This a day of rest, of sorts, for the 53 young women competing in Las Vegas for the title of Miss America. The preliminary rounds of competition are over, the last rehearsal is tonight, and the finals are tomorrow night.

The contestants include Miss Nebraska Mariah Cook of Chadron, Miss Wyoming Lexie Madden of Torrington, and Miss South Dakota Calista Kirby…who was a cheerleader at the University of Nebraska.

They were in the same competition pool and last night faced off in Talent…Cook and Madden with piano solos and Kirby a tumbling routine.

Taking the preliminary Talent honors, though, was Miss North Dakota Rosie Sauvageau for her Vocal/Piano Solo performance “To Make You Feel My Love,” which brought her a $2,000 scholarship. Miss Washington Mandy Schendel was the preliminary Lifestyle and Fitness winner and receive a $1,000 scholarship.

There’s still time to go online and vote for your choice of contestant to automatically advance the semifinal round of 15. Each woman has a roughly 3:00 self-made video on the Miss America website in which she makes her case.

Mariah Cook used her video to confess that she’s a huge collector of rubber ducks, but is actually selling them off as a fundraiser for the Children’s Miracle Network…a partner of the Miss America Pageant…in honor of a young Nebraska girl…one of her Miss Nebraska Little Sisters…suffering from leukemia.

Cook…who postponed her student teaching-professional studies year at Chadron State to serve as Miss Nebraska…also used her video to praise her birth mother for the hard decision to give her up for adoption to have a better life and to praise the adopted parents who raised her. Cook’s birth and adopted families are both very active in her life today.

Tomorrow nights finals will be broadcast on ABC…live in the Eastern and Central time zones, tape-delayed to 8 pm in the Mountain Time Zone after the same lead-in show as the rest of the country: a special edition of 20/20 that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the pageant and contestants.

Pageant Confidential: The Road To Miss America saw film crews given exclusive, unfettered access to the 53 contestants over 6 months. The result was a series of what ABC calls “candid moments of their journeys as they are transformed from state beauty queens to the polished Miss America contenders seen on stage.”