Remember when beauty pageants were a big deal?

Those broadcasts were ratings gold. Mom, Pop, and the whole family would gather around the Sylvania TV set in the living room to watch 50 contestants — in one-piece bathing suits, representing all that is good, wholesome and sacred in American womanhood — parade around the stage with poise.

They would be herded like show animals. They would answer dumb questions. They would twirl batons.

The judges were D-list celebrities, even before that term had been coined. And the winner would end up on the Kellogs Corn Flakes cereal box. The others would disappear forever.

Then came the 1970s and the beauty pageants were, slowly but surely, put out of our misery.

These days, no one knows if the pageants exist, no one watches them if they do, and no one knows who the beauty queens are unless they get in trouble.

Enter Rima Fakih, the lame duck Miss USA, who is in serious hot water for acting like a normal 25-year-old woman in New York and Las Vegas.

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