Feeling just like a princess in her pink, floor-length evening gown, Danielle Sappleton stands beneath a sign hanging in her Long Beach apartment that reads “Babe Cave.” She is showing off the six-hundred-something-dollar dress that she has chosen for the Miss California USA pageant.
“It’s like the best dress I’ve ever owned,” she says with the hint of a giggle. She says girls choose all kinds of dresses for the evening gown portion of the pageant; she says her dress is heavy, but she knew it was the right dress for her because she could breathe in it. Danielle loves that her dress is “the right amount of sexy, and still classy.”
She still has one important decision to make: six-inch heels or four-inch heels?
Shoes … make-up … hair … the right bra … an exam scheduled for Monday; and only a year ago, Danielle wasn’t sure if she would ever qualify for the contest. She joked that when people ask her where she is from, she usually says “um…it’s complicated.”
She doesn’t always feel the need to explain that she wasn’t a U.S. citizen until her 20th birthday last year. She had considered competing for Miss USA prior to that particular birthday, but she found on the pageant website that being a U.S. citizen is a requirement.
Born in Jamaica, Danielle described watching Disney movies with her sister as kids, and dreaming of becoming an actress in Los Angeles. Her family moved to the States when she was six, and traveled a bit more before settling in Lancaster, California. Now a senior theater major at Cal State University Long Beach, Danielle is getting small tastes of her big dreams.
“I love that California is so diverse in landscape, and in people,” she said. If she is crowned Miss California Miss USA in January, she would use her “one-year reign” to encourage diversity.
“I’m not going to say that pageants aren’t diverse…but I don’t see anyone who looks like me,” she said. “I would want my message to be that every little girl could grow up to be Miss USA, if that’s what she wants.”
Danielle is torn over which shoes she should wear; she is only an inch over five feet tall, and she expects the rest of the girls to be wearing high-heeled nude shoes that are standard for the Miss California USA pageant.
“These shoes match my dress perfectly,” she said holding up the four-inch heels. Then pointing to the six-inch pair, she added, “I’m short already, and most of the girls will be in these shoes.”
Amid the hugging, laughing girls at orientation on the third floor of the Westin Long Beach hotel, Danielle describes her 5 a.m. breakfast of eggs and toast that came before her two hours of getting dressed. Everything about this 21-year-old moves as she talks; her hands bounce up and down in tempo with her words, her eyebrows dance along her forehead and her smile is almost always stretching wider across her face. She insists that she is not nervous about much today; she is just intrigued and interested in what is happening around her.
“You know, I think the most common theme today is that girls are just nervous and anxious,” Miss USA 2004 Shandi Finnessey said. “The girl that is comfortable in her own skin…that’s the girl who usually succeeds in pageants.” Standing by the Pageantology table promoting the workshop that she and Miss USA 2003 Susie Castillo offer to aspiring “misses,” Finnessey glows with excitement for the girls dreaming of sharing the crown.
Walking through the hallways lined with vendors who are selling gowns and accessories and products, Danielle makes friends and grabs a free Power Core protein drink from a promotional table. She is wearing a strapless dress that is bright green, but her signature color is pink.
“My parents came here for more opportunity,” she said. “And now I feel such a strong connection to the American dream … the fact that I’m chasing my dream, and I’m lucky to live in California, where people come from all over the country to make their dreams come true.”
The city of Long Beach will host the 2015 Miss California USA pageant in January. The theme of the pageant is “confidently beautiful.”