The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 4

sentinel; imittt dlcoir 4 Cover Girl Cocoa girl awaits call from Johnny Tammy Lynn Leppert as Peter Pan. It brings real tears. 1 ii By HELENE DE GROODT COCOA And now, heeenre's Tammy Lynn Lep-pert. Hoping she'll hear those words from Johnny Carson himself, Tammy waits for a Carson call about the screen test tape that movie actor Cornel Wilde arranged for her eight months ago. It just might land her on his late night show, Tammy says.

Or rather, her mother says. The fame that Linda Lep-pert and her daughter have dreamed about for six of Tammy's 13 years might come with a network walk-on. But even if the Carson thing never happens, the two have learned to keep a lot of other competitive irons in the fire. For instance, it's going to be a "big thrill" when the honey-haired teen-ager sees her face "on the October cover of Cover Girl magazine," Tammy admits. And although she's just started to use perfume, it's "going to be pretty exciting" to have a new scent publicized and named for her.

Mom recently got a phone call from a company about that, she confides. Can "normal" describe a youngster who has carried her school assignments on the road while competing to win 309 titles in contests, and who has modeled and done commercials since age Well, if "normal" is hating to clean your room but doing it anyhow, begging Mom for a fuzzy black puppy that's half poodle and half shepherd and turning from hating those teasing boys last year to kind of liking them this year, then Tammy is as normal as any other eighth-grader at Jefferson Junior High. But the pageant wins like her 1978 crop (All American Girl, Qpver Girl, National Superior Teen-ager), "get her into places other kids can't go," believes her mother. 'Directors show up to spot kids (at All attention. She loved being onstage and picked acting because it's a weak talent for pageants and she knew she have to be good.

She's self-taught from watching soap operas." Tammy has this Peter Pan fantasy, this longing to play a real life nurturing role, a mother to an elusive Feter Pan, Linda says. But that, too, was adroitly channeled to further Mom's stage ambitions for Tammy. At four, she cried when I told her Peter Pan wasn't a real person. So now when she has to cry real tears for a role, she thinks back to that time. And she used the part in Peter Pan when Tinkerbell is dying (and the essence of innocent 'believing') for a skit that's been a real winner for her.

She's never lost with it in 23 national and state competitions," beams Linda Leppert bne adds that Tammy's success has parlayed itself into a new career for Linda too, that of talent agent for 50 other pageant-struck girls. She explains that although her daughter may soon be auditioning for a movie role in Atlanta, 'Tammy already as ed role Paving herself in a movie called Cover Girl Behind the She was cast by Bever-iy McDermott, who's well known in the industry for movies and a TV series called 'Careers'. It's supposed Horida 8 Wlthi" "eXt S'X months 1 think in increasine demands for travel to Miami, Atlanta and other meccas of pageantdom, Tammy is paving her public school friends behind this fall and Leppert 8 l0Cal Private Sch001' says Linda Will Tammy miss the friendships that usually buffer me U-ansition from junior to senior high years for most "Well, you have to take the good with the bad," she the commercials and small bit roles Tammy has gotten have been as a response from pageants. "Just recently when she was last in a line of 300 auditioning for a Dentyne commercial, the director went to pull her first because of her stack of titles. I'm a firm believer in them.

They've become our whole life just like Tammy is MY whole life." And how does the budding adolescent with the wide smile cope with the competitive grind? "She can hold up because she's a professional," insists her mother. "Tammy's never really been a little girl. I put her into this because in the beginning she was hspkwarrf hA -A.