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| Miss america cheryl prewitt |
For 10 years as a child, she says, she was the victim of sexual abuse.
Yet Cheryl Prewitt-Salem became Miss America 1980.
"If God can take a little hick country girl with scars all over her face
from Choctaw County, Miss., and make her Miss America, then he can do anything with anybody," Prewitt-Salem told a Yardley crowd Saturday.
Dozens of the 255 women who had gathered for a women's seminar at Washington Crossing United Methodist Church on Saturday rooted around in handbags for tissues to mop up their tears and muffle their sobs while Prewitt-Salem talked about the emotional anger of past hurts.
About 70 of the women stood to identify themselves as victims of sexual, physical or mental abuse.
"You need to let forgiveness flow out of you," said Prewitt-Salem, an ordained minister, author, singer, lecturer and mother of two.
Prewitt-Salem addresses women's groups throughout the United States. Her message is that although not every woman will be Miss America, all can shape up physically and emotionally.
And if just hearing her won't do the trick, maybe one of her aerobic videos, motivational books or teaching and music tapes will.
"I know I'm going to blow your mind all day, but it's good for you," she told the women, who seemed eager to be blown away by the 34-year-old's life story.
Alluding to her recently published autobiography, A Bright and Shining Place, Prewitt-Salem said a series of miracles led her from the rural south to cosmopolitan prestige as Miss America.
Her first car wreck, which occurred at age 11, pulverized one leg bone. She said doctors told her she would never walk again, nor be able to have children
because of damage to the pelvis.
Later, she said, "God put a bone in my leg where there was none," leaving doctors mystified.
But her "miracle leg" didn't grow at the same rate as the other, and she walked with a limp from one leg that was two inches shorter. God corrected that, too, she said, in a healing service when she was 17, when the leg "grew in a matter of seconds" to equal the longer one.
Later that year, she said God "called" her to "enter the pageant world" even though she didn't "know how to shave my legs or nothing." She lost local pageants five years in a row before winning one that led to the Miss Mississippi title in 1979.
God did the "biggest miracle of all," she joked, "when he blinded the eyes of the pageant judges" and she won the Miss America crown despite the facial scars.
Women suffer from a low self-esteem that keeps them from being "all the woman God wants you to be," she said.
"No matter how good we look or how pretty our dress is, we still don't like what we see. . . . But your husband can stand in front of the mirror and it doesn't matter how little hair he has left on his head or how long ago his chest caved into his belly, he will still like what he sees. And they will say, 'I'm better than the day you married me,' and we will lie to them and say, 'Yes, you are.' "
She gave the audience a gentle browbeating. "How many of you don't like your weight?" she asked. More than half raised their hands. "Now how many of you have some kind of physical problem for your weight and you can't do nothing about it?" All hands came down. "Most of the things you don't like about yourself you can change," she said. "God can heal the rest."
In an interview afterward, Prewitt-Salem said she was the first Miss America to have a platform, something she said the pageant now encouraged for all contestants.
"I stood for God and country and putting the two back together. They didn't really want you to have a platform back then. They told me, 'Would you please subdue this a little?' Which I didn't."
