In reporting the outcome of a state beauty pageant, the dishy website baltimore fishbowl.com headlined its story thusly: “Miss Maryland 2012 Joanna Guy Less Annoying Than Your Average, Perfect Beauty Queen.” As the piece went on to say: “Now studying at Cornell, Guy majors in American studies and is a member of an all girls a cappella troupe. And while she obviously fits right in with pageant stock—tall, trim, toothy/smiley, striking, strong diction—there’s something refreshing about Guy. Not only is she science-smart and politically interested, she’s funny.”
Guy does indeed have a sense of humor about the pageant biz; she will even confide that, during the Miss Maryland competition, she mixed up two particular personal care products. It was the kind of mistake you don’t make twice. “I had never competed in ‘Miss’ before, so I never had to do swimsuit,” says Guy, a twenty-one-year-old senior who’d previously held the state teen crown. “In order for your swimsuit not to ride up, you use something called ‘butt glue,’ and it’s a roll-on. But on the first night of preliminaries I accidentally used my butt glue instead of my roll-on deodorant. And, yeah—it’s funny.”
Guy’s poise under pressure came in handy in July, when a mass e-mail she wrote to her sorority, Alpha Phi, was leaked to ivygate.com, subjecting her to widespread mockery from Internet wags. Guy’s lengthy note—due to her Miss Maryland duties, she was resigning as vice president of recruitment and spending the semester off campus—went viral, with outlets from ABC News to the Washington Post taking her to task for what they perceived as an overwrought and selfserious tone. It must’ve been a slow news week, because the story went transatlantic: the UK’s Daily Mail slammed Guy’s letter as “excruciatingly self-involved.”
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Then came the backlash, with Internet posters pointing out the missive was actually nobody’s business. (As one commenter on jezebel.com put it: “Give the girl a goddamn break.”) “If you put yourself in the public spotlight, you have to expect that stuff like that is going to happen,” Guy says. “Gabrielle Douglas won two gold medals in the Olympics, and people were talking about how her hair looked bad.”
What the raft of Internet judgers failed to note was that Guy wasn’t actually dropping out of college; she spent fall semester in the Cornell in Washington program, taking courses in government and Shakespearean drama while sticking close to her home state. And furthermore, though being Miss Maryland does involve wearing a sash and a tiara—for the record, the former requires constant cleaning and the latter is easy to whack while getting in and out of a car—it also entails fundraising for her chosen charities, the American Heart Association and the Children’s Miracle Network. “I used to have the same preconceived ideas about pageantry that a lot of people have—that it’s shallow,” Guy says. “They look at it just on the surface and maybe don’t understand the service that goes into the year after you win a title at any level.”
A former Miss Maryland’s Outstanding Teen—the little sister to the adult pageant— Guy was third runner-up in the 2008 national competition. (A music minor at Cornell, she sings show tunes for the talent portion of the contests.) Guy didn’t do pageants as a child à la “Toddlers in Tiaras”; she started as a teen, seeing it as “a great way to practice my talent and hone my interview skills, as well as earn money for college.” After taking time off to concentrate on Cornell, she snagged the 2012 Miss Queen State title before being named Miss Maryland in June—winning, among other things, a $10,000 scholarship. Her duties have ranged from serving as grand marshal of her hometown’s autumn parade to speaking at health fairs to visiting schools to modeling bridal gowns for a breast cancer benefit.
In January, Guy goes to the big show: she’ll compete in the Miss America pageant in Las Vegas. “It’s surreal,” she says of being in the iconic contest. “When I’m doing appearances, I still can’t get used to people wanting to take a picture with me.” And what of the backstage catfighting immortalized in films like Miss Congeniality? “One of the huge stereotypes is pageant sabotage—putting make-up on people’s clothes, ripping dresses,” Guy says. “But the girls genuinely like each other. It’s such an intense week that you bond with them, because they understand what you’re going through.”
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