Kelsey Beck: An Ivy League Beauty with Pageant Roots (from Huffington Post/Stylelist)

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post/Stylelist Children often join the family business, and these days kids end up following in their parents' footsteps in variety of fields. Mitt Romney followed his father into politics. Ivanka and Don Jr. joined the Trump family business, appearing in the latest incarnation of Celebrity Apprentice. Superbowl MVP Eli Manning followed in his father's football footsteps so faithfully he even plays the same position.

And then there's Kelsey Beck. While you might not have heard of her yet, expect to hear more from this young woman. Kelsey, just crowned Miss Boston 2012, is a college sophomore vying for the title of Miss America 2013 -- 42 years after her mother, Barbara Beck, competed for the same title as Miss Florida.

Given that parents are more likely to have a son, like Eli, play in the Super Bowl than have a daughter compete in the Miss America Pageant it's not surprising that those with pageant roots in their family trees go far. This year for the first time the daughter of a former Miss America participated in the national pageant as a state queen; Diana Dreman competed at Miss Colorado, the same state her mother, Rebecca King, represented en route to becoming Miss America 1974. Mom Barbara Beck never forced Kelsey to participate in pageants, but she did watch the Pageant with her every year, planting the seed for a lifelong love of pageantry.

But Kelsey's accomplishments extend far beyond tiaras and swimsuits. Kelsey is an undergraduate at Harvard, where she has played on the varsity volleyball team. Beauty, brains, and athletic prowess make for a formidable combination.

In the past decade this impressive combination has appeared more and more often in the pageant world. Harvard graduates like Laura Lawless Robertson, Nancy Redd, Allison Rogers, Loren Galler-Rabinowitz, and more, have competed for the title of Miss America representing states including Arizona, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Kelsey draws inspiration from this group of women: "The fact that a lot of Harvard women have competed and have been successful really says good things about pageants in general in that they're not all about beauty, and they're about the well-rounded woman that is driven, motivated, smart, and intellectual. That Harvard women are becoming more of a force in the pageant world can dispel a lot of stereotypes about pageants."

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Kelsey dispels another pageant stereotype -- that you need to be on the pageant circuit while still in diapers in order to be successful (which has gained more currency than ever thanks to TLC's child beauty pageant series Toddlers & Tiaras). Miss Boston was the first pageant in which she had ever participated. Kelsey explains, "I grew up as an athlete so I never really considered beauty pageants, and didn't have time for them."

So what motivated her to grab her bikini and high heels now? Money -- more precisely, scholarship money. The Miss America Pageant reports that it is the largest source of scholarship money for women in the world. According to Kelsey, "My mom would talk about how great of an experience she had and how the Miss America organization funded her entire undergraduate education. I thought that was amazing and I always had it in the back of my mind as a way that I could help my parents by getting some scholarship money."

As more and more families are affected by the economic downturn, pageantry has increasing appeal for some. While it does cost money to compete in a pageant, the financial rewards can be great (if you win). Kelsey used a bathing suit she already owned and drew from her experience packaging herself as a stellar collegiate student-athlete (Harvard, like all Ivy League schools, recruits for their sports teams, but they do not offer athletic scholarships) to prepare for the interview portion of the pageant. She did invest in an evening gown, but based on that investment she has now earned over $7000 in scholarship money to be used for her Harvard degree, and hopefully for a law degree as well.

Her mother, Barbara, is excited about Kelsey's chances, and is enjoying strengthening their mother-daughter pageant bond. But Barbara is also careful to add, "We don't want to call it a beauty pageant because it's [about] so much more than attractiveness. I never considered myself a beauty. I think the Miss USA Pageant is a beauty pageant -- those girls are drop dead gorgeous. But with the Miss America organization, if you can look attractive -- put on some make-up, walk in heels, and feel okay about your body in a swimsuit -- and have a talent, you can do it!"

Given that Harvard students who represent Miss Boston have been very successful at the Miss Massachusetts Pageant over the past 25 years, it's quite likely Kelsey Beck can do it. She could very well be hearing the strains of "There She Is," as her mother did four decades ago, in no time.

