The young girl started whimpering during the rehearsal in the tunnel under Busch Stadium.

She was scared to walk out on the field with her fifth-grade classmates.

They were expected to sing "God Bless America" before game time on the clear night when the St. Louis Cardinals would clinch the National League Central Division title by beating the Cubs once more.

My daughter was in this group of 30 or so classmates, but she didn't seem to be suffering any preperformance jitters. In fact, she was keen on avoiding extended eye contact with me. I had talked my way into accompanying the music teacher and principal onto the field in the hopes of getting a video of the moment.

So it was another student who tugged at the purse on my shoulder and pointed at the girl on the brink of tears. A maternal instinct kicked in, and I bent down to give the girl a hug and reassure her that she was going to do great.

"If you really don't want to, you don't have to sing," I said. She looked grim and nodded.

I had already been handed one student's backpack and another one's cap to safeguard while they performed. Given all the mothering required, albeit to children unrelated to me, I could overlook how dispensable I seemed to be to my own offspring.

For my daughter, it wasn't just her big night to perform with her friends. It was her big night to hang out with them at a reasonable distance from us, her family, who are ever on the perilous brink of morbidly embarrassing her.

My friends and I remember the places we walked by ourselves as children on the cusp of adolescence -- the local grocery store, the swimming pool, perhaps a nearby pizza or ice cream place.

Whether you hung out at the mall or the movies, the most coveted places became those away from direct parental supervision, in a place bigger than a familiar street, park or friend's house.

My husband recalls the first time he was allowed to go from his home in Long Island to New York City on the subway with just his friends. He was 13. It was New Year's Eve, and they had tickets to see the Rangers play. None of them realized it was a night game. One of his buddies used a pay phone to make a collect call to his parents, who must have informed the other parents about the time change. The four friends had the entire day in the city to themselves.

He remembers walking from the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center. They stopped to eat at a deli.

They were several years older than writer Lenore Skenazy's child, who navigated the city's subways at age 9. Skenazy launched a "free-range child" movement in response to the helicopter parents who seemed to handicap their children with constant hovering and supervision. But regardless of where a parent falls on the free-range to helicopter spectrum, there comes a time when children take their first steps toward burgeoning independence.

For our 10-year-old it was at the ballpark, which is really as close to freedom as she was going to get at this age. She sat a section away from us with a group of girls, at least a row away from anyone's parent. They went to the concessions area to buy their own Dippin' Dots and pretzels. She said one of the best parts was that she didn't have to listen to her little brother cheer or chant during the plays.

"We clapped, we yelled, we cheered, we laughed and we talked," she said, about the night.

The beauty of baseball is that it allows you to talk about everything other than baseball until it forces you to talk about nothing but baseball.

Letting go. Holding on. This is the bittersweet balance for much of life.

I was glad I had served a purpose by joining her classmates as they walked out on what felt like hallowed ground to so many of them.

I was just as glad when we found my daughter in the ninth inning and watched a memorable season draw to a close, together.

There's a return of antiquated-sounding illnesses in various parts of the country -- measles, mumps and whooping cough outbreaks are in the headlines.

And there are two distinct front lines in the public policy effort to get as many children vaccinated as possible. On one side, there are pediatricians concerned about a rise in preventable childhood diseases because of parents reluctant or refusing to vaccinate their children.

On the other side, there are parents with religious objections or other concerns who don't feel their worries are taken seriously by the medical establishment.

And never the twain shall meet, it seems.

Dr. Dyan Hes, medical director at Gramercy Pediatrics in New York City, received a call from grandparents who are at their wits' end. Their granddaughter has refused to vaccinate her 11-year-old, so they are bringing her to Hes' office to see if she can talk some sense into her.

"I'll ask her what her fears are," Hes said. Normally, she meets with prospective patients in her private practice and tells them upfront: "All my patients are vaccinated."

"We became pediatricians because we want children to be healthy, so it's never our intention to harm your child," she said. The previous fears about links between autism and vaccines have been completely debunked, she said. "I don't separate vaccines. I don't alter the schedule because no study shows there are reduced complications from doing so," she said.

While the overall childhood vaccination rate in America is still high -- at 90 percent or higher -- for many immunizations, there are pockets of unvaccinated children in certain communities.

One mother, who says she doesn't like to talk about her concerns about vaccinations publicly because of the reactions it can trigger, says her son began having seizures after getting the measles, mumps and rubella shot when he was barely a year old.

"Every doctor I've spoken to will get upset if you say the vaccination caused it. They will say it might have triggered it. He may have been predisposed to seizures already," she said. But the experience changed her view on vaccinations and has influenced some of her family members against getting their own children immunized.

This mom says she doesn't believe in combination shots, prefers to wait until children are a little older than the recommended age and avoids shots altogether when the child has a cold or any other illness.

Even though her husband is a physician, she says medical practitioners tend to have a view of "you're either with us or against us" when it comes to vaccines.

