Beauty Is in Eyes of Tennessee Couple, Their 4 Children : Pageants: The oldest of the girls is 10 and already has captured 25 national crowns, two cars and $20,000 in savings bonds. Her sisters also compete.

In five years of beauty pageants, Blaire Pancake has won 25 national crowns, two cars, costly wardrobes, almost $20,000 in savings bonds, a Bahamas cruise, a trip to Disney World--and a puppy.

Don’t discount that puppy; Blaire Pancake is just 10 years old.

And if her career as a contestant has been extraordinary, she is not alone. Her three younger sisters are following in her sequined shoes.

“We’ve been to so many pageants I’ve quit counting,” said Bruce Pancake, a plastic surgeon who spends his spare time preparing his daughters to compete.

“It’s something we can do together as a family. It’s like soccer with boys, only I have four daughters and they enter pageants.”

And they usually win. Blaire and her 7-year-old sister, Erin, have won so many trophies in their short pageant careers that their parents recently donated more than 800 of them to schools.

“They just filled the entire basement,” Pancake said. “Sometimes they’d win 10 trophies in just one pageant.”

The younger sisters are novices, but they’re off to a good start. Elise, 3, and Alexis, 1, both took top honors in their first pageant this year. Both were crowned Miss Southern Charm 1993 in their age divisions.

“The babies don’t really know what’s going on. When they’re little, it’s almost like a dog show, in a way. It’s mainly for the parents,” said Pancake.

It is a giant leap from there to the Miss America Pageant; it is Blaire’s dream to walk that fabled runway in triumph, and she and her father have traveled to Atlantic City for the last three pageants.

She’s far from the only one with that dream.

Pageantry magazine, based in Orlando, estimates that up to 1.5 million contestants compete in children’s pageants across the country each year. Many go on to compete into young adulthood.

This is not a bad thing, Pancake insists. “If our girls get anything out of this we hope it’s a good self-image, confidence and a sense of accomplishment when they do the best they can do,” he said.

His wife, Debbie, is a former beauty queen--first runner-up, Miss Chattanooga--but she said pageants aren’t pushed on her daughters.

“You can’t make children do this,” said Debbie Pancake. “Kids that do it for their parents usually don’t do well. They have to love it.”

If her children “decide one day that they don’t want to do this, that’s fine with us,” she said.

Erin is already bowing out. Although she usually wins when she enters, she says she’d rather do gymnastics and play with her pet rabbit, Mogul. She doesn’t really like having her hair curled, and “I don’t like mascara.”

Let there be no doubt, pageantry is hard work. Blaire works with a voice teacher, a dance instructor and an acting coach. She rehearses singing and dancing routines every day in the family’s in-home dance studio; regal sashes elaborately embroidered with pageant titles hang the span of the dace bar.

Before a contest, pageant coach Tony Calantog travels from Florida to the Pancake home to show the girls how to look judges in the eye, when to smile, what to say during one-on-one interviews and how to walk in costumes.

If all that’s not costly enough, consider the entry fees, hairstyling, makeup, professional portraits, hotel rooms, meals, mileage or air fare.

And a double-length walk-in closet the girls share is so stuffed with beaded gowns, sequined dresses, fringed jackets and matching dyed shoes that it’s nearly impossible to add another hanger or box.

When it comes to costumes, Bruce Pancake sometimes goes to extremes. Blaire has one that requires a battery pack and a smoke machine.

She steps on stage looking like a rose bud. White smoke starts to billow. The bud blooms 6 feet high. Lights then twinkle. Petals drop to the floor. Out steps Blaire, a fairy princess.

“We go into it in a big way,” said Pancake, who had the costume patented. “It’s necessary to catch the judges’ attention.”

He denies rumors--circulated by other girls’ parents, he said--that he has performed plastic surgery on his children. But if the girls should want it when they’re older, he wouldn’t rule it out.

“If there was something that was very realistic that troubled one of the girls, then we might consider it,” he said. “But we wouldn’t do it to win a pageant.”

Blaire, who has green cat eyes and cascading blond hair, said her friends kid her more about her last name than they do about the pageants.

“They know I’ve been to a pageant when I go to school Monday with my hair curly,” said Blaire, who now enters only four competitions a year. But they are national contests, each lasting at least a week.

Her mother says the girls are in no danger of falling in love with mirrors. “We try to stress that it’s not beauty, but it’s the total package. It’s personality. It’s talent. It’s confidence in who you are,” Debbie Pancake said. “The girls don’t realize how attractive they really are.”