Get to know the Miss America contestant who inspired 'America's Got Talent' singing ventriloquist Darci Lynne Farmer

Brandy McDonnell by Brandy McDonnell

Published: September 22, 2017 8:55 AM CDT

After spending the summer wowing America with her skills as a singing ventriloquist, Darci Lynne Farmer, 12, Oklahoma City, won Season 12 of "America's Got Talent" Wednesday night on NBC.

The woman who inspired Darci to take up ventriloquism also spent some time in the spotlight recently.

Miss Louisiana Laryssa Bonacquisti, 22, made an impression earlier this month when she belted and yodeled the Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers’ country-western classic “I Wanna Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart" with her matching pair of puppets, Lucky and Lucy: 

As previously reported, Darci sealed her "AGT" victory on Tuesday's final performance episode, when she brought out two puppets - Oscar the awkward blues-crooning mouse and Petunia the big-voiced bunny diva - to sing the Beatles classic "With a Little Help from My Friends."

The similar two-puppet strategies were hardly a coincidence, considering Bonacquisti was Darci's inspiration for taking up ventriloquism.

When Darci was 6 years old, her mother, Misty Farmer, entered the girl in the International Cinderella Scholarship Program, thinking it might help her only daughter with her debilitating shyness.

“I thought, well, the Cinderella program is very low-key. You wear a church dress, you have a talent, it’s no makeup. So, I asked her … if she wanted to do it. She’s like, ‘I’ll try.’ And then we got there: she hid behind me and cried and she wouldn’t do it. I was like, ‘OK, I’m not gonna make you,’” Misty Farmer told me in a summer interview.

But her mother did tell Darci that she had to stay and watch her cousin compete. Once she watched the pageant, Darci thought she could do it, too. She tried again, and she won.

“Then it’s like, ‘I kind of like this,’” her mom said. “But it took lots of those little pageants to get that (shyness) out of her.”

While reigning as the Cinderella program’s 2013-14 International Mini Miss, Darci got to know the 2013-14 International Teen titleholder, Bonacquisti.

“She is amazing,” Darci told me in our summer interview. “I just watched and watched her. I was just super fascinated because I really wanted to learn how to do it.”

She said Bonacquisti gave her some tips on how to get started as a ventriloquist, and in fall 2014, Darci entered Edmond’s Got Talent, lending her singing and yodeling voice to a redheaded cowgirl puppet named Katie, whom the girl had owned for two weeks.

Darci won first prize in that talent show and has been performing as a ventriloquist ever since, all the way to her "America's Got Talent" victory.

Although Bonacquisti's ventriloquist act thrilled viewers on Twitter, she didn't win Miss America. But she did make the Top 7.

Bonacquisti has been rooting for Darci on social media, delivering a heartfelt YouTube message to the girl going into Tuesday's finals performance: 

A Monroe, Louisiana, native, Bonacquisti lists her scholastic ambition as to obtain a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with minors in political science and geography, then get a law degree. She lists her proudest accomplishment as opening for ventriloquist Terry Fator, who won "America's Got Talent" Season 2.

Darci Lynne got to perform with Fator on the Wednesday's "AGT" finale: 

And when Darci was named the winner later Wednesday night, Bonacquisti took to Twitter to sweetly congratulate her "sister":

SHE DID IT! Your new @agt winner is @itsdarcilynne

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