By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
Miss Cass-St. Joseph County Anjel Francisco of Cassopolis and the first Outstanding Teen Tiffany Rogers of Niles leave Saturday and Sunday for their respective Miss Michigan Scholarship Pageant competitions in Muskegon.
Anjel, 20, Miss Cassopolis 2006, attends Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where she is psychology major.
Anjel won a $1,000 scholarship and her 2008 crown last August at Dowagiac Middle School Performing Arts Center.
Counting Blossomtime, this will be her fourth pageant.
Her platform issue is preventing violence in the schools. Anjel is the daughter of Hiawatha Francisco and Andrea Johnson. She also won the award for ad sales in the program and $100 for her blue evening gown. She sang "Out Here on My Own" for talent.
In Muskegon, she will be singing "Just to Hear You Say That You Love Me," which is "new for me. I thought about dancing, but I wasn't sure I could choreograph something people would enjoy.
Anjel and First Runner-up Mekayla Diehl, 18, of Union, a student at Albion College, split $100 for tying in the swimsuit competition.
Tiffany, 17, will be a senior at Niles High School and also competes on the state-champion FFA parliamentary procedure team at Ross Beatty High School.
Tiffany won the inaugural Outstanding Teen contest over Elizabeth Kolden of Dowagiac.
Tiffany, daughter of David and Cheryl Rogers and a member of Country Trailblazers 4-H club, is also the reigning 156th Cass County Fair queen.
She enjoys playing piano, equestrian vaulting, playing soccer, scrapbooking, spending time with friends and family and showing draft horses at state and international shows.
Her grandparents, Irv and Dorothy Frost, were grand marshals of the 2005 fair parade.
In Tiffany's 12 years of 4-H, she has showed draft horses, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, dogs and a variety of still exhibits.
In 2002, Tiffany entered the adult draft horse showmanship class, showed against her 4-H leaders and "to everyone's surprise, and my own, I won."
Tiffany shows internationally at the Great Lakes International Draft Horse Show in Lansing against competitors from Canada and all across the United States.
Tiffany, who was 2004 fair princess, belongs to the Drafted! draft horse club.
"I think we will see a lot of each other (in Muskegon) because I think we're doing dance numbers together," Anjel said Tuesday night.
It was Tiffany who choreographed the opening number of the Miss Cassopolis pageant, so they were already acquainted.
"Tiffany was my dance teacher," Anjel said.
Anjel has no plans for this summer beyond preparing for the Miss Michigan pageant, which is "pretty time-consuming," although she has enjoyed having an excuse to go clothes shopping.
"I'm a jeans and T-shirts kind of girl," she said, "so we had to shop for dresses and casual wear to wear throughout the week. It's been quite an experience. I'm exhausted, but I had fun while doing it."
"I've had a number of practices and rehearsals, perfecting talent and making sure my interview skills are on point," she said.
"I've had a lot of the same stuff as Anjel," Tiffany said. "Practicing talent, rehearsing on stage and trying to get comfortable with all the different phases of the competition. I'm still doing the fair with the same number of animals, I'm just going to focus on that more after the pageant. We won't start practicing (with FFA for nationals) until August. We get a break over the summer."
On May 1, Tiffany and her FFA teammates put on a meeting-conducting exhibition for the Cass County Board of Commissioners.
The squad, coached by Bill Butcher, also includes Chris Davison, Stephanie Stickle, Meg Hein, Kyle Miller, Ryan Stover, Kayla Green and R.J. Lee and Oct. 22-24 goes up against 43 of the nation's outstanding FFA programs in Indianapolis.
Tiffany borrowed Chairman Bob Wagel's gavel and, from the head of the horseshoe-shaped commissioners' table, kept the proceedings moving at such a blistering pace that at least one adult commented she could always become an auctioneer.
"I read that in the newspaper," Tiffany laughed.
Outstanding Teen does not include a swimsuit segment. Tiffany and the other 23 girls model "activewear." Anjel's interview with five judges will be 10 minutes long, while Tiffany's lasts eight minutes without a closing statement.
"We stand at a podium and they ask questions. When we have 30 seconds left, we have to have a closing statement prepared. If there's anything we didn't touch on during the interview or that I want to speak about, that's my opportunity," Anjel said.
Anjel said the talent competition is more intimidating than crossing the stage in a bathing suit.
"We have three nights of preliminaries," Anjel said, with a new Miss Michigan crowned Saturday night, June 21. The last Miss Michigan, Oakland County Kirsten Haglund, 18, who competed with Linaya Hass of Cassopolis, went on to become Miss America.
"We'll never compete at the same time" as their teen counterparts, Anjel said. "The teens will go first," then she and the 26 other Miss contestants follow in the same category, before the same audience.
Tiffany's talent will be singing "One Short Day" from her favorite musical, "Wicked." Tiffany is competing in her fifth pageant. Besides fair princess and fair queen, she was also Junior Miss Apple Festival.
"It's a new level with quite a few more girls," Tiffany said. "I will definitely be nervous."
Awareness and prevention of violence in schools became Anjel's platform in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre.
Is she registered to vote?
"Absolutely," Anjel said.
"It's been a while since I've had spare time," Anjel said, "going to school and working five days a week and getting ready for Miss Michigan, but my freshman year of college I was on the cheer team.
"I picked Eastern because my dad worked there for a couple of years when I started high school, so I was familiar with the campus and knew some people in the area if I needed someone to call and say, 'I don't have any food in my dorm.' "
Tiffany's platform is "Agriculture MATTERS (Materials Attributed to Teaching Elementary Students Rural Significance).
"I go into classrooms and teach agriculture-based lessons to elementary students to make them more aware of agriculture," but longer term she expects to be hanging out in courtrooms.
After high school, Tiffany expects to attend Southwestern Michigan College for two years, then Michigan State University to complete her bachelor's degree before attending law school for a specialized career in agricultural law.
Anjel knows somewhat what to expect because "I went last year to watch Linaya. The crowd really gets into it."
"I'm pretty excited about the week," Anjel said. "We're going to a lot of restaurants."