LAS VEGAS - The morning after her big win, Lauren Nelson, the brand-new Miss America, said she felt different the moment she woke up. "I looked over on my bedside table and I had the Miss America crown sitting next to me," Nelson told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
But, in case anyone is wondering, she added, "I didn't actually sleep with it on."
Nelson, 20, became the 80th woman to hold the Miss America title and the second-straight crown-holder from Oklahoma.
She received her tiara Monday night under a shower of confetti at the culmination of the two-hour pageant, which marked its second year on the Las Vegas Strip since moving from its longtime home in Atlantic City, N.J., and its second year on cable's Country Music Television channel.
After her crowning, Nelson, of Lawton, spent some time with family and supporters, then got to indulge her sweet tooth with some caramel turtle cheesecake, something she said she had been "definitely missing."
Nelson, a music theater major at the University of Central Oklahoma, was scheduled to leave Las Vegas on Tuesday for New York, where she'll hit the morning talk-show circuit Wednesday with "Good Morning America" and "Regis & Kelly."
The whirlwind media tour will continue through the weekend, and Nelson will make her first Miss America community service appearance on Monday when she visits Philadelphia Children's Hospital.
The stop is part of the Miss America Organization's new partnership with the Children's Miracle Network, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit organization co-founded by Marie Osmond that raises money for children's hospitals.
"It's going to be a grueling schedule, and it's going to be a very hectic year, but it's going to be an amazing year and a year that I never would ever, ever, ever have. So I'm just really excited to get it started," she said.
Pageant CEO Art McMaster said a decision hasn't been made on whether the Miss America Pageant will return to the Aladdin Resort & Casino next year, but the pageant favors it.
"It's a three-way partnership between CMT, Miss America and the Aladdin, so we have to get all the people to the table to talk about coming back here," McMaster said.
Organizers have been trying to breathe new life into the Miss America contest, which had lost its network television contract to sagging ratings and declining interest. Last year's first visit to Las Vegas and MTV Network's CMT attracted less than a third of the viewers on the night of the pageant than it had the year before. But its 20 replays on CMT and sister-network VH1 brought the viewership total up to 36 million.
McMaster said he was pleased with the production this year, but didn't know how the telecast had fared in the ratings. Those figures were expected as early as Tuesday, he said.
To spice up the telecast, this year's show included viewer voting and increased participation from the panel of celebrity judges, which included MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews. In one of the new features, viewers were shown a glimpse of interviews between contestants and judges, something that previously was closed.
McMaster said the new twists, particularly the segment showing the contestants being interviewed by judges, worked well.
"Everything came out fantastic," McMaster said. "That is one of the big plusses why we moved over to CMT, (it) was because of the fact of all the millions of dollars they're spending on the marketing of our program."
The return of host Mario Lopez may already be in the cards.
McMaster said the former "Dancing with the Stars" and "Saved by the Bell" star told him that he would like to host again in 2008.
"We'd sure like to have him back," McMaster said.
McMaster said he's not sure how many of the bells and whistles in this year's show will be featured in next year's telecast.
"At the end of the day, it's a two-hour TV show, and what I tell everyone is it's still a pageant," McMaster said, adding that the telecast must show pageant staples, such as the swimsuit, evening gown and talent competitions.
A text message voting system instituted this year enabling viewers to pick favorites for swimsuit, talent and evening gown is expected to return, McMaster said.
The feature proved a contrast to the pageant's outcome because a majority of the viewers who voted selected other contestants ahead of Nelson in each of the categories.
That didn't seem to faze her, however.
"It's great that each and every girl up there had support from America and support from the audience," Nelson said.
