Two Miss Garners to compete for Miss America

Two women who have been Miss Garner will be contestants in the Miss America pageant later this month in what apparently is a first for the competition.

Miss North Carolina, Amanda Watson, won the Garner pageant in 2008. Miss Pennsylvania, Kendria Perry, was Miss Garner in 2007. Perry attends graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Harold Garner, executive director of the Garner pageant, said he thinks it will be first time two contestants from the same preliminary pageant compete against each other to become Miss America.

Garner residents are pulling for both women, Garner said in a news release. "Once a Garner girl, always a Garner girl," he said. "We'll cheer for everybody."

Actually, both Watson and Perry are from Raleigh. Preliminary competitions such as Garner's are sometimes named after the town in which they're held, but contestants are not always required to live locally. The Miss Garner pageant draws contestants from Wake, Johnston, Orange, Durham and Vance counties.

The Garner pageant is the oldest continuing pageant program in the state, Garner said. It celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008.

Watson is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill studying music. Her talent is opera singing, and she plans to earn a doctorate of musical arts degree and become a vocal music professor. She serves as a national spokesperson for the ALS Association.

Perry studied piano at the N.C. School of the Arts and is working on a master's degree in arts management at Carnegie Mellon. Her platform issue is "Art Works!," an arts-in-education initiative focused on 21st Century workplace readiness.

The Miss America pageant takes place Jan. 24 in Las Vegas and will air at 8 p.m. that day on TLC.