Beating The Odds: Beauty Queen With Cerebral Palsy
Reporting
Kristine Johnson LAS VEGAS (CBS) ? The Miss USA pageant gets underway Friday night in Las Vegas, and while it's a dream come true for all the contestants, it's a heroic accomplishment for one participant in particular.
Miss Iowa, 20-year-old Abbey Curran, made it a longtime goal of hers to compete in a pageant that some may have thought would never be possible.
"This is such a dream come true, bigger than a dream come true would be," she says.
It's a dream that's bigger for Curran because the college sophomore has cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder than affects muscle movement and body control. She is the first person born with a disability to compete in a Miss USA contest.
It's been a dream of hers since she can remember.
"I used to dress up and we had a giant window seat with platforms. I would dress up with boas and wigs and sing "Here she comes just a walkin' down the street," and I would make my whole family watch this show every night," she recalls.
Her family always stood behind her and pushed her to make her dream a reality.
"We always told her she can do whatever she set her mind to: 'You know you can do it, you can do whatever you want, you just have to try and might have to try harder than somebody else, but you can do whatever you want," says Katie Curran, Abbey's mother.
And Abbey has maintained a confident attitude that helps keep her going at college, where she has a full workload and even time for extracurricular activities like piano lessons.
"I say that cerebral palsy doesn't have me, I have cerebral palsy, and so I'm not going to not compete for Miss USA just because it looks different," she says.
And if being a full-time college student and competing in the pageant isn't enough, she's also learning how to pilot a plane.
"It's a blast! It's fun. I can't run that well so to be ina plane that just soars through the skies, it's amazing," she says.
Meanwhile, navigating a beauty pageant is just one more challenge she's tackling.
With a little more than a day to the big event, Abbey says it still doesn't seem real, but she says stepping onto the stage will feel like heaven.
"To think I'm here in Vegas – going to be on that stage where every beautiful woman stood before – it's so dreamy," she says.
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