Vanessa Williams & Miss America Contest
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Vanessa Williams is a black singer, actress, and model who in 1983 was forced to resign from her position as Miss America--the first black Miss America. Her resignation came after Penthouse magazine printed a series of photographs taken of Williams some years before, photos seen as pornographic by pageant officials, who in any case seek to avoid scandal at all costs. In the year since that event, Williams has achieved much as an actress and singer, not becoming a major star, but working steadily and reaching the top of the pop music charts. Recently she released a video called The Comfort Zone Collection, and one of the videos on this tape is a visualization of the single that Williams recorded that reached the number one position, "Save the Best for Last." An examination of this video shows that the images used may be intended to refer to the scandal and to poke fun at the type of people who were offended by the photographs and who presumably caused her to resign. The downfall of Williams was a particularly galling one at the time because she was representing more than just America--she was representing black women everywhere. She brought to the contest a new image to the standard of American beauty that usually excluded blacks. She stated at the time that she did not think her being black had anything to do with her qualifications to be Miss America, and as if with some precognition, she also stated, "I'm ready for whatever crisis I have to face." She was raised as
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notable roles in two television movies--Stompin' at the Savoy and The Jacksons: An American Dream--for which she won another NAACP Image Award (Morgan and Edwards 48-53).
The video that includes "Save the Best for Last" was produced and released in 1992, eight years after Williams's resignation from the Miss America position. This video is not unlike many such music videos produced for different singers and offers six songs in various situations directed by different people. The songs all feature Vanessa Williams as singer, and she appears in every video both as singer and as performer within the "story" set to the music. As is often true, these stories reflect attitudes more than plots and are interpretations of the essence of the music rather than its literal meaning. Viewing these particular videos in the light of Williams's background and the scandal that plagued her, however, gives an interesting insight into the way choices were made in the creation of this work.
For one thing, each of the six is very self-reflective in that Williams is put in situations which make her represent different aspects of the black experience, of performing, and even of modeling and which also recall aspects of her own career as singer, stag
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1684
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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