The Day I Put My Heels On
in an Atlanta Parking Lot.

The morning it happened, I thought I was going to work. That is the thing I want you to understand first — I had no idea. I was not dressed for a moment. I was not mentally prepared for what was about to occur. I was wearing blue jeans and a black tank top, the way he had specifically told me to dress, and I had my heels in a bag in the backseat of the car because he had said to bring them and I had assumed he meant we might need me to stand in as a height reference between sets. Photographers do that. You use who is available to check your lighting before the actual talent arrives. That is what I thought the heels were for.

I thought I was going to work. I was going to something else entirely.

How it started — which is really how everything started.

To tell the story of that afternoon properly, I have to back up a little. Because Michael Carson did not appear in my life the day of the signing. He appeared before that — before the contract, before Atlanta, before any of this was a story I could tell. He appeared when I was in college, at UAH, with a brand new Facebook account and a few senior portraits posted without any particular intention. I was not trying to be seen. I was just existing in the way that people my age existed online in those years. And he saw me anyway.

He reached out through Ken Laurence — a fashion designer who would later go on to compete on Project Runway — who asked if I would be willing to take photos for a collection he was working on. I said yes. My mother and my aunt drove down to Montgomery with me for that first shoot. Mike was behind the camera. I was a complete novice. I had never been on a set like that before — the lights, the music, the whole production of it — and I loved every second of it with a certainty that surprised even me.

After that first shoot, Mike and I kept working together. Test shoots, editorial work, the kind of ongoing collaboration that teaches you more than any formal training could. He wasn't just taking photos — he was educating me. He taught me how light works. How a background sets the emotional register of an image before the subject even enters the frame. What a photographer is actually looking for when they look through a lens, and why understanding that makes you a better model rather than just a better subject. He gave me the inside view of the craft, and that view changed everything about how I moved through a set.

I also started assisting him on shoots. Going along as a second hand, helping with setups, watching the work happen from the other side. It was invaluable. You learn things from behind the camera that you cannot learn from in front of it. And it meant I was with him often — which is how I ended up in Atlanta on that particular afternoon, in those particular blue jeans, with those particular heels in a bag in the backseat.

The shoot before — and the watch he kept checking.

We were there for a full shoot day — working with a fashion stylist in the city whose creativity I found genuinely inspiring. Watching her work, watching her take clothing and transform it into something with a point of view, was one of those experiences that confirms something you already believe: that fashion, at its best, is not about the clothes. It's about the idea the clothes are carrying. I was grateful to be in that room. I was grateful to see it up close.

And then the first half of the shoot wrapped. The model needed two hours for an intricate hair and makeup detail. And Mike started checking his watch.

Not casually. Deliberately. The way someone checks a watch when they are trying to hit a specific time. I noticed it but didn't read it as anything significant — shoots have schedules, people have timelines, this was not unusual. When he told the team we were going for lunch and would be back, I assumed that was exactly what was happening. Lunch. A break. The normal rhythm of a long day.

"He was speeding through Atlanta and I was asking where we were going and he was saying nothing. Just driving. Checking his watch. I had absolutely no idea."

What happened instead: he got in the car and drove fast. Toward Auburn Avenue. I was asking questions — where are we going, do we have a reservation somewhere, what is happening — and he was not answering. Not in an unkind way. Just in the way of someone who has decided the destination is going to communicate more than any explanation would. He pulled into a parking lot near the beltline — before the beltline became the thing it is now, when it was still a different Atlanta — and stopped the car.

"Put your heels on," he said.

I got the heels out of the backseat. I put them on. And then I walked fast to keep up with him across that parking lot, across the sidewalk, into a two-story outdoor complex. Still asking questions. Still not getting answers. Until we reached the door.

The door — and everything it said without words.

Click Models. That is what the door said. And I turned and looked at Mike — and he looked back at me without saying a single word, but saying everything. Yes, we are doing this. Yes, you are here. Yes, walk in.

I walked in. A sweet receptionist at the front greeted us. Mike asked if we were too late for the open call. She smiled politely and said no, not at all — please fill out this form and I'll be right back. She went around the corner. And then we heard it. Her voice, lowered but not lowered enough, saying to someone we couldn't see: "You have to come see this girl."

