Star-Spangled Songstress : Fixations: Susan Jeske of Costa Mesa, former beauty queen and current Guinness Book record-holder, puts her pipes to patriotic use performing national anthem.

COSTA MESA —  Susan Jeske has sung it by the dawn’s early light. She’s still been belting it out at the twilight’s last gleaming, giving proof through the night that she loves singing that “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Check out Page 301 of the current Guinness Book of World Records and you’ll find Jeske there as the record-holder for singing the “most versions of the national anthem in 24 hours.” This was accomplished over last year’s Third and Fourth of July, when the 31-year-old Costa Mesan sang at 17 events.

To accomplish that, she says, “I traveled 373 miles by limousine, eight by helicopter, three by boat, and also rode a motorcycle. We needed the boat to get over to a boat parade in Newport Beach, and then I had to take a helicopter to the next event. I wouldn’t have made it otherwise with all the Fourth of July weekend traffic.”

Jeske has been taking a slightly more leisurely pace toward her next goal, singing the anthem at 400 events in one year.

“Would you like to hear my version?” Jeske asked, shortly after meeting at her apartment in a security-gated complex adjacent to the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Leading into a pink-hued bedroom decorated with heart shapes, she put a tape in her VCR showing local newscast footage of her 24-hour marathon last year. It shows her singing a bit of the song here, a bit there, her chatting with Jerry Dunphy, and finally a version of the song that goes to the last note, which you could use to etch glass.

“That last note I hit is a high C, going even higher than the usual high part of the song,” Jeske said. “I keep it very straight until that ending, and everybody loves it. I don’t rearrange it or use any odd vocal techniques or acrobatics. What happens is I kind of please everybody because of the last note.”

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Aside from the thousands of times we all had to sing it in school, Jeske’s first attempt at singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” was at a fireworks display near her hometown of Littleton, Colo., in 1980. It was around the same time that the then-19-year-old entered the Miss Littleton Pageant. She lost, but her vocal occasioned a former Miss America in attendance to tell her she had a good voice and should keep at it.

Jeske said: “Littleton was a small town, and for Miss America to be telling me to take singing lessons was, like, wow! So I did. It’s amazing how people can say one little thing to somebody and it can really make a difference.”

Jeske initially had entered the pageant for the scholarship money, but she kept on entering, becoming Miss Littleton on the third attempt and going on to become Miss All Nations and attaining a number of other crowns in the confusing pantheon of the pageant world.

She’s still capable of that unsettling beauty queen smile and poise. When she’s being interviewed, she speaks as if she’s being interviewed, in cadences overflowing with fair play and civic-mindedness. “I don’t consider myself a beauty at all. I think I’m attractive, and I think I know how to make myself look better. I lost a lot of pageants. I didn’t know how to walk right. I wasn’t very good at singing. In interviews I didn’t know what was going on in the world. But the pageants helped me become more well rounded.

“I never felt bad when I lost, because I always felt the best person should win. I would be asking myself, ‘What can I do to better myself?’ And, trust me, I am not the same person now that I was when I started. I’ve come a long, long way, and I’m constantly learning even now,” she said.

Her primary competition tune used to be “Love Is Where You Find It” from the movie “The Kissing Bandit.” But she found that when she sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she kept getting asked to sing it at more functions, often for famous people.

She’s performed it for Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Bush and others and has sung at Dodgers and Angels games. She also performed for recent Fixations subject Thomas (Ski) Demski’s unfurling of the world’s largest flag in Washington, D.C., on Flag Day--June 14--of this month. (Demski, by the way, was in a highway accident returning to Long Beach. He was unharmed, as was his flag, but his custom trailer was totaled.)

“Something I really, really want to emphasize is that I don’t endorse people,” she said. “Just because I sing for someone does not mean that I’m endorsing them. Some people might think I’m for this person or that or the President or whatever, but I don’t care who asks me to sing. It could be Barbara Boxer or Ronald Reagan, it doesn’t matter. I sing for my country.”

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She has found herself in some novel situations, such as last November, when she was asked to go to Thailand to sing the Thai and U.S. national anthems for Queen Sirikit’s 60th birthday party. That necessitated several days of intensive vocal study.

“It took a lot of work to get the language down, because here we have five vowels, and in Thailand they have 36, so I had to be real careful. When the song goes”--she sang a line twice with minor differences in intonation and inflection--”I had to be real careful, because otherwise part of it would have meant ‘smelly armpits.’ ”

She had been to Thailand before and had noted that “in America, beauty queens are no big deal. But you go overseas and it’s a big, huge deal, like on the front page of the newspaper all the time. You’re like Sylvester Stallone over there.”

