Nevadan aims for success in Miss USA pageant, win or lose
Chelsea Caswell can call herself “goal-oriented” all she wants. The point doesn’t drive itself home until she mentions that, while on college spring break in Las Vegas, she applied for a job. As her friends partied it up, she went into interview mode. The “goal” being to get out of Missouri.
That was two years ago. She got the job, restaurant manager at Encore. While working that one, she got another job, Miss Nevada. If all goes well Sunday when she competes against 49 other women for a bigger crown, she’ll have yet another job, Miss USA.
That’s the reason she entered the pageant, the first in which she’d ever competed. Not to perfect her wave or balance a tiara on her head, but to see what else it might become.
“I told myself nothing bad could come of it,” she says. “Even the girls who don’t win get amazing opportunities.”
Caswell is from St. Louis and graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in fashion marketing and merchandising. After the unexpected turns her life has taken in recent years, she rarely sets specific goals. Rather, she keeps it general. Her goal these days is simple: success.
The 23-year-old says her parents inspired her work ethic. Now divorced, her mom once worked as a newspaper delivery person. These days, she’s pursuing a doctorate and plays the cello. Her father worked for years as a land surveyor and is now the chief financial officer of his company.
Caswell has had a job since age 16, when she started working at Applebee’s. That could have been foreshadowing for her current full-time position that has her clicking around in heels and a pantsuit, fielding dining complaints and keeping things in order at the Encore restaurant Andrea’s.
She takes pride in her position, saying she’s “already set in my career.”
Should she win Miss USA Sunday in Las Vegas, she’ll have to put that career on pause, move to New York and travel the world for the next year. Of course, until last year, Miss Nevada hadn’t fared well in the Miss USA pageant. In the past 10 years, she had made the Top 10 once, in 2007.
Then Jade Kelsall came along and elevated herself, and Nevada, to third runner-up. Caswell credits someone behind the scenes more than Kelsall for that feat.
“I think absolutely the reason why Jade was able to do as well as she did is because of our director Shanna Moakler,” she says of the former Miss USA. “She also saw it in me and homed in on all the things that make me a great person and capitalized on them.”
Moakler became the Miss Nevada USA director after parting ways with the Miss California USA organization. That came shortly after former Miss California Carrie Prejean came out against gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant, and Moakler publicly denounced the contestant’s position.
Caswell’s stance on the issue agrees with her director’s.
“It is a free country and I don’t think I’m the person who should tell people who to love,” she says.
Interview questions are the least of her concerns during the Miss USA pageant. It’s her greatest strength, she says, and a lot of it comes down to skills that people either have or don’t. The only part of competition that really concerns her is the quick-changing involved backstage. Caswell likes to take her time with those things.
Other than that, she thinks she’s got what it takes to walk away with the crown Sunday night.
“Miss USA has rebranded itself to be more of a career woman, leader, role model,” says Caswell, noting that she’s all of these things, too. “And, it’s time for a blonde.”
Tune in to the Miss USA pageant at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC; it is shown on tape delay in the West.
Contact Xazmin Garza at xgarza@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0477. Follow her on Twitter @startswithanx.
HOW TO WATCH
View the Miss USA pageant at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC (KSNV-TV, Channel 3); it is tape delayed in the West.
