Ashlee Perkinson accepts her crown from Miss North Carolina Brooke McLaurin, whose height kept her from getting the crown securely in place. Ashlee said she had to hold the crown up while making her victory walk.
It’s not surprising that 15-year-old Ashlee Perkinson is a beauty queen.
The Henderson native, a sophomore at Northern Vance High School, looks the part, with girl-next-door good looks, a winning smile, and clear, gray eyes she inherited from her mother, Little Miss Kerr Lake pageant director Susan Rogers. Most of all, she carries herself with the perfect posture and poise that come from walking the stage at 40-plus pageants since she was 12.
It’s an experience that has earned her 30 titles across the state.
“I’d always wanted to do pageants,” Ashlee said in a recent interview over breakfast at the Dabney Drive Restaurant. She competed in the 4-year-old class at the Miss Henderson pageant, took eight years off, then was hooked.
“It took me forever to win,” she said. “It took me about a year to win.”
“It took her a while to get going,” Rogers said, “but once she got going, she got pretty good at it.”
But Ashlee won’t be winning any more pageants for a year. She’ll be too busy fulfilling the duties of Young Miss North Carolina, the 13-to-15-year-old title she won at a pageant in Hickory last month. Mayor Clem Seifert will honor Ashlee at the start of the City Council meeting tonight at 7:30.
It was Ashlee’s fourth try for a title at the Little Miss North Carolina pageant, and she had come heartbreakingly close: third runner-up once and first runner-up twice.
“I had been in that position where you’re holding the girl’s hand and you’re looking her in the face thinking, ‘Please don’t call out my name for first runner-up,’ three different times,” Ashlee said. “When I got in that position again this year, I was expecting to get first runner-up again.”
Based on the preliminaries, Ashlee said, it looked as if she would be the runner-up. When she won, her jaw just dropped.
“You could have shoved a watermelon down her throat,” Rogers said.
Rogers said her daughter isn’t an emotional person. She’s mature, focused, a straight-A student. She works hard, but she normally takes everything in stride. Ashlee had told her mom that if she ever won the state pageant, she couldn’t see herself crying.
When the winning moment came, she cried for an hour.
Ashlee Perkinson accepts a hug from Vanessa McClelland after realizing she’s the new Junior Miss North Carolina.
“She knows how to win and she knows how to lose,” Rogers said. “She’s competitive, but she’s still Ashlee the whole time.”
The victory was surprising given the medical trauma Ashlee handled during the three-day pageant.
Ashlee was taking some acne medication and had an allergic reaction that forced her and Rogers to hit the emergency room in the middle of the night, only four hours before rehearsal for the talent competition. She wound up missing the rehearsal, and Rogers thought they might have to give up on the pageant.
Treated with Benadryl and a cortisone shot, Ashlee stuck things out.
The evening gown, photogenic and onstage question competitions weren’t problems, but her fingers were swollen like sausage links while she played her arrangement of a classical piano piece in the talent competition, her favorite part of any pageant. That was particularly scary because the talent judges were all dance experts, and Rogers worried that they would have a bias toward dancers.
It wasn’t the first time Ashlee had to overcome long odds as a classical pianist at a beauty pageant, where most competitors sing or dance. Ashlee said one pageant that provided an upright instead of a concert piano — “You kind of get that sinking feeling in your stomach when you have to play on an upright anyway” — the ivory keys were so worn that they cut her fingers as she played. The next time she played there, the pageant organizers had replaced the ivory with card keys from a hotel.
Things worked out at the state pageant, however: Ashlee won the talent competition and a $100 prize. (She’ll also get a $1,000 savings bond at the end of her reign.)
Because of the prescribed drugs, she also wasn’t her sharpest mentally during the interview, when the questions included her thoughts on President Bush’s nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court.
Ashlee has an interview coach, Carol Featherstone, to help her keep her composure and express herself well when confronted with questions that can range from why the contestant wants to win to her opinions on such topics as AIDS, drugs and teen drinking. The coaching deals with the range of possible questions to help Ashlee stay calm, but she doesn’t try to memorize answers to potential queries.
The Supreme Court question was right up Ashlee’s alley. She has an interest in politics, hopes to major in political science in a few years at her lifelong favorite school, Duke University, then expects to move onto the political scene in some capacity. Unless she goes into national intelligence. Or maybe makes a career of her passion for the piano.
She considers Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a strong political woman who plays classical piano, to be a role model. “We have a lot in common.”
| Of course, Ashlee’s still a high school student. She’s happy to have the support of her friends as she competes in pageants, and she’s looking forward to a challenging course load this year at Northern Vance, where she runs cross country and the distance races in track.
Rail-thin Ashlee also has a teenager’s metabolism. As she plowed through a meal of an egg scrambled with cheese, country ham and grits, her mother joked: “She might be a beauty queen, but she eats constantly.” And like most 15-year-olds, she’s counting the days until her 16th birthday allows her to get her driver’s license. She has about six months to go. |
 |
|
That time and more will be filled with her service as Young Miss North Carolina. In addition to public appearances at places such as retirement homes, Ashlee and the rest of the Little Miss North Carolina court will be raising money for the pageant’s designated charity, the Masonic Children’s Home in Oxford. Rogers said the pageant has given more than $67,000 to the Oxford home over 18 years, and the pageant winners are the only girls who ride in the St. John’s Day parade. Ashlee said she and her fellow beauty queens are looking at running a charity golf tournament and a yearlong raffle for something big, such as a top-flight television, to raise money for the Masonic Home. They also will appear at Mule Days in Benson on Sept. 24 and try a variety of fundraisers, such a dunking booth, face painting, tattoos and balloon animals. All of that traveling requires a big commitment from the parents as well as the beauty queen, and Ashlee has that support from Rogers and her husband, Jay, as well as from Ashlee’s dad, Jim Perkinson, and his wife, Debbie. Ashlee said her half-brother, Harrison, 7, is her biggest fan — except the night she won Junior Miss North Carolina, when he was bitter about being pulled inside from a football game and wouldn’t take photos with her. “We do something about the pageant almost every weekend,” Rogers said. “You have to love it. You have to want to be there.” Ashlee’s schedule will include helping her mom in February with the fourth annual Little Miss Kerr Lake pageant, which Ashlee and Mike Brooks emcee every year. She’ll crown her successor as Junior Miss Sampson County, the pageant she won to qualify for the state pageant. (Ashlee can’t compete in Little Miss Kerr Lake because her mom runs it.) Next July, it’s back to the Little Miss North Carolina pageant. Ashlee has three years to try to win the top age group at the state pageant. There’s no national pageant after Little Miss North Carolina, but Ashlee has dreams of winning Miss North Carolina and Miss America someday. “I love being onstage. I love being in front of everybody, being able to talk, being able to perform my talent,” Ashlee said. “It’s a wonderful experience.” |
|