For no particular reason, I switched from listening to NPR – the US equivalent of the BBC – in the mornings this week to a local commercial station. As a result, I know nothing about what’s going on in Washington DC and everything that happened at the Miss America pageant. And let me tell you: a lot happened. The ceremony, which took place on Sunday in Atlantic City, was chockful of political shockers that had annual viewers of the competition wondering if they had inadvertently tuned into the politics channels.

Merely to take part in a beauty pageant suggests a bias to the right, and in past years most Miss America contestants have strained, during the question-and-answer session, towards a studious political neutrality. Take Miss Arizona, answering a question about universal healthcare in 2013: “I think this is an issue of integrity regardless of which end of the political spectrum that I stand on. I was raised in a family to know right from wrong, and politics – whether or not you fall in the middle, the left or the right – it’s an issue of integrity, no matter what your opinion is, and I say that with the utmost conviction.” Quite. This year was different.

OK, so Miss Missouri backed the president when asked by Jordin Sparks, the singer and one of the judges, whether she thought Trump’s campaign was innocent or guilty of colluding with the Russians. “Right now, I have to say innocent because not enough information has been revealed,” she said.

Then came Miss Texas. The question from the judges was: “Last month, a demonstration of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and KKK in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent and a counter-protester was killed. The president said there was shared blame with, quote – very fine people – on both sides. Were there? Tell me, yes or no – and explain.” To try to head off some of the rambling, the questions on Miss America tend to be formatted as multiple choice, with the word “explain” tacked to the end. Anyway, Miss Texas replied, “I think that the white supremacist issue, it was very obvious it was a terrorist attack. And I think that President Trump should have made a statement earlier addressing the fact, and making sure all Americans feel safe in the country. That’s the number one issue right now.”

Finally came Cara Mund, aka Miss North Dakota, who won the overall competition and was sternly critical of Trump for withdrawing from the Paris climate accords. “It’s a bad decision,” she said. “There is evidence that climate change is existing and we need to be at that table.”

The headline on Fox News the next day was “When did the Miss America pageant turn into a Nasty Woman protest”? Ladies, bravo!

Bum notes on Broadway

The news that Mean Girls the musical is coming to Broadway next spring makes my heart sink. There are very few non-musical films that cross over well into musicals, even if they are, as in this case, written by Tina Fey (Jeff Richmond, her husband, is writing the score). Among the worst drama-to-musical adaptations has been Carrie the musical, a shuddering failure from 1988, and more recently the epic flop that was Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. The greatest conversion of a straight play to a musical was, of course, Pygmalion to My Fair Lady in 1956, closely followed by The Philadelphia Story to High Society the same year. We can hope.

I, phone-less

I did something I don’t usually do on Friday – ate lunch alone and forced myself not to look at my phone. The first 10 minutes were like a bizarre form of self-punishment. I looked at the other people in the restaurant. I looked out of the window. I fiddled with the sachets of salt on the table and then I looked down at my nails. Time passed. Nothing happened. My eyeballs stood still in my head as a strange feeling came over me, one that felt at once new and oddly familiar. What was that? Oh, relaxation.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist