Her family never found out who nominated Natalie. But one day, she got a letter saying she'd been invited to compete in the Miss Teen of South Dakota pageant in Huron.

Natalie Molitor had never been in a pageant, and she wasn't the beauty queen of Custer High School.

She had cerebral palsy, caused by brain damage in her premature birth.

A special bus picked her up every day for school, coming right to the mobile home her family bought to accommodate the wheelchair she'd used since she was a kid.

Natalie wore comfortable T-shirts and sweatshirts with her favorite Disney characters, and had her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail most days. She had every reason to turn down the chance to compete in a statewide teen beauty pageant, on stage with girls who could dance in gowns, in high heels.

But her disability hadn't stopped Natalie from doing her best to be a normal teenager, trying to convince others that she was more like them than she was different.

"So of course," her mother said, "she did it."

If she had gone to public school from the beginning, in the 1980s before it was as common to see disabled children in regular classrooms, Natalie might have become a person who'd say no to a beauty pageant, she says today.

She wouldn't have ended up the reigning 2008 Ms. Wheelchair South Dakota, or traveled to the East Coast last year to compete in a national pageant. She wouldn't have had a hand in choosing the new 2009 Ms. Wheelchair South Dakota, who will represent the state to the nation this summer when the pageant comes to Rapid City.

But at the Children's Care Hospital and School in Sioux Falls, they pushed her toward independence.

In their search for early care and interventions for Natalie, her parents, Bill and Joyce Molitor, learned about the school, where she would live in a dorm with other girls and a "dorm mom."

The children went to school, but also had physical therapy, a swimming program, horseback riding and lessons in how to navigate their wheelchairs around an obstacle course of cones and mats.

But when she was old enough for high school, Natalie decided it was time to move home to her parents, older brother and twin sister.

"I could have stayed where it was safe," she said, "but I really missed my family."

Natalie found the public schools generally welcoming. An aide at school helped her take notes and record her answers on tests. Another helped with homework and exercises.

She sang in the school choir, managed sports teams and joined the drama club, supported by her mother, who helped her dress, bathe and have the confidence to participate.

She even went to the prom, twice, with her friend, John, who made her dinner and brought her a corsage. When they were introduced at the dance, everyone clapped and some shouted, "Go Natalie!"

It was a rite of passage, she said.

"You go through high school like every other normal teenager, just trying to fit in, and when something like that happens, it's wonderful."

Wheelchair pageant

After starting high school, Natalie heard about a new pageant just for women in wheelchairs, and she couldn't wait to turn 21 so she could compete.

The pageant isn't well-known around Rapid City. It has always been held East River, and it's a good year if there are five or six competitors. In a state with a small population, it's hard to find women who not only use wheelchairs as their primary means of mobility, but who are interested in pageants and are comfortable enough with their disability to speak about it on stage, Natalie said.

Natalie competed in the Ms. Wheelchair South Dakota pageant for several years and in 2008, she was chosen for the crown. She traveled to Maryland to represent South Dakota in the national competition.

"I was just kind of hooked, because it was so much fun," she said. She was around people like her, on an even playing field.

And even though she can no longer compete - state winners are retired from the competition - Natalie still watches pageants on television, and her emotions range from the excitement of seeing the beautiful dresses, to the rush that comes from knowing what it feels like to compete on stage, to, sometimes, an unsettling anger.

"The world places a lot on outer beauty," she said. "While I like watching Miss America, it's hard for me, sitting in a wheelchair. It's so idealized - there's tape here and who knows what there. It kind of makes me angry that this is what the world sees as beautiful, that they're only looking at the outside."

The Ms. Wheelchair pageants are a contradiction, in some ways. The message is disability acceptance, but the contestants compete separately from women in other pageants, women who can walk. The contestants talk about how beauty should come from within, but it's still a pageant, so there's makeup, and glitzy dresses, and tiaras.

And when the winner is crowned and the music stops, contestants go home to their regular lives, where things aren't as glamorous.

Back home again

From where she sits in her apartment, Natalie can look right at a framed portrait of herself from her pageant, in her gown and tiara and lipstick. It's next to the TV where in the evenings she tunes in to her favorite reality shows - "Jon & Kate Plus 8," "Say Yes to the Dress," "Ace of Cakes."

She watches Jon and Kate and their twins and sextuplets, sees past the craziness of their life and thinks, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a family, and a nice, supportive husband?"

She celebrated her 29th birthday this year, and like so many single women, she worried. Would she meet someone she could marry? Would she have a family? How soon?

She prays that "somehow, some way - God knows how stubborn I am - he'll give me somebody. I don't know who I'll meet or where I'll meet them, but I know I'll know when I meet them."

Her mother suggested an online dating service for people with disabilities, like the one that asks, in addition to all the regular dating site questions, "Are you willing to date someone in a wheelchair or scooter?"

Actually, Natalie says, she'd prefer not to. She wants to meet someone who can expose her to something new.

"I just want to see the world from their point of view," she said. "You want to know what it's like to run around a track or dance. I know what it's like to live in a wheelchair, and it's pretty hard. I just want to know how the other half of the world, that's not in a wheelchair, lives and thinks."

Natalie lives in her wheelchair - seat belt clasped - pretty much all day long. She can talk on the phone, feed herself and get online, with the help of her big touch-screen computer. But to move around without her wheelchair, she needs a hand.

An aide comes to her apartment four times a day to help her with what most take for granted: brushing her teeth, showering, fixing her hair and getting dressed.

She can leave her West Park basement apartment whenever she wants but can't just get in a car and drive away. She calls the city's Dial-a-Ride service, with its wheelchair-accessible buses, to go to Wal-Mart, the mall or her job as a receptionist at Concourse Industries.

A new phase

Now that her pageant career is over, Natalie knows it's time to define the next phase of her life.

Joyce wants her daughter to be happy in her life. Her teaching experience helped her understand her children's disabilities - her son has a developmental disability as a result of a genetic condition - and raise them to be independent people. At the same time, she says, "knowing those things did not make it any easier. I hurt for the things that my kids have been shortchanged on, but I have to be happy for the things that they've excelled in."

Natalie would like to go to college and earn a degree, and also become a speaker, talking to schoolchildren about disability acceptance.

As Natalie leaves for work, she opens her door by pressing a button and letting an electric motor do the work. She steers her wheelchair down the hallway and rounds the corner, and there's a group of the building's elderly women residents standing and chatting by someone's door. She approaches, and they don't move out of the way, just chat, blocking the way.

"Excuse me, ladies," Natalie finally says, and they look at her and make room.

She heads outside to a sunny day to wait for her bus, not sure what shape her life will take this month, this summer or after she turns 30. But she has faith that she's got something important to offer, goals to accomplish, a life to live.

"Who knows what corner I'll turn around next?"

Contact Barbara Soderlin at barbara.soderlin@rapidcityjournal.com