Enthusiastic Entrant in Beauty Pageant Feels She’s on a Roll

Maria Serrao, a bubbly 23-year-old North Hollywood actress, hesitated before entering a local beauty pageant in Solano County, where she grew up and her family still lives.

But not because she’s been paralyzed since age 5--she’s never believed being confined to a wheelchair was much of a handicap.

Serrao, who today will become the first woman to compete for a major beauty title from a wheelchair, paused before entering, she says, because she thought beauty contestants were “the stereotypical bunch of pretty girls parading around.”

She was at her mother’s Vacaville home Saturday, preparing to compete against 21 other women for the title of Miss Solano County, a local warm-up to the Miss California, Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. She will be judged in a peacock-blue evening gown with sequins and in a pink one-piece bathing suit.

Serrao, who said she is eligible to enter the contest despite the fact that she moved to North Hollywood five years ago, has been rehearsing for the contest for three months.

“Now I know it’s not in bad taste,” she said of the pageant. “It’s very classy, not a free-for-all and there’s a lot of self-discipline involved.”

And even if it isn’t her name that’s called tonight in the auditorium of Solano Community College, about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, the brown-haired, hazel-eyed Serrao already considers herself a winner.

First to Compete

She is the first woman in a wheelchair to ever compete in a contest that could lead to a crown as Miss USA or Miss America, said Ouida J. Rodriquez, director of the Solano County pageant.

It was Rodriquez who first approached Serrao about entering the pageant after reading about the aspiring, wheelchair-bound actress in a local newspaper in Vacaville, where Serrao’s family lives.

“She has not let that wheelchair stand in her way,” Rodriquez said.

Quite on the contrary. Serrao said in a telephone interview Saturday that the loving support of her large, close-knit family saw her through the automobile accident that left her legs partly paralyzed. It didn’t take her long to bounce back.

“The wheelchair is just something I get around in,” Serrao said confidently. “I work out at the health club and do everything everybody else does.”

Audience Support

When she competes tonight, her mother Mary, three older brothers and four nieces and nephews will be there to cheer.

The 22 beauty contestants have been rehearsing with professional dancers on a Las Vegas-style number for the pageant’s opening production number. Serrao will play a showgirl, having learned to easily maneuver her wheelchair to the choreographed dance steps.

Although she insists she did not enter the pageant to boost her acting career, Serrao is nevertheless hoping the beauty contest in Solano County catches the eye of a Hollywood mogul or two. She has already appeared in such television shows as “General Hospital” and “Cagney & Lacey” and the movie “Inside Moves.”

Her career goal, she said, is to be in a weekly television series. A pilot for a possible series has already been filmed in which she plays an assembly line worker. The part did not call for a handicapped actor, which suits Serrao just fine.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, make people forget about the wheelchair,” she said. “It was hard in the beginning, but when people see a total package, they aren’t just seeing someone in a wheelchair.”