caitlin upton
08/28/2007
Miss South Carolina Responds On TODAY SHOW!
You gotta give Miss South Carolina Teen USA some credit: she doesn't run from her mistakes. Lauren Caitlin Upton fumbled her final pageant question so spectacularly this weekend that the clip has become an internet juggernaut. But did Upton hole up in her room with a pint of fro-yo? No, she went on the Today show.
Upton has a simple and honest defense: she was overwhelmed, and she made a mistake. Given the opportunity to answer the fatal question again, she does so... well, not brilliantly, but coherently. She doesn't single-handedly come up with a pithy solution to the nation's educational pitfalls, but at least she makes sense.
Basically, Upton comes off as a sweet, composed girl who, okay, may not be a genius, but certainly isn't as completely brainless as folks might have thought. Sure, her interviewee style consists mostly of rewording the question and parroting it back. But I think anyone who doesn't sock Ann Curry in the head when Curry says condescending things like, "Good girl, you!" deserves some extra credit.
Incidentally, as the fickle finger of fate would have it, there is another teen pageant contestant from South Carolina named Lauren, and she's getting a lot of undeserved flack. Her name is Lauren Elizabeth Lytle. She's South Carolina's Miss Outstanding Teen, she's got a 4.6 GPA, and she's a completely different person in a completely different pageant. So leave her be.
08/25/2007
At Miss Teen USA Pageant, South Carolina Fumbles
Sure, you could write off Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton's spectacular fumble of the question "Why can't twenty percent of Americans find America on a map?" as just another example of an over-tanned bimbo trying to sound smarter than she is. Or perhaps you could try to see her verbal stumbling as a post-modern attempt to illustrate this country's crumbling education system. With each repetition of the word "America," imagine Caitlin pleading for Congress to reexamine No Child Left Behind and other educational reforms of the past ten years. Imagine her reaching out, for something better.
