OCEAN CITY — Stella Fleming may be crowning her successor Friday night, Aug. 16, at the Ocean City Music Pier and leaving behind her duties as an ambassador for America’s Greatest Family Resort, but she believes there is something everlasting to take with her.
Stella, Little Miss Ocean City 2024, made a pair of friendships she hopes she’ll carry with her forever.
The best part of being Little Miss, the 11-year-old said, was spending so much time with Miss Ocean City 2024 Lola DeMarco and Junior Miss Ocean City 2024 Sarah Avellino. Not surprisingly, Lola and Sarah said the same thing about their friendship with Stella and each other.
“I feel we’ve built a very good friendship and it’s going to be a never-ending friendship,” Stella said.
She looked back on the past year with fondness, saying she enjoyed going to all of the events.
As ambassadors to the resort, the crown sisters appear at numerous family-friendly events throughout their one-year reign. Those include First Day at the Beach, Martin Z. Mollusk Day, the Christmas, Halloween and Fourth of July parades, the Business Persons Plunge, Night in Venice, the summer Wacky Wednesday contests, the Baby Parade and just about anything else where it’s a bonus for people to see and interact with the girls in their crowns and sashes.
Fleming, who is going into sixth grade at Ocean City Intermediate School in September, said she really enjoyed the Wacky Wednesday contests that include taffy sculpting and french fry sculpting. Wacky Wednesdays, at the Ocean City Music Pier, are extremely popular and draw large crowds of locals and summer visitors.
Her favorite contests? The pretzel sculpting.
People can sculpt pretzels? “Yes,” Stella said, laughing. “It was interesting.”
“They were really fun,” she said of the contests. “It was definitely hard to judge, but they were fun. We got to judge every single one, the taffy sculpting, the french fry contest.
There was one event that wasn’t exactly to her taste, pun intended. That was the pie-eating contest.
“Oh, gosh. I’m not a big pie person,” she said. “I don’t think any of us liked the pie, but it was interesting. I’m definitely not going to eat any more pie.”
Stella also enjoyed the parades.
“They were really fun. My uncle drove me in most of them so it was really fun because I know my uncle really well. That was fun to be in the parade with him because he got the experience once again.” (Her older sister, Makenna, was Junior Miss Ocean City a few years ago.)
Outside of the pageant duties, Stella does competitive dance (dancing was her talent in the pageant), plays on the Ocean City recreation field hockey team and plans to try out for the school team at the Intermediate School.
When she was crowned last August, it took a while for the win to sink in.
“I didn’t really know what was going on when they crowned me, but then I got home and was, ‘Wait. I just won Little Miss.’ It’s so amazing. I was so happy.”
Stella said she has received a lot of support from friends and her family and she’s a bit apprehensive about the upcoming Little Miss Ocean City Pageant, even though she has enjoyed rehearsing for it with Lola and Sarah.
“It’s definitely going to be very bittersweet. I’m going to miss this. It was a great experience. I had so much fun, but I think I’m going to be very nervous when I get up on stage.”
The Little Miss Ocean City Pageant is Friday, Aug. 16, and the Junior Miss Ocean City Pageant is Saturday, Aug. 17. Both begin at 7 p.m. at the Ocean City Music Pier. To get tickets, visit oceancityvacation.com/boxoffice, call (609) 399-6111 or stop by one of the city welcome centers.
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff