By ED SALVAS
Miss New Jersey 2007, Amy Polumbo, paid a visit to Asbury Park last week, attending a joint meeting of the Asbury Park Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs.
The 23-year-old Howell Township resident was the guest speaker at the annual Thanksgiving Eve joint meeting of the two service clubs hosted this year by the Rotary Club at Jimmy’s Restaurant.
Polumbo has been crisscrossing the state speaking at gatherings large and small since being crowned Miss New Jersey last summer.
She was chosen to represent the Garden State in the re-vamped Miss America Pageant which will be held on January 26, 2008 at the Planet Hollywood Performing Arts Center in Las Vegas. But before she could become Miss New Jersey, Polumbo had to win her first pageant, Miss Seashore Line, one of several regional pageants held around the state.
She helped open the meeting by singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” a cappella, and then told how becoming Miss America has been her dream.
“It was always a dream of mine to be Miss America,” she said, and then told how her mother gave her a Miss America coloring book as a little girl. That was enough to start the child in Howell Township thinking that her dream could become a reality. Polumbo, who turned 23 the day before her Asbury Park visit, graduated from Howell High School and enrolled at Wagner College on Staten Island.
She left college in her sophomore year and headed for Florida where she performed as Ariel in “Voyage of The Little Mermaid” at the MGM Studios. She says while it was fun, it was no vacation, performing five shows a day for audiences of visiting tourists.
Polumbo is now back at Wagner, juggling her studies as a Theater Major with her Miss New Jersey appearances.
“I rarely have a day off,” she says, not even Thanksgiving, where she rode in the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.
She also talked of being suddenly thrust into the media spotlight when shortly after winning the Miss New Jersey crown, a package of photos with a threat to make them public if she didn’t give up the crown was mailed to both the Miss New Jersey and Miss America Pageants. Polumbo decided on a pro-active approach and held a news conference at Asbury Park’s Paramount Theater and made appearances on the “Today” show and other programs. She made the pictures public and Miss New Jersey pageant officials said she could keep the title and go on to compete for Miss America.
She calls the pictures embarrassing and “not very ladylike,” but says it did provide the incentive to develop an Internet safety platform. While the culprit has not been identified, she said someone had to sift through 500 pictures on her “Facebook” social networking site to find the few that could prove embarrassing.
“I was obviously too trusting,” Polumbo says now, and because of her own experience has become involved in i-SAFE International, a worldwide leader in Internet safety education. “We need a stronger curriculum in schools to teach kids the dangers of the Internet,” she says. And she believes parents must be more involved in monitoring their children’s on-line activities.
One subject definitely off limits for her Asbury Park appearance was the format of the new Miss America Pageant. A fixture in Atlantic City for decades, the 83rd Miss America Pageant has been moved to Las Vegas and re-vamped into a combination reality television show and pageant. Polumbo spent time earlier this month in Los Angeles taping the reality series, which will be shown in weekly segments leading up to the January 26th broadcast on The Learning Channel. She explained that she couldn’t discuss the reality series in order not to give away any details of the competition. When the live show airs on Jan. 26 the 10 finalists will be announced and they will compete for the Miss America crown.
Until then, Polumbo will continue making appearances around New Jersey promoting the Miss America scholarship program which she says is the number one provider of college scholarships in the country. Joined on the road by her traveling companion Sally Johnston, Miss New Jersey gets no financial assistance and pays for her own car, travel expenses and wardrobe. Polumbo says she does receive some assistance from “sponsors” who help out with clothing and hair styling.
Is she disappointed that the Miss America Pageant won’t be held in New Jersey where she has the home state advantage? “Everybody wants Miss America to come back to New Jersey,” she says, “but it will probably never happen.”
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Published every Thursday.
The final night of the pageant airs on January 26th, NOT 28th.