‘Miss Iowa’ 2013 Only Has One Arm

Nicole Kelly  was crowned Miss Iowa this weekend.  The 22-year-old was born without a left forearm. Despite her physical disability, Kelly won the pageant. She says winning the title is a way for her to speak out for girls like her, girls who are struggling with being different.

“I found I could tell people it was acceptable to stare. It was the place that was kind of an outlet for me, a place I could stand up and be myself, and say here I am, and I’m confident in myself.” said Nicole Kelly.

Kelly will compete in the Miss America Pageant in September in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Another article about Nicole Kelly from the Des Moines Register newspaper: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130615/NEWS/306160055/Miss-Iowa-says-disability-doesn-t-define-her

Sometime around the end of elementary school or the beginning of middle school, she can’t remember when, Keokuk native Nicole Kelly decided she didn’t need her left arm. It was a prosthetic. She was born without a forearm and hand. She wore cosmetic appendages as a girl, but as she grew older, Kelly just felt more comfortable without the device.

“I felt like I could get along fine without it,” she said. “I didn’t need it. I could do anything I wanted to do just the way I was.”

The 23-year-old has gone a long way to prove that. She’s the reigning Miss Iowa, a crown she won last weekend in just her second beauty pageant.

The first? February this year, when she won Miss Metro, the contest that qualified her for the Miss Iowa competition.

So, for those keeping score at home, she’s 2-for-2 in pageants. Looming next: the biggest one in the land, Miss America, in Atlantic City, N.J., this September.

Intimidated? Nervous? Not this kid from Keokuk, said her mother, Pam Kelly. “She doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘no’ or ‘can’t,’ ” Pam Kelly said. “She sets her mind to something and she does it.”

Nicole Kelly has tried a little bit of everything, from baseball to theater. “If somebody said I couldn’t do it, I did it,” she said.

Nobody ever told Kelly, a striking, slender blonde with blue eyes, that she couldn’t win a beauty contest. She just never could fit it into her schedule.

She finished work with a Chicago theater company this winter, where she wrangled the child stars of a production. The Miss Metro contest came at the right time.

For Iowans, Kelly has one glaring blot on her Miss Iowa resume. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which does not disqualify her from representing her native state, but might raise the eyebrows of Hawkeye and Cyclone fans dotting the landscape.

At Nebraska, Kelly earned a degree in theater arts, with a focus on production. “I’ve always been interested in a behind-the-scenes role,” she said.

Now, she’s taking a very upfront and on-stage role. Since taking the Miss Iowa crown, she’s been beset by national and international media requests, from CNN and “The View” to Chile and South Korea, said Miss Iowa marketing director Rachael Vopatek.

Kelly has declined all requests but those from Iowa news outlets. Her strategy: Any other Miss Iowa would get some attention from the state’s media, but likely not the outside attention. So she decided to politely decline to enter the media mash — until September and it becomes a requirement.

“One of the reasons I’m doing this is to prove that people with disabilities are just like everybody else, and they can accomplish things just like everybody else,” she said. “I’m going to be just like any other Miss Iowa and do the best I can to represent our great state.”

Kelly has big high heels to fill. The 2012 Miss Iowa, Mariah Cary of Burlington, was fourth runner-up in last year’s competition.

Kelly was heading to Kansas City, Mo., last week to meet with a vocal coach and pick a song to sing in the competition.

While in Kansas City, she met with 2000 Miss Iowa Theresa Uchytil-Etler, who is without a left hand. For Kelly, it was meeting an early childhood hero.

“I remember I was at a friend’s birthday party, and we stopped to watch ‘Miss America,’ which is something we would normally not do at a party,” Kelly recalled. “There was somebody on there that looked like me. It was very inspiring.”

Interviewed afterward by phone, Uchytil-Etler described Kelly as “a very bright, talented, smart and beautiful young woman.” She also praised Kelly’s chosen platform: overcoming disabilities. “I’m thrilled that my legacy has inspired her and other individuals to go on and do great things with their lives,” Uchytil-Etler said.

Their conversation last week focused on ability, not disability, Uchytil-Etler said. “We both might not have a left hand,” she said, but “we’ve both focused on what we can do.”

Uchytil-Etler happens to be heading to Washington, D.C., this week to accept a Jefferson Award for community and public service. She became a finalist through her work at AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals.

“This is the beginning of something special” for Kelly, she said. “Miss Iowa opens up so many doors” for giving back to the community.

Since Kelly’s Miss Iowa win, she’s begun a gauntlet of training. She’s got a pageant coach to work on her stage presence. She’s been hitting the gym with intense workouts.

“There is a chance I’ll be wearing a swimsuit on national television,” Kelly said. And in that tiny, almost unnoticeable moment, Kelly defines her bold but demure bravery. She is a woman with an obvious physical difference. Yet she chose to enter a contest where participants are judged, in part, by their physical appearance.

Kelly betrays no sense of hesitation or fear. She’s too Iowan to be nonchalant about what she considers to be the honor of representing the Hawkeye State. In fact, she credits her roots for the courage to make the leap.

“I had good parents,” she said. “I had good experiences growing up in Keokuk. Nobody ever made fun of me. They asked questions. They were curious. I liked that. I liked talking to people. Pretty soon people forgot about it, and they were just talking to me.”

Now Kelly has the platform to tell the world what she’s been saying all along: “I’m just like everybody else.”