I was still seated. Still filling out the form. Still not fully understanding what was happening. I heard a small group of women come from around the corner. I heard their reactions before I looked up — the sounds people make when they see something that surprises them in a good way. One of them asked me to stand. I stood. They all looked up — every single one of them, eyes traveling from my feet to my face without blinking. Another one disappeared briefly and came back with someone else. They asked me to walk down the hallway. I walked. They took a few digitals.

And then, on the spot, they offered me a contract.

"Everything moved so fast I asked could I take the contract home to read. They happily agreed. Mike, on the other hand, was smiling and beaming from ear to ear. He had seen something in me that I had not yet seen in myself."

The drive home — and the silence that held everything.

We had to go back to the original shoot. The model's hair and makeup were done. The second half of the day was waiting. And so I went back — contract in hand, completely numb — and I worked the rest of the afternoon the way you work when your mind is somewhere else entirely. I didn't tell the stylist. I didn't tell the other models. I went back to being the assistant, doing the job, holding the reflector and resetting the backdrop and doing all the small invisible things that keep a shoot moving. Mike told the stylist. He couldn't not. He said: I just got her signed with Click. And Click was a very big deal at that time in Atlanta. The stylist knew exactly what that meant.

I drove back to Birmingham that night after we wrapped. Mike sat in the car wondering, I learned later, whether he had pushed me into something I wasn't ready for. Whether he had moved too fast. Whether he had overstepped. He had not. He had given me the greatest thing anyone had given me up to that point in my life: he had walked through a door with me so I didn't have to walk through it alone. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

I didn't say much on the drive. The contract was in my lap. It was real paper with real terms and a real agency name on it, and the weight of it — not physical weight, the other kind — was almost more than I could process while also navigating a highway in the dark. So I didn't try to process it. I just drove. And I held it. And somewhere on that drive back to Birmingham I started to understand that something had shifted, that the before and after of my life were now divided by an afternoon in an Atlanta parking lot when a man I trusted handed me a pair of heels and said nothing else.

What happened after — and why the before matters.

Back home, I shared everything with my mother. We discussed it. We called my aunt, who connected us with a family attorney who was willing to look at the contract and protect my interests. The terms were standard for the industry: the agency would take 20 percent from print work and 15 percent from film. A two-year exclusive contract. Standard requirements on my end. The lawyer reviewed it, gave his feedback, and said it was fair.

I prayed about it. I talked to my parents about it. I sat with it alone. And then I wrote that note to myself — the one above — and faxed the signed contract to the offices of Click Atlanta from my lawyer's office. And just like that, I was a signed fashion model with a legitimate agency in Atlanta, Georgia.

But the real work, as I wrote then and as I know now, was only beginning.

What Mike gave me — and why I am still saying thank you.

I have thought a great deal about what it means to have someone in your corner who sees you before you see yourself. Not someone who flatters you — flattery is easy and cheap and everywhere. Someone who actually looks at you, with all their professional knowledge and all their experience, and concludes: there is something here. And then acts on that conclusion. Goes out of their way. Checks their watch. Drives fast across Atlanta. Says nothing and lets the door explain itself.

Michael Carson is one of the most accomplished fashion photographers in this region. His work is recognized nationally. He has shot for major publications, worked with major talent, built a body of work that speaks for itself without needing anyone to explain it. He did not have to do any of what he did for me. He did it because he believed in something he saw — and because he is, at his core, a person who acts on what he believes rather than waiting to see what everyone else decides first.

We are still close. That is fifteen-plus years of friendship built on a foundation of mutual respect and a shared belief in what Birmingham has to offer — what Alabama has to offer — and what is possible for the women who grow up here and decide not to let anyone else's low expectations become the ceiling of their ambition.

The afternoon in the parking lot was not the beginning of my career. My career began earlier than that — in a Montgomery studio with a Ken Laurence collection and a woman who had never been on a proper fashion set and was discovering, in real time, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be. But the parking lot was the day someone else confirmed what I was starting to believe about myself. And that confirmation — given without words, given with a pair of heels and a specific route through Atlanta traffic — changed the shape of everything that came after.

To Ken, to Michael, to Crystal and the entire team at Click Models Atlanta: you changed my life more than you will ever fully know. I am still becoming who you saw that afternoon. I am still working toward the woman in that note.

See you on the catwalk.