By LEAH WEATHERSBY

If the nearly 50 girls I interviewed on Mother's Day weekend are any indication, 20 years from now there will be almost no working women in the Seattle area who are not either models or veterinarians.

There may be a few singers.

Yep, there's nothing like judging a pageant if you want to truly see a cross-section of America.

Many a long strange journey has begun in SeaTac, and this was no exception.

Through a remarkable coincidence, I was offered the opportunity to judge a pageant put on by a Pennsylvania-based, for-profit company known as Nationals, Inc.

Girls between the ages of six and 23 are invited to pay around $400 each compete in different age divisions.

On Saturday, May 12, myself, 14 other judges, a handful of National Inc. employees and almost 300 girls from Seattle and surrounding areas met at the SeaTac Radisson hotel for the interview round. The pageant would commence the following night in Auburn.

We judges were a motley crew. Some people, like the bikini model who was judging the same divisions I was, seemed to make sense. Others, like the three recruiters from various branches of the military, did not. I know these are the days of don't ask, don't tell, but how much an the average soldier know about hair and and high heels?

Why did I agree to give up a weekend to be a pageant judge? Other than the chance for my first undercover job, I was simply fascinated by the idea that someone like me would have the opportunity to judge a pageant at all - I don't even know how to put on make-up. However, it soon became clear what important qualifying trait I and all the judges shared: we were all willing to work for free.

Being new to the pageant circuit, I asked Ruth MacDonald, a Phinney Ridge resident and former pageant mom and judge if this kind of scenario was standard operating procedure. MacDonald said that a $400 entry fee is not unusual for pageants since they need to raise money to cover costs like the pageant site, the prizes and the set decoration. But, she said, pageant producers should select more qualified judges than, well, me.

"(Judges) should have an overall knowledge of the things they're judging," MacDonald said. "If you just pick somebody, that's not good. It needs to be someone who knows what they're looking for."

What I was judging , as it turned out, was mostly modeling and the answers to few stock pageant questions.

After watching nearly 300 girls walk, pivot, walk, pivot and walk back to their spot in at the back of the (undecorated) stage, in not one but two outfits, I was actually feeling a little motion sick. In the first part of the pageant, the girls walked and pivoted by me so quickly it was a struggle to get the right score next to right girl. I can only imagine how the girls must have felt, standing on stage for 20 minutes at a time, listening to 15 young ladies before them steal their answer to "what's your definition of a winner?"

While National Inc. stresses personality and inner beauty as the most important criteria in judging the their pageants, it turned out that "the five girls who best represent our traditional idea of beauty" was, predictably enough, the definition of a winner that night.

Showmanship undoubtedly played role in the decision in the two most hotly-contested categories, Junior Teen and Teen. But the girls who won in two of the categories I judged, six to eight and 20-23, which had few participants, were, to be honest, the prettiest. In my own defense, neither of my favorites in those categories won.

Most of the audience left after the 10 finalists in each category were announced. The evening's five winners left with a trophy, a trip to Florida to compete in Nationals, Inc.'s national pageant, a $1,000 scholarship and other novelties.

On my way to the Radisson on Saturday morning, driving past SeaTac's plethora of hotels, fast-food joints and strip bars, I thought to myself, hey, this is just a way for some local girls to find a little glamor in our sometimes dreary Puget Sound. After Sunday night in Auburn, I couldn't help but wonder if they succeeded. (