Oran student tries for Miss Teen USA title

Oran, Mo.'s Amber Marie Seyer and the other 50 contestants in the Miss Teen USA contest completed their preliminary competitions in bathing suits and evening gowns Friday. They will find out who the 15 semifinalists are when a national TV audience does Tuesday night.

Whether she is or isn't a semifinalist doesn't matter to Seyer.

"You realize it's not all about winning," she said in a phone interview Friday from the pageant site, Palm Springs, Calif. "I have come so far."

The 17-year-old Seyer is a volleyball and softball player and A honor roll student at Oran High School. Winning beauty contests isn't something she has dreamt about all her life. She competed in only a couple of hometown pageants before winning the Miss Missouri Teen contest last October in Poplar Bluff.

"I never thought God would put me in this place," she said.

Seyer has been in Palm Springs rehearsing for the contest since July 29. Her parents, Sherry and Tom Seyer, are in California with her. So are a lot of other people. On Friday, her supporters numbered 12, including boyfriend Jason Bahr. Fifteen more family and friends were on the way.

"If they're not family they're like family," she said.

Back home in Oran, a big-screen TV is being brought into the Oran Jaycees Hall so that everyone else in town can join the party if they want to.

Inspired by uncle

Seyer's inspiration for entering the pageant was her uncle, Robert St. Cin, who was killed last year in an industrial accident at Lone Star in Cape Girardeau. Her mother's brother, St. Cin was her godfather. His 16-year-old daughter, Tory, is Seyer's best friend. He was "an amazing dad," she said. She entered the Miss Missouri Teen contest because she thought he would have wanted her to try.

"He taught me never to underestimate the impossible," Seyer said. "Being Miss Missouri Teen seemed impossible. Now I have a four-year full ride to Lindenwood University," one of the rewards of winning the Miss Missouri Teen contest.

Competing in pageants has other rewards, including self-confidence, she said. "You definitely have to have willpower to do this."

While Amber was toiling away at the pageant Friday, her brother, Nathan, and her boyfriend, Jason, were at the beach. Nathan, the Southeast Missourian Player of the Year last year, said he and Amber have always been pals.

"We hang out all the time. She can always make me laugh, and I can make her laugh," he said.

He thinks the support of her family and friends have helped Amber succeed.

"We're the loudest group at any pageant we go to. We get rowdy," he said. "We brought air horns to this pageant."

Bahr graduated from Advance High School this year and is headed to Murray State University in the fall. He and Amber have been dating for almost three years now, long before she became interested in pageants.

"She's just a down-to-earth kind of girl," he said. "It's hard for me to realize she's Miss Teen Missouri."

He thinks her chances in the Miss Teen USA contest are excellent.

'Not afraid to lose'

"She's confident, and she's not afraid to lose," he said. "She's having fun with it."

The show will present singing performances by "American Idol" runner-up Justin Guarini and by Jessica Simpson. The masters of ceremonies will be Mario Lopez and Brooke Burns, both hosts of NBC reality series.

Whether she makes the top 15 or not, Seyer will be seen in the hip-hop dance that opens the show.

"All 51 of us are breaking it down," she said.

All the girls had to audition for the dance number, and she was one of those picked to dance at the front of the stage.

Though they are competing against each other, Miss Teen USA contestants don't do any of the outrageous things those in the beauty pageant movie spoof "Drop Dead Gorgeous" do, Seyer said. "The only thing anybody ever says is, 'I cannot pick a top 15. '

"I wish you could see how amazing these girls are."

They also don't put Vaseline on their teeth or use any of the other supposed pageant tricks to woo judges, she said, adding that if she wins something she wants it to be by being herself.

After winning Miss Missouri Teen, she was offered a coach to prepare her for the judges' interviews and for questions she might be asked in the contest. She declined to be coached.

"I wanted it to come from my heart," she said.

She leaves California on Wednesday and begins her senior year at Oran High School the following day.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182