Youthful fame pricey

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - Tonaja Bates raised $30 from her bake sale this week. Friends and family came up with more money. But the 9-year-old is still $200 short of the total she needs to participate in a beauty pageant on Saturday.

Her mother Niesha said, "They told us we could get sponsors and I looked all over for sponsors, like the banks and stores, and no one would sponsor us. So we just decided to raise the money by ourselves."

The pageant Tonaja wants to be part of is run by a Pennsylvania company, Nationals Incorporated . It holds pageants across the country for girls between the ages of 7-19, and this weekend, the Grand Rapids-Lansing Pageant is set for the Coopersville High School auditorium.

Jolin Brophy, 11, was interested in the same pageant for awhile. "I thought it might just be cool to try something new," she said. But her mother, Cristi, said, "$500. Y'know when I sat there, I went 'Holy Cow!'"

The organization tells participants at an initial meeting that they can enter without any cost to them if they find sponsors to foot the $495 bill.

Jolin said she tried fundraising for a while. She wrote to businesses near her Middleville area home, contacted friends and family and created a Facebook page. But she and her mother kept talking about it.

"We ended up stopping," said Jolin. "I got two sponsors and ended up giving the money back."

It came down to the economy and what they expected to get out of it.

"It's just too much to ask of these businesses and families," Cristi said. For she and Jolin it was "playing dressup" and entering the competition "just for fun," and they decided they couldn't justify asking others for money in the down ecomony under those circumstances.

Cristi said she figured the pageant would pay the organizers some $75,000. "None of the money stays locally," she said. "Nobody around here benefits from it except perhaps two or three girls."

And she wondered, "I would like to know how your name gets on this mailing list."

She's critical of the company mailing recruiting letters directly to the children. The initial letter about the upcoming pageant came directly to 11-year old Jolin.

In a telephone call, a pageant official said they don't buy mailing lists to find candidates. She claims that every participant was referred by someone else.

The initial letter to Jolin said she had been referred "as a possible contestant who may enjoy modeling in front of an audience and learning modeling routines." Jolin said she was never interested in that.

Until she got the letter.

Cristi said she worries that children will get excited about the pageant before they and their parents find out how much it costs and that they will end up disappointed because they can't raise the cash.

Pageant officials say they don't lure children into it and that they and their parents can decide whether or not to participate after the initital group meeting at which they learn how much it costs.

And, they say, their pageant is among the cheapest.

The Better Business Bureau said there are a lot of national pageants, and gives a C+ rating to Nationals Incorporated.

But in general the BBB warns that they are pricy.

"You need to have a pretty clear head as to what's the intent of doing these," said the West Michigan BBB executive Ken VanderMeeden. "Doing it for fun? It may be an expensive little hobby. If you're doing it for some gain or some future for your children, modeling or acting or something of that nature, you need to be extra cautious in checking those companies out."

Pageant officials refused to put us in touch with satisfied former participants for privacy reasons.

But VanderMeeden said parents considering whether to let their children participate should ask for those references. "They may refuse it for privacy issues to the media and the BBB, but they shouldn't refuse it to parents considering it."