Did you know the TODAY anchors have a former model in their midst?
"Twenty years ago, I was a calendar girl," Dylan Dreyer revealed on TODAY Thursday.
The TODAY meteorologist was looking to make a few extra bucks as a 16-year-old when she took a gig as a stock-photo model, posing in generic situations like holding up a coffee mug or throwing her head back and laughing.
Before she knew it, her face was popping up in newspaper articles, a calendar and even the cover of a book where she's seen fanning out a stack of money.
Dylan's revelation came during a talk about pharmacy chain CVS announcing that most of its photos in the beauty section will not be retouched.
That brought Dylan back to her days working at a local CVS as a high school student in New Jersey. She was approached by a photographer asking if she wanted to be a model, which her mother later approved.
"I'm behind the counter and this man comes up to me and says, 'Would you like to do stock photography?''' she said. "So I said, 'I don't know what that is, what do you mean?'"
"So he said, 'You take random pictures of you like holding a mug or you like looking surprised. We pay you and then different articles can take these stock pictures to put along with their article. I said sure!"
The stock-photo process sounded a little creepy in hindsight.
"I did a lot in this guy's basement," she said as Al Roker, Willie Geist and Craig Melvin simultaneously raised their eyebrows.
"This does not sound right," Al said.
Thankfully it was a benign request and everything worked out in the end.
"Why my mom was on board I don't know,'' Dylan said. "But I got some extra money in high school!"