Ex-Miss America contestant, singer thrives as math teacher

If his wife won’t pay $19 for a glass of Champagne, Martin tells his staff, neither will the average Las Vegan.
Dana Martin is the woman behind the man behind Las Vegas’ world class performing arts center. Although she and her husband consider her an “everyman,” few would agree – and it has nothing to do with affluence.

Her jewelry box, after all, boasts a Miss Texas tiara. She held a mic on a Strip stage for more than 10 years and currently calls a junior high populated with low-income students her home away from home.

It gets better.

Not many people can say, with a shrug and rolling eyes, they’ve been the center of a national public scandal. Dana Martin can.

It was 1983, a time when Miss America still enjoyed A-list status and plastic surgery still garnered gasps. Both contributed to an unwanted spotlight on Miss Texas, Martin, who was competing for the crown with newly augmented breasts.

She admitted her cosmetic work to a People magazine reporter, as advised by a Miss Texas handler. “Just tell the truth and it will go away,” he assured her.

Wrong.

“The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Entertainment Tonight” and a slew of others all requested two interviews that pre-pageant season. One with Martin, the physically enhanced scandal in a sash, and another with the promising contestant from New York who just might become the first black Miss America.

Several months after Vanessa Williams indeed earned that title, the media learned what a real pageant scandal looked like, as clarified in the pages of Penthouse magazine.

If she had to do it all over again, Martin would tell the reporters her breasts were none of their business. She wouldn’t change much else.

“I think with pageants so early on, you learn not to pretend to be something you’re not,” Martin says. “You don’t lie. That framed my whole life.”

It’s the reason she doesn’t blink when asked her age – 51. It could also explain why her pretty injection-free face smiles with every nerve ending God intended. But it’s certainly to be credited for her current career.

Martin could very well spend her days perfecting Pilates or lunching with ladies. She chooses to brighten the brains, and hopefully futures, of seventh- and eighth-graders at Cannon Junior High School, where more lunches are served free than charged for.

“It’s not an accident that she’s teaching in a school where she’s needed the most,” Myron Martin says. “She has kids that are homeless. The ability to break through now and then … that’s just in her DNA.”

Dana Martin says she looks in the mirror each morning and asks herself if she’s doing everything she can to get through to her pre-algebra and algebra students. And each night, she agonizes over which mathematical example will result in that “I get it” nod for which educators live.

Martin started teaching the first grade in 2001. When she outgrew that post, Bill Hanlon, director of Southern Nevada’s regional professional development program, taught her how to teach junior high math. Last year, when she added algebra to her curriculum, she called on him for help. Hanlon referred her to the more than 80 20- to 25-minute videos he recorded on the subject. Martin watched every one.

“It’s a treat she chose to be a math teacher. … She understands that it’s all about preparation,” Hanlon says. “Having people with her dedication and work ethic makes so much difference.”

Teaching wasn’t part of the plan, though. It was that metaphorical door optimists swear by, the one that opens after another closes. The closed door in this case was a recording career and a chance to sing on Broadway.

Martin grew up splitting her time between Dallas-Forth Worth and San Antonio, where her divorced mother and father lived, respectively. She sang in high school musicals and later in pageants. Through the Miss Texas and Miss America organizations, she landed singing gigs across the country, performing songs made famous by Linda Eder and Whitney Houston. Her high belt allowed her to master the kind of music karaoke nightmares are made of.

“Johnnie High’s Country Music Revue,” which LeAnn Rimes and Willie Nelson are alums of, welcomed her, as did Elaine’s Lounge at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City.

She moved to Las Vegas in 1989 with her first husband to perform in the Flamingo Hilton’s “City Lights” production. She sang, he ice skated.

After having two children, Martin was still determined to live out her dream. She switched stages, moving over to “Jubilee!” at Bally’s and started traveling to Nashville, Tenn., where she had connections, songwriters and demos in place.

One week away from her kids, though, changed everything. She didn’t come home to a warm welcome. Rather, a chilly reception. Little William and Amelia didn’t enjoy her time away as much as she did.

“That literally made me change my mind about the focus of my life,” Martin says. “It was not going to be on Broadway. It was not going to be recording and touring. I was going to be a mom.”

She closed the door on her own dream. Her children and students are thankful. Her old music peers are in wonder.

“It’s not just that she can sing, but Dana has that thing,” says former Strip headliner Clint Holmes, a close friend of the Martins and godfather to their 9-year-old daughter Molly. “I guess she’s not singing so much anymore and when you hear her, you go, ‘Why?’ ”

Right now it comes down to opportunities. But the long-term reason goes back to those pesky motherhood priorities. A few years after she divorced and remarried, Myron Martin started a job search outside of Las Vegas. Dana, still wearing a 27-pound hat with feathers 8 feet tall on the “Jubilee!” stage six nights a week, pondered her future.

Already a regional PTA president and sitting on the state board, her husband suggested she consider teaching. Studies show music aficionados have higher math performance, so that part made sense, too.

She wishes she could sing more, but she’s happy with the decisions she made and where her life is today. Dana Martin doesn’t do regrets. She doesn’t do egos, either.

That’s what makes her so perfect for the man making decisions for a half-a-billion-dollar facility, she says. With her, he’ll never get a big head.

She’s lived a not-so-average life, but has kept the outlook of an average person. And that’s why her husband uses her as the standard when considering patrons of The Smith Center.

“Dana, in my mind, represents kind of the everyman of Las Vegas,” Myron Martin says. “She’s a regular Las Vegas citizen who felt that a glass of Champagne for $19 in a plastic cup wasn’t fair. She’d rather go without than be taken advantage of. I never want people to come to The Smith Center and feel they’re being taken advantage of.”

Contact Xazmin Garza at xgarza@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0477. Follow her on Twitter @startswithanx.