SECRETS OF A SOUTHERN UNDERDOG:
year, there’s growth. When I first came into the circle as one of the new girls, I wanted to give everyone a chance. Any- time you come into a group, you give them the respect—it’s their group.” Six years later, she’s learned to be what she calls her “purest self.” Mistakes will always be made—in this way, Bailey sees reality TV as an apt reflection of real life.
“All I can do is do me. Sometimes I do me, and it works out really well. Sometimes I do me, and it doesn’t work out so well,” she says, still laughing. “I’m not perfect, and I don’t expect to be perfect on the show.”
Bailey is unapologetically flawed, but there’s a real sense of pride that no one can take away from her. She confesses that she actually gets a thrill out of being underestimated.
“There’s a power in people not seeing you coming,” she ex- plains. “When they don’t see you coming, and they don’t look at you like you’re that girl, then they wake up one day, and you’re that girl.” And her response to the naysayers she’s met along the way are words that everyone with lofty goals can live by: “When you say I can’t, I say I already did.”
“My life did not have to turn out this way,” Cynthia Bailey says, reflecting on her long road to the present-day. “I’m an under- dog. I’m from a small town in Alabama. I didn’t have a strong support system, or a cheerleading squad around me.” Bailey, the eldest of three, says that her parents were loving, but left her to fend for herself in many ways. This, she says, is how she learned to be her own cheerleader.
And just one year after high school graduation, she was on a plane to New York. She’d been offered a Wilhelmina modeling contract after a scout saw her in a homecoming queen pageant, and began working full time. But the big transition didn’t come easy for the southern underdog.
“I had confidence, but I didn’t have supermodel confidence,” she admits. “I had to learn how to sell myself. I didn’t grow up thinking like that, but I caught on quick.”
When Bailey isn’t waxing poetic on how she got over, or run- ning The Bailey Agency School of Fashion (she’s responsible for launching Nisaa Pouncey’s modeling career), she tends to her mind, body and soul by spending time with her teenage daughter Noelle and her husband Peter (“we love watching movies, looking at houses, and just brainstorming togeth- er”). But she is also a big fan of spending her “Cynthia time” doing as little as possible.
“I love doing absolutely nothing,” she says. “My life is a living itinerary. So when I have my own time, I want to lay in my bed, watch Lifetime all day and order Chinese food.”
“I had to learn how to sell myself. I didn’t grow up thinking like that, but I caught on quick.”
Bailey likens herself to chameleon, and this inspired her initial approach when she first joined the Real Housewives of Atlanta cast in the third season.
“There’s no way to do your first season of reality TV, except to do the first season. Then you watch it with the world, mortified like ‘Oh my god,’” she laughs. “As for my sixth season—every
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That sense of pride creeps back into her voice. She’s earned those days off, and she knows it. While it’s clear that she hopes to imbue her daughter with that same sense of pride and work ethic, Bailey invests just as much time and effort into supporting Noelle emotionally as she does her entrepre- neurial work.
“I don’t play no games when it comes to Noelle. Everything stops when it comes to her.” Bailey asked to share the cover with Noelle for this reason. “I thought of who my heart and my soul is, and it’s her.”
Noelle likely won’t have the same underdog beginnings as her mother. What she does have is the benefit of a woman in her corner who can always tell her how she worked to create a legacy, and how she—flaws, failures, triumphs and all—made her own way up, and over.
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