There is an empowering group of pageants building the self-esteem and offering an outlet for the talents of women who have reached their golden years.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Lydia Tanne was being treated for cancer, but that wasn’t going to keep her away from the Superstar Theater, a 1,350-seat auditorium at the Resorts Casino Hotel here, the site a few weeks ago of the most recent Ms. Senior America Pageant.
“I tell my doctor I have to come,” Tanne, 90, a resident of Palmer, Massachusetts. (via Cannes, France, and Trieste, Italy), said in thickly accented English. An opera singer, Tanne returns every year to cheer on her friends and to relive her own moment of glory. In 1994, she won Ms. Massachusetts Senior America, and lest anyone forget, she was wearing a black satin jacket with her title embroidered on it.
“Mimi,” as Tanne is known, isn’t alone in her devotion to the decades-old pageant for women “between 60 and death,” as one contestant jokingly puts it.
Unlike the Miss America beauty pageant — the two pageants are not related — Ms. Senior America, which was held Oct. 18-20, caters not to women on the cusp of adulthood but to those who have experienced life in all of its joys and sorrows.
They are doctors and nurses, business owners and executives, dancers and singers. They have escaped wars, survived illnesses, lost spouses and children. And yet, they are still kicking — and kicking high.
“If you were taken to a Russian prison, you learn to do anything,” said Krystyna Slowikowska Farley, 91, Ms. Connecticut Senior America, who was dressed in a long-sleeve, mint green beaded dress,rhinestone earrings and a tiara. Farley was born in Poland in 1925. After imprisonment in a labor camp in the Ural Mountains, she joined the Polish army in exile as a nurse’s aide before coming to the United States, where she became a dental technician and raised five children.
This story is from the February 2017 edition of Marie Claire Malaysia.
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This story is from the February 2017 edition of Marie Claire Malaysia.
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