Shrinking and Pinking: Co-Ed Underwear

I love the Olympics. I love watching all the events. I love watching the "fluff" (background pieces/sob stories about the athletes). And I love seeing amazing athletes who participate in sports that don't often get a lot of attention (like synchronized swimming and fencing, for example). And then there's shooting.

Over the weekend six shooters were selected for the US Olympic Team.  One of them, Sarah Scherer, was featured in a thought-provoking and informative Wall Street Journal article last week. Scherer is a junior at Texas Christian University on an all-female team that won the NCAA Championship last year. That would be the rifle championship for men and women. Shooting is one sport where women are now consistently beating men.  As the WSJ piece explains this is not possible in other sports due to physiological differences between men and women (in shooting women in fact may have the physical advantage, with a lower center of gravity and better balance). Despite this there are separate competitions for men and women in the Olympics, as there are for many other events (exceptions include sailing and the equestrian events).  Interestingly, until 1976 women and men did compete against one another in shooting, but that changed after pressure from Eastern Europe to segregate the sport (I assume for more medal opportunities, but the article wasn't clear on this point).  Giving more people more opportunities to win Olympic medals is okay with me, but I hope it's not because of implicit sexism that this is true.

Co-ed sports competitions bring their own problems, of course.  As I've written about before, here in Massachusetts there have been controversies over boys playing on girls' field hockey teams and swim teams.  The swim team issue is especially thorny because boys can now break girls' swim records.  Early last month the state's high school athletic association formed a subcommittee to investigate the issue and they will issue a report in early April, which I'll write about here in the spring.  From the coverage I've read it seems people want separate male and female records, which makes sense. I just hope they don't go the way of the IAAF and decide that women's records only apply in women's-only events (if men push women to race faster then so be it).

Records are also at issue in downhill skiing, where a rather interesting controversy erupted last month over underwear.  Slovenian ski racer Tina Maze was accused of wearing illegal underwear.  Yes, you read that properly.  The Swiss Federation complained that her undergarments had too much plastic, giving her an unfair advantage (just how they saw her drawers was not revealed).  Maze had no problem revealing her own skivvies on the Internet, posting this picture on her Facebook page:

In skiing, as in swimming, plastic garments give athletes an edge by making them more aerodynamic. In skiing that means less wind resistance.  While Maze's unmentionables were cleared by the International Ski Federation (FIS), FIS took the opportunity to say that plastic underwear may be harmful to skiers' health. (To me skiing down icy slopes at breakneck speeds is far more hazardous to one's health than wearing plastic underwear, but clearly I'm not a skier!) I can only hope that the comments applied to male and female skiers equally and that the Federation wasn't more concerned about women's underwear than men's...

One Olympic sport where men and women seem to be getting equal top-notch attention is volleyball. I loved reading this article about Hugh McCutcheon.  You may recall from the 2008 Olympics that McCutcheon's father-in-law and wife were stabbed during the Games (his father-in-law died from his injuries).  But McCutcheon returned to coach the men's volleyball team to a gold medal, the first in 20 years. Now he's taken over as head coach of the WOMEN'S volleyball team for the 2012 Games.  I love that he sees male and female athletes as equally worthy.

Perhaps next Olympic cycle we'll get a coach switching from the female to the male side-- or is that too much to hope for?

The Age of the Diva: Fallbacks in Dance and Pageants

Watching Dance Moms and Toddlers & Tiaras is always interesting for me-- both because the shows are often entertaining (if only in a horrifying way, like the recent T&T episode that featured Heaven, a modern day Violet Beauregarde with her incessant gum chewing, and Honey Boo Boo child and her TLC crossover extreme couponing momma [who made this deeply disturbing appearance on Anderson Cooper]) and because they bring to life to a broad audience many of the issues I think about in my research on competitive afterschool activities. I find the similar "scandals" that occur across a range of activities especially interesting, as I've written about before. One of them, age manipulation, has been the focus of several episodes in the most recent seasons of both shows. One mother mentioned in the fifth season premiere, the episode with Heaven and Honey Boo Boo, that it is harder for competitors when they have to "move up" in an age category (say from 3-4 to 5-6).  The fourth episode showed how some parents try to give their kids an advantage by using their "fallback" age when they have to move up in an age category.  Adriana's mom explained that while her daughter is five she would be competing as a four year-old because the pageant used a 30-day fallback. This means that because Adriana had her birthday within thirty days of the pageant she could compete as a four-year-old.  This also means that she might have been competing against someone who was 3 years and 31 days, while she was 5 years and 29 days-- a big difference at that age!

