Don't Let the Lipstick Fool You by Lisa Leslie

Author:Lisa Leslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2008-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

I guess my sister thought she could cash in on the success that I had enjoyed in Italy and at the 1996 Olympics. She also knew that I had signed a professional modeling contract before the games in Atlanta. In 1995 Dawn Staley’s friend Londell McMillan took me to New York City to see if any modeling agencies would be interested in me. One stop was at Wilhelmina Models Inc. where I met with Kevin Jones. He was six foot six, and when Kevin saw me, he said, “Oh my god. You are so tall. You are beautiful. This is great.”

I did not have a professional portfolio, but he looked at the few pictures I had brought with me. There were a couple of shots from the Olympics, when my hair was in two French braids, and one photo of me with an ex-boyfriend. That was all I had to show, but Kevin saw something that he liked. “You could be used as a model in special situations,” he told me. “You could open and close shows. You could do a variety of still shots. You have a nice face and a nice body. I could use you on athletic shoots or when we have a need for body-part models.”

He thought that my unique look and height could bring something special and extraordinary to edgy designers. Usually, they want all their models to be about the same size, with the same look, so this gave me a chance to bring something different to the runway. Since I am much taller than the average model, he thought that he could also use me to model in shows where designers preferred to have celebrities wear their new line of clothing. That was his pitch. I thought it was cool. That would be fun. I was in New York City, and I was going to be a model!

When I was a youngster, the first career goal that I remember having was to be a weathercaster on television. The second was to be a model. Believe me, no one would have ever guessed that the shy, lanky young girl from Compton would one day get into modeling. I was still not the girl that people would pick out of a bunch of photos and say, “Oh, she is beautiful,” but there was something about me.

I guess I caught the modeling bug when I was a young girl performing in Mom’s mock runway shows at home. Each summer Dionne and I got four pairs of pants, two skirts, four tops, a sweater, a jacket, two pairs of shoes, socks, and underwear for the upcoming school year. We got most of it from the Compton swap meet or from Zody’s (Compton’s answer to Kmart), but we loved getting new clothes and could not wait to get home to model them. It did not matter if the pants cost five dollars or twenty dollars. The fact that they were brand new was exciting.

Dionne and I would come

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