SMILE

For the seventh year in a row, the Santa Rosa Jaycees are organizing the California edition of the American Junior Miss beauty pageant, this year with much of the same organizers as previous years. The thirty-odd contestants include the regular mix of confident girls, gregarious girls, shy girls, naive girls and backstabbing girls, but they all have the same goal of wanting to win and saying and doing what they believe the judges want to hear and see. But those behind the scenes are looking for their own two pounds of flesh either from the pageant and/or from the girls themselves, including a penny-pinching producer, a musical director who just doesn't understand the limitations of the girls, an egotistical and highly paid choreographer, a self-indulgent maintenance crew and the sex obsessed and entrepreneurial spirited teenage son of a pageant official. Add to the mix the former beauty queen pageant supervisor who is hiding a dysfunctional marriage and the pageant head judge who sees this job as bringing up his standing in the community, and this year's edition of the pageant may proceed a little differently than past years, especially as both do whatever it takes to avoid scandal.