Fallbacks are also used in competitive dance, as the second episode of the new season of Dance Moms revealed. Brooke, one of the featured dancers, was able to compete in a younger age category due to her later birthday in January.  That was legal. But one of her other competitors, from a rival dance studio, actually competed under a false age-- which obviously led to her disqualification. This explains why dance teachers are always supposed to have copies of their dancers' birth certificates readily available, in case anyone questions a competitor's age (like the dance competition owners, as pictured below).

Even when complaints aren't formally filed, adults often gossip about the age of competitors.  And, lest you think this is behavior reserved for a group of women who I think are looking for media attention, take a look at this quote from a newly released book called Dance Divas, about a group of middle school-aged girls who participate in dance competitions: "The competition here is really fierce and you just never know.  I saw a girl out there that looked like she was twenty competing in your thirteen year old category. Who knows what's going on?"

In my research for Playing to Win many of the parents and teachers I met had learned to manipulate competitive activity systems in order to maximize the chance of winning-- even in chess.  This was harder to do with travel soccer, which was particularly strict when it came to verifying ages through birth certificates.  Soccer teams had to always have age verification handy and all ages were checked at the beginning of each season. I guess there are fewer divas in soccer. With a new show featuring figure skating moms, Ice Moms, in development (along with a Dance Moms spinoff set in Miami), I'm guessing we're going to see more diva behavior and not less on our television screens though...

Pint-Sized Phenoms: Terrific Teens Edition

This group of outstanding teenagers might make you feel bad about yourself! They all have found ways to achieve in distinctive and varied ways-- from sports to extreme activities to academics-- at such a young age. Here are some impressive feats they accomplished in the past month or so (Note: I think it's important sometimes to focus on older "kids," for fear of building up hype for kids so young they can never live up to it, like Cody Paul, who was recently featured in a great follow-up in ESPN The Magazine). 1. Mikaela Shiffrin- At just 16 Shiffrin is making waves on the slopes.  Just before the new year she became the youngest female skier on a World Cup podium since 1978, placing third in the slalom.  She is also the youngest US national slalom champion. I'm guessing we'll hear her name a lot at the 2014 Olympics!

2. Laura Dekker- Dekker is another impressive (if controversial) 16-year-old girl. She just became the youngest person to circumnavigate the  globe alone.  Her record isn't officially recognized though because after some disastrous recent attempts (like Abby Sunderland, and her brother, Zac, both of whom I've written about before), neither the World Sailing Speed Record Council nor the Guinness Book of World Records will recognize those records to "discourage dangerous attempts."  Dekker's parents fought the Dutch government for the right to let their daughter pursue this goal (the government thought it was unsafe). No word on what her next record-breaking adventure will be.

3. Jordan Romero- Well, she won't be breaking the record for youngest person to summit the tallest peaks on all seven continents, because 15-year-old Jordan Romero just earned that honor. At just ten Romero scaled Kilimanjaro and he finished his feat on Antarctica. Currently a high school sophomore I'm guessing he is going to write one heck of a college admissions essay.

4. Sierra Mudra- 16-year-old Mudra also has a great story to tell on her college applications. When she was born she weighed under two pounds. Now a high school junior who has a slight case of cerebral palsy, Mudra hopes to become the first professional skateboarder with a disability.  Based on her story she recently attended The X Games and will soon appear on a billboard in Times Square.

5. Samantha Garvey- The big recent feel-good student story, of course, is that of Samantha Garvey, the 18-year-old high school senior named a semi-finalist in the Intel science competition for her research on mussels (not to be confused with the Seimens competition, which had Angela Zhang as its impressive winner). Garvey achieved this honor despite living in a homeless shelter (though in many ways her teacher, Rebecca Grella, is the real hero of the story).  Though she did not make the final cut of 40 to reach finalist status, Garvey now has an agent and even attended the State of the Union (where, coincidentally, my husband's research on how much a good teacher is worth was discussed by the President [See slide 36]).  Though her college essays are almost certainly completed, Garvey will have some impressive tales to tell for years to come...

