The community has always been very supportive of the show. I was getting calls before Christmas from people wanting to know who was coming.

The community has always been very supportive of the show.

We also will have three times as many bathrooms then we did the first year. We learned our lesson that year.

[Pageant officials thanked the Atlantic City community for its longstanding support of the pageant.] We thoroughly appreciate the assistance we have received from the Atlantic City community, and the state of New Jersey over the past 85 years, ... The entire community has embraced Miss America, its contestants and the pageant's rich history.

We're going to be looking sparkly next Christmas. We want to be the heart and soul of the community … downtown.

They had to meet a plateau of standards, such as being able to work together and showing community spirit. We were also looking for communities that had had some distress, but were willing to pull together in spite of it.