Mrs. Oklahoma 2010 ALYSSA SILER: Kentucky Derby Event

On Saturday night, after I left the Dillards fashion show, I headed straight to Remington Park for their Kentucky Derby night. I was asked by Joy Rose Murphy, promotions coordinator for Remington, to judge the hat contest. I thought that sounded incredibly fun so I told her to count me in! Here I am in all my Kentucky Derby splendor.

Yay for big hats! They are so fun! Their only downside is that they completely shadow your face and give you really bad pictures if you are shooting with a camera that you want to throw in the trash each and every time you use it because it is a piece of junk. Whew! Now that I got that off my chest.....
Here I am with Joy Rose. She was the first runner-up at the pageant! She is so beautiful and smart that it is no surprise that she did so well. I really hope she comes back to compete next year! Her hat was fabulous!

Here I am with the other two judges, Lauren Hammack and Angie Bruss. Lauren is a writer for Southwestern Publishing (Edmond Monthly, Nichols Hills News, Norman Living, etc) and Angie is a reporter for NewsOK.com. They were wonderful to work with and we had a lot of fun.

Look at this little sweetheart!!! She was an absolute doll in her fancy hat!

Now, I just had to take a picture of this lady's hat. It wasn't exactly what we were looking for, but it definitely got our attention! Yes, that would be a tiny sombrero on top.

This is the beautiful hat that people could register to win that evening. I mean, how fancy would you feel wearing a hat like that?!

Here are all the ladies waiting for the announcement of the winners. We had all of their pictures of them in their hats to look over to make our decision. There is no way we could have remembered all of them on our own!

This beautiful lady won the award for most elegant. With her plum satin dress and matching hat, I'm sure you can see why. She looked so classy.

I really hate that I didn't get this lady's face in the picture, but she was our winner for best ensemble. Seriously...how do you find a dress and hat both the same exact color of turquoise? I was very impressed.

I didn't get a very good picture at all of our "most creative" winner (remember: piece of junk camera). Her hat looked like it had a big sunflower on it. It was very cute.

Then it was time for 3rd, 2nd and 1st place overall. Our third place winner had on a beautiful black and white hat with red flowers on it. When we called her name, however, she was already gone. So you'll just have to trust me on how beautiful it was.

Our second place winner was this young lady with some awesome turquoise feathers on her hat. We loved it!

And here I am with our winner! Check out that hat!!! Most amazing is that she made it herself! That gained some brownie points with us judges! She won $500!

Then the drawing was held for the hat giveaway. This happy lady was the winner. I would be happy too if I'd just won that hat!

As I waited for my car, I was still in the mood to snap some more pictures

These ladies were so sweet and adorable! The lady on the left made her hat with fresh roses! She gave me one as she was leaving. She told me it was an official Oklahoma rose. I don't guess I'd ever seen one before but it was gorgeous!