A Covenant for My Son

As he has been brought into the covenant, so may he enter into Torah, huppah, and ma’asim tovim.

I’ve been remiss in my blogging lately as I spent some extra time bonding with Little Man, taking him on his first important outings (i.e. the bookstore, the New England Aquarium, the jewelry store…) and throwing him a bris party.

What’s a bris? The covenant, or bris, is the oldest continuous Jewish rite.  The brit milah is scheduled eight days after birth (as that is when Abraham circumcised Isaac). And, yes, I said circumcised. So the eighth day of life was not so much fun for Little Man-- though, believe me, it was much harder on Mommy. We had a mohel perform the brit milah with only immediate family present at our home so that all of us could really enjoy welcoming Carston into our wonderful community of friends and family a few weeks later.

At his bris party, which essentially was a baby-naming celebration since the actual circumcision had been completed, we highlighted our hopes for Carston Cook Levey Friedman.  His Hebrew name is Shlomo (or Solomon) Chaim. "Shlomo/Solomon" honors John's Uncle Stuart, who passed away in childhood; the name also means peace, and is more commonly associated with wisdom, both things we wish for him and for the world. "Chaim," which means life, connects him to all his Jewish ancestors and to an artistic tradition (think "Fiddler on the Roof" and Chaim Potok).

I was particularly moved when our rabbi discussed the meaning of leaving a chair out for Elijah, who is said to visit every bris in the hopes that this child could be the Messiah. More practically though Elijah's chair symbolizes everyone's great hopes for every child-- who knows, the cure for cancer could lie within our Little Man! My father carried Carston into the room and sat in Elijah's chair.  You can see him in this picture, which also shows me lighting candles.

I like to say that Carston is our child of light since, like most children, he is obsessed with any kind of light (whether electric or sunlight) and naturally turns toward it. As I lit the candles (which John and I bought nearly two years ago during a trip to Israel, having NO idea we would ever use them for this purpose) John's father read the below blessing for a newborn child:

There is a new light in our hearts and in our home.

These candles celebrate the birth of our child.

Out of the creative darkness of the womb he has come.

These candles celebrate his emergence into light.

Blessed is the woman who bears a child, for she knows how love covers pain.

Blessed is the man who fathers a child, for he makes a bridge between earth and heaven.

Child of light, you know not yet the love and joy overflowing from our hearts. 

Believe me, as these pictures capture, love and joy overflow from our hearts whenever we look at him.

As part of the covenant we committed our son to a life of learning, love, and good deeds. I love that these are three of the main pillars of my own life already.

The first part of this statement--learning/Torah-- really resonates with us, as we are book people. Nearly every room in our home is filled with books and our lives are dedicated to knowledge and learning.  Of course, we hope the same for Carston.  To honor this I made up a wee bookmark (for a wee Little Man) as our party favor.

I also ordered a book cake, with a rabbit on it of course (the Friedmans are OBSESSED with rabbits because John had pet rabbits as a child).

This is my new favorite picture, which captures two of my greatest loves-- my son and books.

In addition to learning we hope our son finds love, with whomever he desires, and that that love is recognized by all. Finally, we hope that he serves others and lives a righteous life, committed to justice.  John and I read the following Parents' Prayer to capture these three elements.

We dedicate our child to Torah,

To a never-ending fascination with study and learning

With a book, he will never be alone.

We dedicate our child to huppah,

To never-ending growth as a human being capable of giving and receiving love.

With a loving mate, he will never be alone.

We dedicate our child to maasim tovim,

To a never-ending concern for family and community, justice and charity.

If he cares for others, he will never be alone.

We pray for wisdom to help our child achieve these things.

To fulfill the needs of his mind and body,

To be strong when he needs us to be strong,

To be gentle when he needs us to be gentle,

But always there when he needs us.

The birth of a child is a miracle of renewal.

We stand together this day, contemplating a miracle.

We stood surrounded by the great love of so many friends and family from so many parts of our lives. It was a fascinating group full of neat connections and we all shared in this simcha together.

The Hebrew word for joy is simcha, which is also the word for party. Little Man clearly brings us much joy and gives us a reason to party. As you can see, he is looking forward to even more parties in his future...

* All photographs courtesy of Mark Manne Photography