Miss Poland Universe 1958 recalls 58 pageant

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(December 16, 2013, 4:25 p.m., updated Dec. 17) -- As the gone, but not forgotten Miss Universe-Long Beach pageant morphed Saturday into an East Village window installation, a 1958 participant reflected on the effect the contest had on her life and, to a certain degree, the world stage.
Alicia Bobrowska, now 77, and a Los Angeles resident, was on hand during a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of 126 Linden Ave. The moving display -- featuring sashaying dolls gliding along a moving ramp past architectural landmarks -- will blaze with glowing colors for a year.



Bobrowska (photo below) was the first pageant contestant from a Soviet satellite nation. Her presence allowed the audience a glimpse into a part of the world that was then sealed against the outside.


Bobrowska said she feared "that everybody was afraid because I was from a Communist country," but her unique circumstances worked in her favor. She got first place in the speech category, delivering a talk about her native country, in Polish.

Overall the event "was so natural for me, so nice," and she walked away as fourth runner-up.

Bobrowska, who went on to a career in movies, theater and television in Poland, as well as Germany and Russia, pointed to the Lafayette building, which formally was a hotel, saying that was where she and the other women stayed for the contest duration.

"It was a good time," she said, aside from the mishap of lost baggage.

"I didn't have anything to wear," she said, adding that people in the local Polish community "rented me a beautiful dress."

So impressed with the lifestyle she encountered, Bobrowska said that after her marriage to a Polish "super-star," she rebuilt a "house and swimming pool like I saw in California."

After her marriage, she returned to Los Angeles in 1981, trained and worked as a nurse, and is now an artist who creates three-dimensional works that she calls soft-sculpture on canvas.

The Miss Universe diorama, sponsored by Downtown Long Beach Associates, is the second "storefront activation" project, but not the last, Julie Meigs Korinke, said DLBA communications manager, adding that "there’s something beautiful for people to see."

The diorama bursts with all the hoopla -- in miniature -- surrounding what was to be the next-to-the-last year of the city's day in the international sun before the pageant moved to Miami in 1960.

The dolls represent the world's continents. In order to include Antarctica, creator Marek Dzida threw in a curve -- a trailing penguin.

"It's kind of like a funny addition," said Dzida, who is Director of the Hellada Art Center (across the street.).

Included are 1,500 milling human figures, a grandstand with shoulder-to-shoulder viewers, beach bungalows and period automobiles -- all set amid undulating waves and the city’s most prominent buildings.

The scene features one icon that berthed at a later time, the Queen Mary, but how else to picture of the city without it, Dzida asked.

Buzzing overhead is a Goodyear Blimp with an electronic message welcoming contestants and a Bell H-13 helicopter as featured in the TV show, M.A.S.H. Miniature posters of Elvis set the cultural stage.

"I call it a multiple postcard of Long Beach," Dzida said. "I wanted to bring back the good times of downtown Long Beach."

The five-foot square installation, funded by a grant of $5,000 and built by a collaboration of artists, will come alive with colorful flashing lights from sunset to about 10 p.m. , and lighted overhead during remaining hours.

The pageant may be long gone but it left behind one thing. "That's where Long Beach got the name International City," Dzida said