ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
Amber Medlin got the work but not the glory.
She is quick to say she'd do it all again. That she accomplished much as Miss Virginia after Andrea Ballengee was forced to surrender her crown 11 months ago. That she has grown immeasurably in that time.
But the reigning Miss Virginia never had that moment pageant contestants dream about.
"I never got the part where you get crowned, and you cry, and you get flowers. ... I have no idea what it feels like when they say that in front of all your friends."
What Medlin, a graduate of Radford University, got instead was a phone call. There followed several days of extensive fact-checking, in which gun-shy pageant officials made her verify everything on her resume.
Ballengee, her predecessor, lost her crown after a series of exaggerations and untruths were discovered on the fact sheet all contestants are required to submit.
When Medlin's resume passed muster, she was crowned in a short ceremony outside the Hotel Roanoke, which she said was broadcast statewide on three television networks.
"When I did get crowned, they did it very nicely," Medlin said.
She went right to work. Medlin felt an obligation to work very hard, she said, to help restore any credibility the pageant may have lost last summer. "I felt like I had to prove myself."
Has she done a good job?
"I like to think so."
Pageant officials think so, too.
"She was an excellent Miss Virginia," said Bud Oakey, pageant spokesman. "She has served the pageant and the state well. "
To some degree, Miss Virginia is what the winner makes it.
Beyond a certain number of personal appearances scheduled by the pageant, Miss Virginia is left alone to implement her own, presumably well-intentioned agenda. Medlin's goal was to increase awareness of the handicapped among schoolchildren. Soon after being named "Miss Virginia," she wrote a letter to every elementary school in the state offering to visit and talk about the issue.
Many took her up on it - and Medlin spent much of the past year tooling down the highway to far flung corners of the state, looking for schools.
Medlin also spoke on drug awareness, parenting, marketing - indeed, whatever she was asked to talk about.
"It's so funny. When you are Miss Virginia, people expect you to know about everything," said Medlin, who spent a good deal of her time in the library and cruising the Internet for information. "But it's fun. You learn."
Miss Virginia is paid a fee - at least $150, plus expenses - for personal appearances, out of which is subtracted a small administrative fee, Oakey said. The rest is hers.
Medlin also was given an apartment in Roanoke for the year, as well as a Camaro - actually a series of them - equipped with a cellular phone. Both she and Ballengee were awarded scholarships.
Medlin, who has a degree in speech communications from Radford, plans to pursue a master's degree in journalism at Regent University, the conservative Christian school founded by Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach.
She is, according to her fact sheet, 5-8 and weighs 118 pounds. Her hobbies include weight training, jogging and Jazzercise. Her dress size is a 6 - her shoe size 81/2. Her measurements are 34-24-34.
She is 24. She seems - setting aside whatever drives her to compete (she entered her first pageant at age 10, she said, because the prize was a bicycle with a banana-shaped seat) - the quintessential girl next door. She is cheerful, poised but not overpolished - her sentences sprinkled with generation X markers such as "like" and "totally."
Asked what she found in Virginia in the past year that she had not previously known existed, her answer was "I mean, like, all these little towns."
She has logged some 45,000 miles on the road in the past year -and a few more thousand in the air. She has been to Flint Hill, and to Ewing. To Strasburg, Rose Hill and Chilhowie. She almost never found Chilhowie. "Oh, that was like, a trip," she recalled.
Her ambitions are likewise down to earth. Unlike many beauty pageant contestants, Medlin does not plan to save the world. She hopes to enter broadcast journalism someday. Or else teach.
"I kind of just take each year as it comes," she said.
Asked if there is a down side of being Miss Virginia, Medlin answered promptly: loneliness. Miss Virginia, after all, is a young woman at a sociable age, performing a solo act - often finishing up the day in an unfamiliar town, alone.
"People ask me, what is the worst thing about being Miss Virginia? I say, 'being lonely,'" Medlin said.
"But that's the only thing. With all the positive things, I'd do it again. I feel that I've grown as a person more this year than in four years in college."
In addition, she said, "The message that I wanted to share [about the handicapped] - I feel that I've gotten it across."
In any event, it's nearly over. Saturday night when the pageant ends, she and her father will collect all that remains in her Roanoke apartment and head for home in Virginia Beach. Afterward, Medlin plans a week's vacation in Vermont.
If it wasn't always easy, she has no regrets.
"It was always worth it," Medlin said.
LENGTH: Long : 106 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: FILE 1995 1. Amber Medlin has spent her tenure as Missby CNBVirginia traveling the state talking to schools about the
handicapped. color.
2. Amber Medlin was Miss Virginia Beach when she was selected as
the first runner-up in the 1995 Miss Virginia Pageant.