‘Myth Kalifornia’ Contest : Foes Plan Counter to Miss California Pageant

One year she wore a bologna gown, bedizened with pimento loaf and a hot-dog bodice. Another year she slipped into a bathing suit of steak. She has chained a bathroom scale to her ankle and jumped through hoops, all to protest the Miss California pageant.

Ann Simonton, once Sports Illustrated’s bathing-suit-issue cover girl, was in San Diego this week to organize the seventh annual Myth Kalifornia demonstration, which will greet the 41 women competing at the Civic Center Monday night for the title of Miss California, a chance to go to the Miss America pageant, a $20,000 scholarship and $40,000 in prizes.

Simonton arrived from Santa Cruz on Tuesday, where the pageant has been held for 61 years before it migrated south this year. “I think that the myth of white womanhood is outrageous,” Simonton said Wednesday. “There might be some token black or Hispanic contestants, but the winners all look very much the same.”

In the 62-year history of the Miss California pageant, there has been only one Hispanic winner but never a black winner, a pageant spokeswoman said Friday. The Santa Cruz protests have drawn as many as 1,000 participants, according to Simonton, but in its first year in San Diego, she does not expect as large a turnout.

This year’s Myth Kalifornia theme, “Get your business off of our bodies,” is directed at corporations that sponsor the Miss California pageant, said Simonton, coordinator of Media Watch, the group that sponsors the counter pageant. Several demonstrators will wear costumes that represent products of the sponsors.

“This year, I’m wearing a Kellogg’s cornflakes box,” Simonton said, noting that Kellogg’s puts Miss America on its box. “My crown actually lights up and says ‘For Sale.’ . . . There are cornflakes spilling out of the bottom like a little skirt around my legs.”

One year, protesters tossed beribboned raw meat on the stage, Simonton said. Another year, a float materialized in downtown Santa Cruz lugging 100 ceramic Barbie dolls sponsored by local businesses. Miss Demeanor was sponsored by a lawyer, Miss Alignment by a chiropractor.

Later, the edge grew sharper. In 1983, the theme was “weight slavery.” One protester vomited into a rotating toilet, a reminder of anorexia. Simonton served 15 days in jail for spilling her blood to symbolize a link between pageants and violence against women.

“I never take probation,” she explained.

“Miss California is not representative of women in any sense,” Simonton said. “I could deal with the pageant better if it were called the Miss Hollywood Hopeful.” Benita Berkson, co-president of the San Diego County chapter of the National Organization for Women, plans to participate in the protest at the competition Monday night, but said that she does not agree with some of Simonton’s tactics.

“I don’t agree with ridiculing other women,” Berkson said. “I am protesting against the system, not the women.”

Robert Arnhym, president of the Miss California pageant, said earlier this week that he is confident that disturbances from any protest will be kept to a minimum.