That Time I Got to be a Bikini Model at Splashion 2016

{Wearing: Peony. Photographed by Thaddaeus McAdams/exclusiveaccess.net}

{Wearing: Laundry by Shelli Segal. With: Ria Michelle, I’m Not Sorry Darling, Uncle Luke, Brickellista, Kelly Saks and (my lifelong swim week sista for more years than either of us can remember) The Wordy Girl. Photographed by Thaddaeus McAdams/exclusiveccess.net}

Year after year, as July creeps into the middle of our summer, we make our way to the tents of swim week. We go to the rooftop parties. We snap pics of models in bikinis. We wish our legs were that long. We realize just how short our legs are. And we sweat—in hair, in makeup, in outfits we obsess over putting together, backstage, front of house, front row, on rooftops, at presentations, at breakfasts, waiting for Ubers. Swim week is one of my favorite weeks in Miami, but I’ve been going for so long (since its inception), I can’t even remember which year I’m on. While its fun, it does, after a decade plus, get redundant. And up until a few weeks ago, I thought this would be another year, like all the rest.

Boy, was I wrong. This was my best swim week ever. Ever ever.

Why? How?

Let’s start at the beginning.

A couple weeks back I was working late at night when my friend (and fellow Hoosier) Stacey Russell of Miami Magazine shot me an e-mail at 11 p.m. asking me to model in the Splashion 2016 fashion show, the unofficial kick off to swim week. I actually went back and read the e-mail three more times to make sure my tired eyes were seeing correctly what the black serif font in front of me was asking before I threw back YASSS YASSS YASSS.

I’m 38. I’m a mom. I’m a 38-year-old mom. What business do I have being on a runway in a bathing suit? Zero! Zip! Zilch! And that’s exactly why I said yes. Because it’s about shaking things up. It’s about doing something wild, crazy, fun. And this was without a shadow of a doubt all of the above. This year, it seemed Miami Magazine was stuck in the same rut as my swim week mentality, so they decided to break the mold. Instead of sending a fleet of models down the runway at the W Hotel in South Beach, they asked a small crew of bloggers to do a little catwalkin’. Just so happens some of those girls, Maria, Ria and Kelly, are some of my favorite humans on earth. If only you could have read the texting threads leading up to the days before the show.

Things got pretty real the day we went in for the fitting with Rachel Russell of Style Saves. Five looks, two of which were thongs. THONGS. Did I mention I’m 38—and a mom? I mean, I’m all about living for the moment, but this, this was extreme moment-ing. Sure, I wear that to the beach, but the beach isn’t a runway with lights and cameras and 400 people gawking at you. Exit all solid foods and enter hitting Pilates as a hard as a toddler tripping on its first steps, tanning (because tan cellulite is cuter than white cellulite), nails, hair, makeup—the whole nine. If ever in the dead of summer, after lots of rose and multiple vacations, you needed motivation to put the bottle down and get back to your regularly scheduled workouts, well, this was it. This was the mother of it.

But there was more to it than that. See, we aren’t models. We’re bloggers. We’re look real. We come in all shapes and sizes and personalities. And we didn’t treat the runway like models would. We did it like bloggers do. We took our phones and snapped the audience as we walked. We danced. We sang. Maria even got down. And I, in a moment of yoga glory, struck a bird of paradise pose smack at the end of the runway. Hey, if I’m only going to get this moment once in my life, I’m going to make the most of it. Damn straight.

In the end, it was so much fun, that any nerves I’d managed to work up, seemed silly. There wasn’t anything to be nervous about. It was a blast. One for the books, and I’ll never forget it. Fifty years from now when I look back on my life, I can say, “Hey, remember that time I got to be a bikini model when I was 38?” And that’s what it’s all about. Thanks, Miami Mag for breaking the mold. Thanks, Rachel, for being such a badass stylist. Thanks, Stacey, for asking me to do this. Thanks, Jorge, for screaming my name so loud that even though I couldn’t see you, I still knew you were there. And thanks everyone who came out to cheer this nearly middle-aged mama along in her thong.