On Friday, Tony and Mitzie DeAloia left their home in Santee for vacation. But this is no typical vacation; it's a working vacation, one they will spend helping the young women of the Miss South Carolina organization prepare for and shine on pageant night, July 4.

"We basically make sure the show goes off," Tony said of his and his wife's duties as part of the Miss South Carolina stage crew. "We run all of the rehearsals.

"It's kind of like doing a theater production. But we do a show, we run a show, in two days, and we put it on."

The DeAloias are no strangers to the stage. Both are active members of the Orangeburg Part-Time Players.

"It's kind of like doing a production with the Part-Time Players. It's live theater, and you never know what's going to happen," Tony said. "You have technical glitches, you have costume malfunctions -- things happen, and you just got to kind of roll with them."

Mitzie said she first became involved in pageant work locally and found herself helping backstage at the Miss South Carolina and Miss South Carolina Teen pageants somewhat by accident.

"They (the contestants) don't always wear clothes under their costumes, except underwear, and so I had to mic them because they couldn't have a male do it," she said. Once she quit helping with local pageants, her involvement in Miss South Carolina became full-time.

"The first two years, I went with Mitzie to the pageant, sitting in the audience," Tony said. "(But after) seeing the same show four nights in a row, you just want to go, 'I'm bored.'"

Tony said he helped break a barrier in the organization -- one where locals, or people in groups who have queens competing in the pageant, couldn't help with the productions.

"It was two separate entities," he said. "(In the past) when the girls went to the Miss South Carolina, they had no contact with their parents, their locals or nothing, face to face, while they were there. They were sequestered so much that it was, like, maybe one night, maybe two nights, they got to see their family, their locals, for about 10 minutes -- that was it. They (organizers) kind of thought it would be an unfair advantage."

While the contestants have ladies helping them in their dressing rooms, Mitzie said she and the choreographer are the only two women backstage who assist in pageant production. She said the Miss America organization rules prohibit males from touching female contestants unless another female is present.

"If she has a costume malfunction or something like that, we cannot fix it unless there is a female there," Tony said. "Again, it's perception. They don't want the wrong things going on."

While pageant production used to be a huge endeavor, Tony said it has been scaled back in recent years, largely because of funding.

"When I first started working with it, there were 20 or 25 people working backstage, but that's because we had so many sets," he said. Fraternity brothers who helped with Palmetto Boys State were invited to assist in the production, but Tony said costs associated with housing and entertaining them during their stay was a burden on the organization.

"When they asked me to be stage manager, then I started bringing people with me from the Part-Time Players," said Tony, now a pageant producer. "We were doing all these set changes. ... We were taking risers and huge production pieces (on and) off. It took a small army of people.

"Since then, we've pared it down, and it's very simple things that we do, move off and on, that take two people. We fly everything in and out now, pretty much."

Pageant week

A typical pageant week begins eight days before the pageant, the DeAloias said. Tony and Mitzie leave their Orangeburg County home and make the trip to Spartanburg on Friday. Once there, they head to a production meeting, where pageant plans are organized.

"We lay out every single thing on set, who's doing what and all that, for pretty much the whole week," said Mitzie, the pageant's stage manager.

On Saturday, the contestants attend the Miss South Carolina Scholarship Foundation Gala. Sunday and Monday are rehearsal days, with a full dress rehearsal staged on Monday night. Rehearsals and preliminary competitions are held Tuesday through Friday, leading up to the Miss and Teen pageants on Saturday.

Tony said pageant-week days typically begin at 7:30 or 8 a.m. and don't end until well past sundown.

"In the previous couple of years, we would have the morning rehearsals, and then we take a lunch break, 2 o'clock, we do the Teen pageant, take a dinner break, and come right back and do this Miss pageant," Tony said. "So our day would be starting at 6 o'clock in the morning, and we would end at 11, 12 o'clock at night. And that was all day long. You go and sleep, get up in the morning, and do that all over again, for five or six days in a row."

"And that's our vacation," Mitzie said.

