang out with.

Ashley. There were a million Ashleys--of course!

Here we are waiting outside the door for our photoshoot time!

Girl talk (a.k.a. juicy gossip of course! lol nah it was all fun stuff!)

Teens and Miss's awaiting their interview. Isn't Amanda Muribi's pink tweed suit super cute? The girl in the red was in the Top 5 last year and in the final TWO this year but Shanon won.

::Mealtimes::

 They gave us strict instructions to eat whenever there was food or snacks because "we don't want any girls fainting on-stage" and trust me, with all the workout we got practicing our dance routine and running up and down stairs changing coctail dress to evening gown, to photoshoots to interviews, WHEW! You can eat heartily and stay fit. Besides, as Mia (Miss Illinois 07) said to us, "Girls, no matter how much you eat, you won't put on any wight until 3 days later and by then the pageant will be over, so just dig in!" I've never needed any encouragement there!

 (After this I honestly don't envy models at all. What a sad life to have to always be obsessed with food and not be able to eat grits and pumpkin pie and lasagna!)

::Stage Rehearsals::

Watching the Teen girls do their opening dance.

They were SO adorable! I wish I had video of their dance, it was so cute and they were all so energetic and alive! That's why I decided that teen girls are my favorite people group. The older girls just take everything so seriously and they are nervous wrecks!

This is Miss Deborah Tek (and she WAS our tec girl! We were told to label EVERYTHING we had with our name, because in the middle of hundreds of girls, you will loose your stuff and never see it again unless you label it! Well silly me, labeled EVERY single piece of make-up and other things, but forgot the clothes, purses, bags, the MAIN/important things!

So I was commenting about this dilemma (since I'm not going to write on my clothes and bag with a marker!) and it was Deborah to the rescue! She says, "I have a label maker, do you want some labels?" and pulls out her technology from her bag. She printed me out some labels right then and there. WOW! It was like a Mary Poppins bag (what else do you have in there girl?!)

A scary story: One evening after we wrapped up the preliminals and we were having a leisure dinner with ice cream and other such evil food, I was walking back to my room with my roommate, we passed the lost and found table and I glanced over at it and saw MY SWIMSUIT! Ahhh!!! It wasn't labeled and what would have happened if I hadn't seen it, (they would not have gotten it back to me because it wasn't labeled) and I had to wear it for the show the next day! Yikes! Close call. Scares me just thinking about it again. Eeek.

Blythe Richmond's sister won for Teen Illinois in '06. So this year little sister was here to compete!

 Amanda Muribi was one of the most beautiful girls there and does beauty pageants and competitions on a regular basis. We shared the front row on stage for the opening dance number. She is Mediteranean so her skin is this beautiful olive color and her hair a deep, raven, gypsy black. She has soft eyes and a sweet smile, although she didn't talk much and rarely spoke unless you spoke to her; so personality wise, I don't know much.    

The rooms we're just gorgeous! I couldn't get really good pictures of everything, but I tried!

This is right before our first show.

And right before the day started! Eeek! Scary, but aren't we all in the morning ;) 

Most women wouldn't be caught dead in their curlers and pajamas, but these beauties didn't seem to mind one bit (some of them would wear it all day until and take it out right before the show). 

Oh yeah babe! Rock on!

Here is the beautiful view of Chicago right before you get onto the elevator on our 7th floor...I just love how the smoke rises in the early dusk.

   Yeah we were up bright and early for rehearsals!

Ladies and Gentlemen:

 It's SHOW TIME!!

Backstage at the Anual Miss Illinois 2007 Pageant can be summed up in two words: total caos. For less experienced models, the swarming photographers, reporters, and publicists can be overwhelming. But for pros like Cristina Rodriguez, it's just another day on the job. (Gotta love that big hair!)

Me without a drop of make-up on, and Alexandra, fully finished. How do you like her fake lashes?

This is my make-up artist. He is Mexican so we hit it off right away jabbering in Spanish! Hey it takes them a couple of hours to get you all ready for the stage so might as well enjoy your time there! I thoroughly did!

We had an opening number in our coctail dress! The colors had to be white, red, or pink. We basically had a dance routine, and then we would take turns at the mic saying our name and where we're from. (They would constantly remind us, "Now girls, only say, 'I'm Joana Foley from Oak Park' DO NOT say "I'm Joanna Foley from Oak Park, Illinois--you're ALL from Illinois!" (Or so we hope! lol. actually there have been girls who ON STAGE said, they were from Illinois. How embarrassing. That probably would have been me ;) 

Here I am with Miss Congeniality! Yes, at the end of the week, all of us girls vote for who we thought was the sweetes girl there. I heard it was a close tie between me and her. haha wow that sounded cocky! But I am so glad she got it, she is definitely vivacious and always encouraging all the other girls! wowzers! I am a quiet, shy, introvert compared to her! lol.

Here I am with the girl who got me into this in the first place! One day she says, "Guess what I am going to enter the Miss Illinois USA pageant!" I am like "What?! REALLY?! How?! When?! Where?!" So she told me all about it and I said, "I wanna do it too!" SO, I sent in my application and didn't think I would even get past that, much less called back for an interview, when one day I got THE CALL!! Ahhhhhh!! I just felt like being completely honest with the judges and telling them what I'm all about: basically loving the Lord and girls. And they loved it.   

  Let me point out I do realize how much I look like a drag queen, but that's because they put so much make-up on! Mine alone was enough to go around third-world countries, for crying out loud! They just want us to be seen from far away. It's just like theater. Close up, it's ugly, far away and on video camara, much better.

Eating a subway sandwich in my room after the first show. They were so good at keeping us well fed and with energy snacks in between breaks so we won't faint from exhaustion!

and talking on the phone...or pretending to! 

And journaling about my weekend...we can't forget a thing!

We had some time to kill... Relaxing before the next big gig.

Believe me it was exhausting!

Here was a sample hairdo pulled back. I don't know what I like more, up or down.

::Dinner Dance:: (girls only!) 

The girl in the black is Ashley Bond, she was a semi-finalist although I think she needed to be in the top 5. She was honestly one of the sweetest girls in the WHOLE pageant. I really want to be like that myself. The girl beside me in the black and white on the right is a sweet Christian and yeah she was so much fun to hang out with.

Me and some of the other girls were thinking that these two girls beauties should have been in the Miss group for sure! How can they be Teens?! They were two of the Top 5 finalists in the Teen category though so that's good.

Jelena Kostic belongs on the Victoria Secret runway if you ask me. She has this Heidi Klum/Ukrain/model-look that is just SO beautiful. She is quiet but very gentle in her personality, a great girl. AND she had the CUTEST interview suit outfit. It was brown plaid and she got it at Bebe. I just saw it's on the sale rack now...I just might go snatch it up myself!

These were our "chaperones." Basically we ask them for whatever we need to know about the show and they keep us informed! The two girls in the middle were Miss New Jersey and Miss Massachusets for 2006. And the other two have been in numerous pageants all over I can't remember it all. The guy, ahem, now he was a bit...interesting. In one word: fruity, but I was laughing so hard throughout his whole talk he gave us! I couldn't help it!   

Lok at the face of the little girl behind me. Awww! I would be just as stunned if I was her age walking past a pageant girl. Wow I just love hanging out with young girls!