With that in mind, she arranged for several other U.S. beauty queens to accompany her, with the idea of raising money for the queen’s favorite charities. So they did, coming up with the equivalent of $90,000 for a children’s hospital and being greeted with more adoration. “Every time we walked out of the hotel, they were screaming, yelling, trying to touch you, the whole bit.”

Not all of her appearances have been as peachy at the outset.

“I did an event for Pat Buchanan, a rally in the gym at Whittier College. We went there, and all these people were wearing T-shirts that were against him, and they were really loud and obnoxious during the Pledge of Allegiance, being disrespectful. So OK, Susan’s turn. I said, ‘OK, I realize that we all have our differences, but one thing that we do have in common is the national anthem. Will you please stand and join me in singing the national anthem?’ I stood there, and everybody went silent. I started singing and everyone joined in, and afterward they all clapped,” she said.

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She also did a whirlwind tour with Iran/Contra poster boy Oliver North.

“We did seven events, Sacramento, Bakersfield, O.C., San Diego, et cetera. At the very end of the day I go, ‘Wow, isn’t there a world record for this?’ That’s how I got the idea for the one-day record.”

Once she had established that record last July, she says the Guinness people encouraged her to to keep going to set a year’s record as well. There is no record of 399 for her to best. Rather, Guinness set 400 as a goal for her to attain to warrant their consideration. She says reaching that number isn’t her main goal.

“The idea was not so much to get into the Guinness book, but so that people can see someone trying to get in there spreading patriotism and ‘rah-rah America.’ To me, patriotism is love for your country, fighting for your country, helping your neighbor out in times of need and being proud to be an American.”

Like most folks, Jeske usually sings just the first verse of the national anthem, leaving out the stanzas that had such gory anti-British sentiments as “Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.” As history buffs know, the song was adapted from a British drinking song by Francis Scott Key during an 1814 battle of the typically tardy War of 1812. It was adopted as our national anthem in 1931.

Jeske doesn’t like the idea of replacing it with a new anthem, believing “that would be like changing the color on the flag.” Her verve for the song and its import is untouched by the often-divisive politics that sometimes is attached to flag-waving.

“I don’t know. I never really thought about it. I know when people are upset with America in other countries they burn our flag, which I don’t think is too nice.”

Though most of the politicians she has sung for have been conservatives, one of her biggest goals is to sing for President Clinton, who sent her a letter congratulating her on her patriotic efforts. She also would like to sing for the Pope and at the Super Bowl.

Jeske recently has used her performances as an occasion to raise money for the Tri-Counties Leukemia Society of America office, which this week named her its Woman of the Year.

That title means a lot to Jeske, as does her Miss Littleton crown, since it was her hometown. She’s not too big on playing up the rest of her beauty queen past. She does list it on the advertisement she sends out for “Star-Spangled Banner” bookings, because, she said, “After the Roseanne Arnold thing, people seemed to be worried that you’d go out and ruin the song, so I put the beauty queen thing in to show I knew what I was doing.”

Though she had racked up more than 330 performances, about six weeks ago Jeske came to the realization that she isn’t going to meet the 400-event goal by the date she had chosen, the Fourth of July.

“I probably could have made it, but finances got in the way,” she said. She has earned her living as a spokeswoman, representing products and businesses at trade shows and conventions, and, “this year the recession definitely has hit. That was one reason why I wanted to keep going, to uplift everybody, but it hit me as well.”

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With the additional work she has taken on to make ends meet, she wasn’t able to pursue her singing opportunities as much. She wants her singing money to continue to go to charities, because, she noted, they have been hard hit as well.

That leaves her with two options in pursuing the world record. She can pick a new starting date among the months she’s amassed--a date from last November, for example--and see if she can reach 400 by that date this year, or she can start over, which she might prefer because it would give her a chance to be better organized and to seek corporate sponsorship.

“It’s almost better that I didn’t set the world record now, because it means I can do it again, and these experiences are precious,” she said, ever upbeat.

She doesn’t find the thought of having to navigate the awkward melody, possibly hundreds of more times, to be daunting.

“Never. You know why? Because every time I do it, I look at the people and their faces, and you should see them. They might start off looking bored, but as it goes on, you can see them getting enthusiastic. I just sang for a couple’s 50th wedding anniversary, and the man was sobbing at the end of the song. You don’t mess around with the national anthem.”

(If you want to book Jeske to sing the anthem, call her at (714) 662-3333.)