All across America there were spectacular displays of freedom on Thursday, as there have been for 232 years now, but one of the best came two days before when they held a very unusual beauty pageant in downtown Los Angeles.

I don’t know who came up with the idea but at the Walden House, a halfway house of sorts where they take female convicts before they can be released, they have the Miss Independence Day Pageant where the holiday is characterized by freedom of a different sort.

The general charge of the Walden House is primarily to educate and rehabilitate those who have run afoul of drugs, as a fabulous story in the Los Angeles Times told us yesterday, and while the fun-filled pageant focuses on beauty and talent like they usually do, there comes a time when each contestant must either answer a question or present an essay -- oneabout “independence,” of all things.

At that precise point the borrowed dresses, the ill-fitting high heels, the furious rush to get the make-up just perfect – all that had happened just an hour earlier -- is completely forgotten because these fallen women each stand so very tall as they speak of a different kind of independence.

This year’s winner was a woman named Darlene Escalante. She was dressed to the nines, the newspaper story told us, but when she clamored onto the stage trying to manage those high heels instead of the prison-issue rubber slippers, she tossed aside the poise a normal beauty queen must possess .

“I am not going to read my essay,” she announced. As she did, those huge tears crept into her eyes like they have almost every day and every night since she was sentenced long ago to the state prison in Chowchilla on drug charges.

Her shaking hands then rolling her carefully-written essay into a tight cylinder, her husky whisper began to get roots as she explained, “I’m just going to talk to you from my heart.

“Independence to me means breaking the cycle of three generations of incarceration. It means independence from three generations of drug addiction. It means independence from living a gang life,” she said, all the while wobbling in front of nearly 100 other women who also felt tears sting their own eyes.

“Independence to me means getting myself together and living for my kids,” she said in an even stronger way and, when she did, the applause and yells of encouragement and cheers from even the other contestants gave an entirely different meaning to the Miss Independence title.

As America celebrates its freedom from tyranny and oppression, the women at the Walden House add an equally glorious type of freedom. As one would sing a song or another might offer a poem , the contestants were the most delighted of all for such a day of merriment but Darlene’s words hung heavy in the air as not one forgot the purpose of their stay at the Walden House.

When a newcomer arrives, they wear a prison-issued shift and are brought to the facility wearing “bracelets” most beauty queens will never see. Once the handcuffs are released and they are given “street clothes” for the first time, an intensive program begins where each learns how to be better equipped to stave off the vice-gripped lure that awaits them outside the walls.

Some will return to the sordid life, they’ll go to prison again, but it won’t be because they weren’t given a chance to make things right. The Miss Independence Day Pageant – don’t you see – is simply a clever way to illustrate a new-found independence and freedom in a way most of us will gratefully never know.

When Carla Hall, the writer for the Times, asked Darlene what the title meant to her, this year’s winner replied, “I didn’t have a dress, a talent, a skit, nothing. I’m so shocked.”

But she shouldn’t be surprised. Instead she ought to learn from it, learn what happens in this world of ours when you give your heart.

Ironically, isn’t that what Independence Day is really all about?

royexum@aol.com