Written by
Corinne Platt

Photographs by
Joanna B. Pinneo

LeAnne didn't like being teased at school for wearing less expensive clothes than the other girls.

She began to feel shy and lose confidence in herself. Her mother entered her in small local beauty pageants and she soon won Miss Preteen Tampa.

Because of this she won a scholarship to the Barbizon School of Modeling. LeAnne doesn't want to compete in pageants forever, but she does enjoy traveling and meeting other girls. They have fun at the pageants and she likes spending time alone with her mom. She and her friend Michelle were baptized last year and LeAnne, loves to talk to her youth director, Dave, about religion and God.

"I like pageants because I enjoy having fun. I feel really pretty because it’s a really dressy occasion and you get to look the best you can and you just have fun while you’re looking good. It teaches me poise. When I get older if I don’t have good poise then I’ll like have a bad back, at least that’s what they say. It’s a good time to be with all your friends dressed up really pretty and people looking at you and being judged on how good you do and it’s just an experience, like modeling as an experience. I had no self-confidence before I went in pageants and now I think that if I try to accomplish something I believe that I can achieve it."

"Going to church makes me really happy because if I’m in a bad mood, whenever I come back from church I’m in a good mood."

"My dad’s like really quiet and stuff. We’re close, but then again, he’s just so quiet and he’s always at work. Whenever he’s home he’s either outside or next door or asleep or something. He’s hardly ever here and like talkative. He’s just a quiet country boy. He’s overprotective. He said if a guy ever comes up he’s going to be like ‘get away from my daughter.’"

"The boys are dumb these days. They’ll sit there they’ll be like ‘make your two elbows touch each other behind your back’ so you would push your boobs out. Or ‘do a back bend’ just to see if your shirt will come up. I’m trying to pay more attention to the guys at my church because they’re the same religion. And I don’t know that many Christian guys."

"I like having nice clothes but I just don’t compete with people. I just don’t really pay attention to what they have cause if they have like I tell them I like it but I’m not like ‘oh cool, I wish I could get that’. I just don’t think we should be in competition. It’s kind of hard because there’s a lot of different kinds of people. If you look at one person wrong, they’ll beat you up. Or if you listen to country music they’ll call you like a hick. Or if you’re like in high school or something and you go out with someone and they’re a person that’s bad, then everyone else won’t want to go out with you because they’ll think that you’re like that. People around here think that you have to do what they do and dress how they dress.

 "My mom drives all my friends to the pageants and we do fun stuff. But she’s too involved in my life. If me and a boyfriend break up or I get in a fight with a friend, she’ll call them up and be like ‘why did you break up with her.’ I’ll be like, ‘mom, my life. She’s like ‘mind your own business,’ and I’m like it is my business. I’m not going to be like that, like my mom was, when I’m older. Cause I see how her life is now and I’m not going to be like that when I get older cause I’m going to go to college and then get married. I want my life to be so different. I want to be rich. Have a gorgeous house and have the perfect family, which that will probably never happen, have like one or two kids and have them like not argue and have a clean house. I want to marry someone and have us both not smoke or drink. I want to get my credits and be a Dr. But I don’t see how I am going to do that because I hate the site of blood, but I’m going to try."