This year, for the first time, the Teen and Miss pageants will be integrated, with the Teen and Miss contestants in each category set apart by a song or production number, Tony said.

The 2009 Miss South Carolina and Miss South Carolina Teen Competition will be held at 6 p.m. Saturday, July 4, at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium. Tickets for the pageant, which is not televised, are available at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium box office and through Ticketmaster.

Challenging job

Joe Sanders, president and CEO of the Miss South Carolina Organization since the early 1970s, said it is because of the production staff that they are able to pull off such wonderful pageants.

"It's a very challenging job. ... Tony and Mitzie, the two of them, are very key to the success of the production," Sanders said. "They are experienced ... they are always responsible for getting (the contestants) on stage on the right cue.

"The production team ... is a very synchronized group of people who know how to work together, and work together well."

He said the Miss South Carolina franchise has been recognized by the Miss America organization as the best state pageant in the nation, and two Miss South Carolinas have gone on to win Miss America titles -- Marian Ann McKnight (1957) and Kimberly Clarice Aiken (1994).

"I've seen some of the finest young women come through this program," he said. "Our program has been very successful."

He said this year's pageant theme is a salute to television and will feature contestants dressed as memorable TV characters through the years, series-based production numbers and more.

"It's going to be a great, great show," Sanders said.

The DeAloias say the hard work and long hours -- all done on a volunteer basis -- is worthwhile.

"The Miss America organization has the largest scholarship program in the world for young women, and it's something that I truly believe in. That's why I do it," Mitzie said. "There are so many opportunities that they offer these girls. ... We're empowering young women, is basically what we're doing, and it's a way to mentor to these girls that you can't any other way.

"I just think it's a grand and glorious opportunity to do that, to teach women that they can do anything that they want to do, and that's what this pageant is all about. It's not a beauty pageant any more."

"That's the biggest difference between Miss America and Miss USA. Miss America is about scholarships," Tony added. "They (the winners) do not get cash to turn around and go buy dresses and do all this other stuff. The money goes directly to the schools.

"It's the opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest young women in South Carolina. And truly, these are girls that are at the top of their class."

Memories

In her more than two decades helping with the Miss South Carolina pageant, Mitzie said one moment stands out above the rest. She recalled the year actress Dixie Carter was asked to present the Presidential Service Award.

"Of course, we were all excited because Julia Sugarbaker" was going to be at the pageant, she said, referring to Carter's role on the hit TV series "Designing Women."

Tony and Mitzie were backstage, and another member of the production crew, who was sitting out front, kept yelling for Tony to send Carter on stage.

"And Tony's was saying, 'Ms. Carter, they need you to go ahead and go on stage,' and she kept turning around and looking at him, in her best Julia Sugarbaker voice, saying, 'I don't think so,'" Mitzie said. "I was on headset, too, and could hear him screaming, I mean screaming, 'Send her on,' and Tony kept saying, 'Ms. Carter, they really need you to go on stage.' 'No, sir, I don't think so.' And this kept going on.

"What it was was she was waiting until a certain part in the music -- they were playing the 'Designing Women' theme music -- and she was waiting for a certain point to make an entrance."

"I was trying to have her positioned on stage so that when the lights came up, she'd already be on stage, and they would just put a spotlight, but oh, no, she wanted to make her grand entrance," Tony said. "In the meantime, I'm getting chewed out over the headset."

"That stands out in my mind more than anything else," Mitzie said.

"That's probably one of the funnier ones," Tony added.

So how long will the DeAloias continue their yearly odyssey to Spartanburg and the Miss South Carolina pageant?

"I don't know, until we get tired of it," Mitzie said.

Will they ever get tired of it?

"Hard to say," Tony said.

"It's a lot of hard work -- we don't stop the whole time we're there, and it's almost like we need a vacation from our vacation -- but the frie-ips we've forged there make it all worthwhile."

T&D Features Editor Wendy Jeffcoat Crider can be reached by e-mail at wjeffcoat@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5546. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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