Viet beauty queen lost title over ‘technicality’
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
A strange turn of the event, hinging on a stranger pageant rule, caused a Viet who had been crowned Miss Garden Grove Outstanding Teen just six months ago to lose her title, reports the OC Register here.
Emily Nguyen (center, when she won the pageant), now a senior at Sunny Hills High School, was beauty queen for six months, until a casual lunch conversation with the pageant’s executive director disclosed that she was too old to qualify for the competition.
“Too old” is relative. Emily was 16 at the time she applied for the pageant in the summer of 2008. That was the summer after her junior year in high school. She’s still 16 now.
Nonetheless, “according to the pageant rules, that meant she was already a senior,” the executive director Stacy Margolin said. Margolin called the problem a “technicality.”
As it turns out, a teen-ager’s senior year in high school (the one year where extracurricular activities are least likely to affect her schooling) is actually also the one year where a girl is too old to compete for Miss Teen and too young to compete for the regular Miss title.
