“Five – Six – Seven – Eight – One – (breath) – Three – Four – Five – Six …” whispers Mattea Rae Hagglund, marking the cadence as she goes though her paces.  A dance move is paired with each beat: One – head up. Two – kick. Three – turn. Four – shoulder roll. Moonwalk for four counts.  Someone has just told her she has ten minutes before she’s due onstage, so this hallway recital is her final cram session.  Mattea stares intently into space and takes it from the top. “Five – six – seven – eight—…”

Mattea is dressed in a black leotard with a halter-style, backless tuxedo shirt, a black-sequined bowtie and one sparkling silver glove.  She has arrestingly long legs, womanly curves and an ample cleavage. She is 14. Younger girls pause to gape on their way to the dressing room. The teen-aged male wait staff make extra trips through her practice space to catch a glimpse. Even middle-aged mothers steal looks.

Mattea represents something different to each passerby. She’s what younger girls want to be, what mothers worry their daughters will too soon become and what boys of all ages fantasize about. But at the core, Mattea is just a girl with a dream, dancing to the rhythms of a different generation.

Her dream: She wants to be famous by next year.

In a time when anybody can rocket to celebrity status via American Idol, reality television, You Tube and the blogosphere, Mattea’s desire to be famous isn’t unusual or out-of-date. What’s old-fashioned about her dream is that she, a girl from the rural town of Gold Hill, Oregon, population 1,073, wants to reach Hollywood by way of beauty pageants.

This, Mattea’s fourth pageant in ten months, is the statewide Oregon Cinderella pageant, part of the greater international Cinderella Scholarship Pageant program, which calls itself, “The largest and most prestigious pageant of its kind in the world.” The key part of that description is “of its kind.” In the Cinderella pageant system, participants compete in seven different age categories from infant to age 26.  Those above age three are judged on the following: modeling casual and formal wear; self-introductions on stage; performance of a talent; and interviews with a panel of three judges.

What makes this pageant different, however, is its focus on youth development, age-appropriateness and, inner (not outer) beauty. This is a “natural pageant,” as opposed to a “glitz pageant,” Cinderella promoters say. Unlike in glitz pageants, participants here are not allowed to have cosmetic surgery to remove baby fat. They can’t wear fake teeth if their baby teeth have fallen out. Fake eyelashes are also banned. The formal modeling gowns should be clothing that participants would actually wear in public, nothing too short or too low cut. Cinderella participants are also not allowed to use hairspray and make-up unless they’re in the teen and woman categories.

“We want kids to be kids,” says Elaine Girard, the Oregon Cinderella state co-director. Their talent performances should be age appropriate too, she says. “What I mean is I don’t want a mini miss singing about her long lost love, and I don’t want a woman singing about the Good Ship Lolly Pop.”

Standing before the group of mothers and daughters at the start of the weekend-long state pageant in Eugene, Oregon this May, Elaine reminded them of the appropriate behavior. “This is about youth development,” she said. “Everyone should cheer for everyone.”

This year that applause will be muted. With less than 20 total contestants, in fact, Elaine worries this may be the year the applause ends altogether.

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The pageant is in its “31st year of making dreams come true,” but it’s Elaine’s first year of leadership. When she and her husband, Mike Girard, took the helm of the Oregon, chapter, they did so with a dream of their own: They want the Cinderella pageant to return to its heyday in the early 1990s when their two daughters, Michelle, now 18, and Katie, now 14, first started competing.

Back then, pageants were popular, having survived 70s-era feminist criticism by refocusing judging priorities and renaming themselves “scholarship pageants” instead of “beauty pageants.” But in the late 90s, thanks in part to the media images of JonBenet Ramsey – her six-year-old face almost invisible under layers of cosmetics, her little-girl body dressed like an adult – pageants for young girls became unpopular again, seen as unwholesome, even borderline pornographic. As young girls, Michelle and Katie were grilled by classmates and classmates’ parents about their participation in Cinderella. People assumed Mike and Elaine had forced their little blond-haired, blue-eyed daughters to compete. But the opposite was actually the case. Michelle at age 5 begged for permission.

In the last few years, the view of pageants has shifted again. Now, it seems, pageants aren’t even worth paying attention to, except perhaps to regard with mild amusement. Even the giants of the pageant world are struggling to attract interest. The Miss America pageant, the first and still most famous, used to be one of the most widely viewed U.S. television events with almost half of the population, 85 million, tuning in to watch it during its peak in 1960. When only 9.8 million watched the 2004 telecast, ABC abandoned its multi-million-dollar contract to produce the live show, which put the nonprofit Miss America Organization into debt.

Cable TV’s CMT network (yes, that’s Country Music Television) took up the cause to save Miss America at the end of 2005 and moved the pageant out of Atlantic City, its home since it began in 1921. Going the way of so many fading starlets in hopes of a second chance, the Miss America Organization slunk off to Las Vegas, setting up the 2006 pageant at the Aladdin Resort & Casino. But even with a hyped-up, reality TV makeover, only 2.4 million watched in 2007. The following month CMT abandoned its rights to broadcast the pageant as well, leaving it network-less for the second time in three years.

But the Girards aren’t concerned about the welfare of pageants on the national and international levels. Those pageants still manage to attract participants and dole out millions in prizes and scholarships. For Cinderella and the Girards, lack of interest at the local level means no pageant. And that is the reality they’re facing.

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