Thank you, Karen Pinkney.

My first real job out of college was a broadcast media assistant for an advertising agency in Dallas. Well, actually my first job was teaching preschool, but I don't really count that as my first "real" job, my first corporate life job. Because I was still not facing reality that I was out of school and in the "real world" at that point. 

I knew I didn't want to teach preschool forever, not because I didn't love it, but because one cannot live on seven bucks an hour, even for a 40 hour week. I had an English degree  from a liberal arts university, which sounds nice and general and you can go anywhere with that, according to my dad. But you can't really qualify for anything in the corporate world, you don't really get solid, applicable skills with an English degree, unless you get a teaching certificate with it, or go through the journalism school. Which I didn't. But I kind of wanted to go to grad school, and I was at least smart enough to know you can't do that with a corporate job, and so preschool it was, and I loved sitting on the floor in my Keds doing Itsy Bitsy Spider all afternoon. I didn't know what I wanted, at all really.

My dad was understandably frustrated, having just spent an ungodly amount of money on my top tier education, with nothing to show for it.

So he pulled a favor, and got me an information interview with an advertising agency in Dallas. I was supposed to go in and get a tour and find out what happens in a media buying group, just to see if that was a route I wanted to take.

On the day of my interview, the woman running the department had fired her assistant. I showed up at 6pm, after a day of teaching two year olds, in a suit and matching heels, and a bachelor's degree. She offered me a job on the spot.

Karen Pinkney was the woman who hired me. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but in retrospect Karen being my boss was a big deal. Karen was a black woman.  Women did not generally have big time management positions in corporate companies, even in the mid-nineties. Much less a woman who was also black.

But she was not a token. She was brilliant. And she had scratched her way there by being brilliant, and being a hard-ass when necessary, but mostly by quietly teaching everyone she came in contact how to do their job. She played politics like an ace. She understood the ego of both the dominant male Media Planning Director, and the young female ingenue. People would come crushing down the hallway to her office, angry and all HULK SMASH over something stupid that had gone wrong, like Buy Order printouts that had a typo, as if someone's life needed to end over a typo.  And they would leave an hour later all giggly with a fresh stack of printouts. They never knew what happened.

Karen rarely got angry. If she was angry though, you knew it, because the strains of gospel music coming out of her office radio would get turned up to 10 and swell down the hallway. You did not go to her office to ask her a question when the gospel music was turned up. The building better be on fire if you did that.

She lived on coffee and cigarettes and lettuce. I am not even kidding, I never saw her eat protein - she was allergic to dairy. She came in at 6am and stayed until 8pm, four days a week. She had a young son whom she adored and I think a very patient husband. She was the first woman I ever knew to be on the corporate ladder and have a family.

Karen was from New Orleans. Her mother's name was Sweet, Not Miss Sweet, not Sweetie, not mama, just Sweet. In February, she had a King Cake shipped to the office from New Orleans, and that was the first time I learned that Mardi Gras was about something other than getting beads and flashing boobs from balconies. She told us what the green, purple and gold colors mean. She taught us about the baby Jesus hidden inside.

I think of Karen every year on Fat Tuesday. I think about how she gave me a chance, knowing only that I could type and speak in full sentences. I was not the best employee she ever had, I'm quite certain. I asked a lot of questions about why do we do things this way when this other way might work better? She was very patient with me. I didn't deserve it. She taught me that advertising is not about politics, it is not about glamorous benefits or Hollywood photo shoots. It is about spending someone else's money in the most responsible, optimizing way.

She taught me that life is too short not to have King Cake. She taught me that Jesus is hidden inside everything we do. When I think back about the road that has led me to a career in ministry, I realize it is a road paved with people who knew that.