Captioning Miss America
From BAGRA Newsletter, Spring 1995

On January 6, I had the great privilege of realtime captioning a speech given by Heather Whitestone, Miss America for 1995. As you may be aware, she became deaf as a child but speaks quite well. I have Shari Moss, reporter and sister of the Director of the California Chapter of the Alexander Graham Bell Association, to thank for this opportunity.

It was very exciting for me, a real highlight of my career. We projected Heather's picture with captions onto a 9' x 12' screen. There were approximately 400 people in attendance. We also had a television monitor (with captions) in front of the stage, which Heather used to follow what was being said by others. It was extremely rewarding for me to watch her hanging on "my" every captioned word, reacting to what was said, then smiling at me.

She was very gracious and unpretentious. Unfortunately, the Miss America Association has very strict rules about approaching her, so I was unable to meet her directly or take any pictures.

The funniest part of the evening came when a local newspaper photographer, who was there taking pictures of me and our setup for an upcoming article on captioning, was told that he couldn't take any pictures of Miss America while she was speaking.

His response was, "I'm not here for Miss America, I'm here to take a picture of her," pointing at me. The emcee, Jan Yanehiro from Channel 5, got a shocked look on her face, then said, "Now I've seen everything; have at it!"

Reporters and captioners are finally getting noticed!