POULSBO — In navy blue scrubs and white rubber shoes with a “Yes We Did” button pinned to her top, Heidi Nicks seems relatively ordinary. She’s stopping for this interview in Poulsbo between an appearance at a local Rotary meeting and catching a ferry to attend class in Seattle. Over coffee, Nicks talks nursing school, sorority sisters and the future — along with one other thing: a new title and crown that prove she’s anything but the norm.
“It’s hard to go through it three times,” Nicks says of the Miss Poulsbo scholarship pageant, which she won Jan. 10 after trying for a trio of consecutive years. Jokingly, she admits “third time’s the charm” has become the unofficial slogan of her reign. But she adds each year taught her a valuable lesson.
“Last year, I bawled my eyes out. I cried so hard my fake eyelashes came off,” said Nicks, 22, referring to her second loss. As the 2009 event came calling, she hesitated to enter. “I wasn’t sure how (it) would fit into my life. At times it does seem a bit superfluous.”
That could be because the newly crowned royal is also enrolled in a two-year nursing program at Seattle University. (She tears up as she describes, just days before, how she assisted in the delivery of a newborn for the first time.)
But after some convincing, Nicks says she became the same doe-eyed contestant she was at 17, when she first entered and won the Miss Kingston title in 2004. She graduated from North Kitsap High in 2005.
This year, she chose to approach a familiar pageant with a new, uncompromising self-confidence.
“It was nice to go into the interview, lay all my cards out on the table and say ‘this is what Heidi Nicks is all about,’” she said, describing it as “liberating.” And it worked: Nicks also won overall best interview. “I stopped thinking ‘How do they want me to answer this question?’ and I started thinking ‘How do I want to answer this question? What do I really think?’”
She also stepped out of her comfort zone by delivering a vocal performance of “Someone to Watch Over Me.” What occurred next Nicks describes as the fulfillment of a dream.
“I know what it’s like to have the heartache of not winning, and when you do win it’s sweeter,” she says. “I remember, in that moment, sending a prayer up, saying ‘thank you.’”
In the days after this interview, Nicks would begin her year of attending local pageants, getting to know the community in which she was raised and wearing her inaugural bounad.
And, since “the crown speaks,” she’ll take to spreading her platform message of disease prevention through healthy lifestyles to Kitsap.
But there’s more than a few layers to this contest winner: she enjoys reading, taught herself to knit watching a YouTube video while snowed in over Christmas — and then there’s those roommates of hers. Nicks lives in Seattle with six of her Alpha Chi Omega sisters.
She hopes to attend a George Mason University nursing master’s program that teams with the Peace Corps, and wants eventually to teach. Nicks says she sees her new crown as a stepping stone, a way to articulate to those around her what has always been important in her life.
“With or without this crown,” she says, “I’d be the same person.”
