DEAR KATE,

Now that you wear the crown of Miss America 1998, we have something in common. I wore that crown in 1944. So I hope you won't mind a few words to the wise, from an old bathing-suit bimbo to a young one.

As you well know, every September millions of viewers of the Miss America sideshow have their eyes glued to the TV during the winner's famous waving, tear-jerked, tiara-donned saunter down the runway. What you may not realize is that they secretly hope she will trip and fall flat on her face, if only to relieve the monotony. Well, one of the Miss Americas finally has fallen on her face, at least metaphorically.

It's true that the aura of purity that once surrounded Miss Americas has been fading of late. But your crusade to distribute condoms to students has knocked Miss America off her pedestal for good. "If kids need them they should have a place to get them." That's what you told the students who gathered to hear you earlier this month in the gymnasium at Arlington, Virginia's Yorktown High School. And if the press clips I read are true, you are advancing this lunacy in other locales across the country.

Perhaps I shouldn't just pick on you. All over the country, Miss Something- or-Others are using school podiums to enlighten our youth about the mysteries of sex. But the real mystery is why administrators lend prestige to these charades. By their invitation to lecture on school premises, the principals and teachers tacitly intimate to students that young bathing-suit bimbos are cognizant of life's intricacies. Does winning a college scholarship with the bod suddenly make one all-knowing? Atlantic City's Miss America contest has tried for years to sanctify its leg show by granting scholarships to the winners, but the nation's high schools don't have to play along with this disingenuous idea by inviting Miss America to speak. I mean, after all, who thinks with their legs?

Meanwhile, the corporate sponsors who foot the bill for the scholarships get to use this altruistic pursuit as a tax write-off. It's hardly fair to the bow-legged, knock-kneed, snaggle-toothed, cross-eyed chick who has to flip hamburgers to finance her own education.

Maybe I'm being too hard on you. But I think the honor of all Miss Americas is at stake. Of course, I come from a different era -- an era when condoms were rubbers, marijuana smokes were reefers, no one had AIDS, and those things were not discussed, especially by a Miss America. As I recall, the illegitimate birth rate then was around five percent instead of today's thirty.

YOURS SINCERELY,

VENUS

P.S. I also come from an era when we had a name for girls who hand out condoms, and it wasn't Miss America.

EDITOR-NOTE:
Editor's Note: Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998, has made the distribution of condoms to high-school students her special issue. When she was crowned in September, Shindle told reporters, "I understand that parents and administrators don't want students to talk about AIDS and sex because it isn't pleasant, but I think of it as similar to defensive driving." Venus Ramey, who represented Washington, D.C., in the 1944 pageant, lives in Eubank, Kentucky.