The southeast Iowa woman who is this year’s Miss Iowa is already in Las Vegas, preparing for the nationally-televised Miss America pageant that airs next weekend.
Twenty-two-year-old Olivia Myers, of Sperry, says she’s been featured prominently in the four-part reality-style T-V show, "Countdown to the Crown," running on Friday nights this month.
Myers says: "I did get quite a bit of face time actually, yeah, the first episode, I was on there quite a bit. Everybody was really excited. All of the Iowa people were excited anyway."
The show features all 52 of the Miss America contestants and was filmed a few months ago aboard Queen Mary cruise ship, docked off Long Beach, California. "We stayed on the ship the whole time," Myers says. "We stayed in the rooms — it’s been turned into a hotel — and we were divided into teams of eight or nine girls each and each episode we compete in a team challenge and then the top two teams advance into an individual challenge."
Myers says winners of the various competitions have been awarded special golden sashes to wear. She says, "We’re all thinking at this point in time that there are only four gold sashes but during the last episode there’s a big surprise and we learned that there are actually 15 and that America will get to vote four girls from the 15 who have earned gold sashes into the actual Miss America top 15."
Myers is a history major at the University of Iowa and hopes someday to become a social studies teacher. She’s taking this year off to serve as Miss Iowa and will be a senior at the U-of-I next year, unless, of course, she wins the crown. The pageant finals will air next Saturday (January 24th) at 7 P.M. on T-L-C.