A Toast to Miss Mississippi 🍸❤️ 🩰

By Gail Moore Woltkamp

During the summer of 1983, leading up to my senior year in high school, I walked into my hometown’s dance studio to discuss music options with my dance instructor in preparation for a local pageant. Although I was never a Miss America contestant, I was delighted to have the opportunity to compete in a small-town Kansas pageant for the title of Queen Neelah. 

Queen Neelah reigns over a now-nine-day festival with roots dating back to 1919. Uniquely named Neewollah, (Halloween spelled backwards), it was initially organized as a one-day event to provide a positive alternative to “prankster” mischief on Halloween night. It has since grown into a time-honored, hometown tradition, the Largest Annual Celebration in Kansas. 

Neewollah is filled with tons of events drawing over 75,000 visitors annually to the nine-thousand-person-small town of Independence, Kansas. In short, and for purposes of this particular blog post, the festival has an annual Queen Pageant open to local high school senior girls, and the celebration itself is a story for another day. 😉

Having taken dance since I was five years old, I knew I would perform a ballet number for my talent. A big fan of West Side Story, I decided in advance that a selection from its Broadway Soundtrack would be a good fit. My instructor, Sue Straw, a gifted performer and choreographer and someone we all adored, pulled out the album, like magic. 

During the course of listening to part of “Dance at the Gym,” (which I was determined to use), we decided it was just not going to work for a solo performance and it was on to Plan B—except, of course, I didn’t have one. 

In the back of my mind, however, I had a memory of a performance that kept playing in my head. Two years prior, in 1981, I saw a Miss America contestant perform a character ballet, en pointe, to the music from the Broadway Musical, “Annie.” 

Now if you’ve come this far, keep in mind, “Annie” was fairly new. The script, based on the 1924 comic strip, “Little Orphan Annie,” was not adapted into a Broadway musical until 1977, being only six years old by 1983 and just wrapping up its original stint on Broadway. 

Needless to say, the Miss America contestant’s performance stuck with me. Instead of a single song, it was a medley that allowed transitioning into more than one dance style. The contestant merely channeled the character Annie, and did not look exactly like her, leaving alone her flowing blonde locks in lieu of sporting a curly wig.

Clearly trained in ballet, she gave a perfect performance during the live television broadcast and it impressed me enough to tell the story to Miss Straw who again, like magic, pulled out the album. A three-minute listen to the Overture and I was on my way to creating my own version and clinching the title of Queen Neelah. 

I so enjoyed my classmates and friends as we participated together through the pageant events and various functions leading up to the Talent and Coronation Nights. Unique for a small town in Kansas to have this kind of pageant opportunity, it was a highlight of my senior year in high school and one I have always cherished.

Throughout the subsequent course of my life, it seems as though the musical, “Annie,” followed right along with me: The very year after I danced my own rendition, the Neewollah Festival presented “Annie” for the first time. A month before my high school senior year began, my mom and dad and I rescued a mut, whom I named Freeway, but close friends called her my “Annie Dog.” She lived for 17 years. 

In 2015, my older son’s high school theater department chose “Annie” as their musical performance his senior year, in which he played three different saxophones in the pit band. 

Finally, coming out of the difficult two-year mess of a global pandemic, I sat and watched “Annie Live!” with Celina Smith, Taraji P. Henson and Harry Connick Jr, a surprise hit whose message of hope somehow pulled me out of a mental funk.

Through the years, when October and the Neewollah Festival rolled around, I would flash back to our year and the unique pageant opportunity we experienced. In my mind, the Miss America contestant who inspired my own ballet number came from the state of Kentucky. But within two seconds worth of a Google search, I discovered it was not Miss Kentucky at all, but rather Miss Mississippi, 1981, Karen Hopson. 

Miss Hopson has no idea who I am and I know very little about her except that she did well in the Miss America Pageant the year she competed. It is a simple, yet pivotal part of my life’s trivia that happens to mean something.

So with that, a Toast!…to Miss Mississippi, my amazing classmates, family and friends, Miss Sue Straw, my unique hometown, the hundreds of Neewollah volunteers, all past and future Queen Neelah Contestants, my beloved “Annie Dog” aka Freeway, and to all those who have hope for tomorrow…from a small-town Kansas “Annie.” ❤️🥂❤️