Phyllis Jordan

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Alicia Windsong Diamond

Everything that could go wrong indeed went wrong as Phyllis Jordan was preparing for June’s Ms. Senior D.C. pageant.

She brought a complicated pattern for her evening gown to a dressmaker that ended up a “hot mess.” She hired a second seamstress to start again, but her results were “deplorable.” “I told her I would absolutely lose if I wore this,” said Jordan, 62.

So she headed off to Neiman Marcus to find a gown that would work, and luckily found two choices. Not so luckily, her daughter, who had just graduated from college, was rear-ended by another car when she came to pick Jordan up from the store.

Fortunately, her daughter was uninjured, and the blue, off-the-shoulders dress’s alterations were finished the day before the pageant.

But there was more. The pageant organizers decided they didn’t like Jordan’s choice of song — Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit,” a haunting song about lynching. So at the last minute, Jordan chose to sing Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” but she didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse it.

Despite all this, Jordan recently recalled, “I said I was going to do my very best and enjoy myself.”

Jordan sees the hand of Providence in her entering and then winning the D.C. pageant this year. Several years earlier, she had talked with her sister about entering the pageant. Since then, Jordan had been on the fence about it, but then her sister died of cancer.

“I was thinking about her, and we were always pretty active in the community,” she said. “I got online and by chance had a few days left to send in an application, so I did.”

Like Ms. Senior Maryland USA Karen Moore, Jordan isn’t a stranger to pageants. At age 16, she entered the Miss Black Teenager of America pageant and won, taking her first plane trip from home in Santa Fe, N.M. to New York.

She won a scholarship in that competition, and then entered other competitions while in college to help pay her tuition. Apparently, the talent runs in the family. She says her niece won enough scholarships from pageants to pay for her entire education.

Jordan now works as a contractor with the State Dept., after having a long career traveling the world as a motivational speaker. She also once worked as a newscaster for an educational TV station in Oklahoma City.

Regarding the main project for her reign as Ms. Senior D.C., Jordan is working to recruit local houses of worship to offer friendly visitors to residents of care facilities with dementia. She is using her own church as a pilot.

“If you have the misfortune of not having family, you can have a very lonely life,” she said. “It’s kind of sad, that oftentimes in our culture people regarded as no longer useful can kind of be tossed to the side. I hope to be able to play a role in some way.”

Ms. Sr. Virginia’s helping horses

Newly crowned Ms. Senior Virginia Alicia Windsong Diamond used to love to perform as a classical singer. But the painter and therapeutic horse riding instructor hadn’t been onstage for a while.

“I had the evening gowns in my closet. I thought it would be fun to dust off some of those clothes and get out there, but I didn’t have any expectation of the outcome,” she said of her decision to enter the Ms. Senior Virginia pageant. Diamond lives in Abington, Va., in the southwestern corner of the state.

While living in New Mexico, Diamond had discovered the plight of wild horses at risk of slaughter by the Bureau of Land Management. So she set up a nonprofit organization to help protect them.

She adopted three horses herself, and then began to work with people with disabilities to help them gain self-confidence and strength through therapeutic riding.

“This feels like a moment in my life to get back to the public,” she said.

To learn more about the pageant in Virginia, see http://www.msvirginiasenior.com or call (804) 435-3704. For additional information on the Ms. Senior D.C. contest, see https://dcoa.dc.gov/page/ms-senior-dc-pageant or call (202) 724-5626.