That may be due to cases such as the measles outbreaks in New York City and Texas this year. If trends continue, this may be the worst year for measles in America in a decade. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report earlier this month stating unvaccinated children or those with unknown vaccination status made up 92 percent of the 159 reported cases of measles between Jan. 1 and Aug. 24 this year.

"We don't really see childhood mortality anymore because we have vaccines," Hes said. "People don't remember what it's like to be in an iron lung because of polio." They haven't seen encephalopathy or death as a complication of measles.

Parents who don't vaccinate their children are exposing the larger public to risk, including babies too young to be immunized, she said. Hes has patients with cancer and other illnesses who cannot be vaccinated; having those kids share a waiting room with an unvaccinated child with measles could be fatal, she said. "Most of the parents forget that they are vaccinated, but they are choosing to expose their kids."

But for the mom who believes her son had a negative reaction to the MMR shot and never got another immunization for him, a position like Hes' will never sway her.

"I'm not trying to argue with someone who has spent years studying medicine," she said. "But they should try to understand where the other person is coming from. No one wants a sick world. Everyone wants what's best for their child."

A doctor scarcely has the time to answer every vaccination question a parent might have during an office visit. And the vast amounts of information online can range from reliable to completely false. But if the goal is to get as many children vaccinated as possible, the medical community needs to find a way to address parents' concerns about the risks -- without alienating the very people they seek to help.

We don't like when a sexist contest provokes a racist response.

Come on, Miss America viewers, you're better than that.

Those upset with the crowning of Nina Davuluri, Miss New York, as the first Indian-American to win the crown took their displeasure to Twitter, referring to her as Miss 7-11, Miss Al Qaeda and other asinine slurs.

Bigots and idiots, which so often go hand in hand, described Davuluri as a foreigner, an Arab, a terrorist even. Stupid, stupider, and stupidest.

Do we really look to anachronistic beauty pageants to measure societal progress? After all, it wasn't until 1984 that the pageant crowned its first African-American, the famously dethroned Vanessa Williams, who is also the pageant's most successful alum. 1984? Good grief.

Surely we recognize this as a contest in which a young woman saunters across a stage in high heels and a bikini and asks to be judged for how she looks in it. Males have preening competitions, too. Where is our Mr. America? And why don't we care how he handles the burning controversy of Julie Chen getting her eyes done?

This year's pageant was a spectacle replete with bizarreness, such as Lance Bass of the '90s boy band 'N Sync grading a contestant's soundbite about the United States intervening in Syria.

It was a pageant rife with contradictions: The winner, who confesses struggling with bulimia, was investigated by the organization for allegedly calling her predecessor "fat as

."

Physical beauty, a personal and subjective standard, of course, relies on its beholder. It transcends the categories that may divide us. A society's beauty ideals say much about its values and aspirations. And as those beauty ideals evolve, they hold a mirror to larger societal shifts.

The most intriguing underlying question throughout the Miss America pageant is: Who gets to represent us? Who do we hold up as a pinnacle female, a representative of our country's beauty, ideals and, ahem, talent (loosely defined)?

For some, it wasn't the two finalists -- both of them Asian women representing the coasts -- who looked like "real" America to them. It may have been the tatted blonde from the Midwest.

Miss Kansas, Theresa Vail, became the first Miss America contestant to show off tattoos during the swimsuit competition: the insignia of the U.S. Army Dental Corps on her left shoulder and the Serenity Prayer along the right side of her torso. (Donald Trump, owner of the competing Miss Universe franchise, publicly derided the popularity of getting inked and says his pageant doesn't encourage tattoos. He, of course, knows a thing or two about embracing questionable aesthetic choices.)

Vail's tattoos weren't the only first. Miss Iowa, Nicole Kelly, was born without her left forearm. Her confidence spoke to the changes in how we view people with disabilities.

There was Miss Florida, Myrrhanda Jones, still looking glamorous as she sported a bejeweled knee brace after tearing her ACL during a rehearsal. Perseverance is a sexy accessory.

In 2010, Rima Fakih became the first Muslim American to wear the Miss USA crown. There was an expected backlash to that choice, as well. The xenophobia prompted those who typically roll their eyes at pageants to defend the winner. Some base level of ignorance will likely always be with us.

When someone tweets that Davuluri should be wearing a red dot on her head, that insult hits close to home for many Americans of South Asian heritage.

In its 87-year history, the pageant has risen and fallen in popularity. For years, it was dropped by a major network because so few viewers were interested in watching. Then, in 2011 and 2012, the telecast was the highest-rated nonsports event in its timeslot across networks. While I wouldn't want to watch the show with my young children, I'm tempted to selectively share the stories of a few contestants -- the ones whose imperfect lives overshadow their flawless faces.

As ethnic and racial lines continue to blur in this country, as our national identity continues to evolve, moments in pageants like this capture our imagination.

Yet, there's this ridiculous message the pageant peddles: We enjoy judging women on their looks and bodies, and we will set as a body ideal a standard impossible for the vast majority of women on this planet.

But there's another revelation at play: Whether Muslim or Evangelical, whether brown or white, whether you twirl a baton or shake it like a Bollywood star, you can rock that tiara for this country.