You can have it all with Kelley Thompson, our Miss November 2009. She has long brown hair, brown eyes and the sweetest smile this side of the Red River. Born and raised in Gilmer, a small town in east Texas, Kelley went to the local high school and got married at seventeen. She was working at a bar in Longview when she heard about our 55th Anniversary Playmate Search.

“There was a casting in Dallas,” she says. “I went and did some test shots, but I never thought that I would hear back.” A few days later, she got the call – she had tested positive for Playmate. “I cried on the phone,” she says. “I had never even left Texas.” Kelley found herself on a plane to Los Angeles, then in a car to the Mansion, where she met Hugh Hefner and made friends with her fellow Playmates.

“I knew there had to be more to life than tending bar,” she says. “Playboy changed my life.” Kelley eventually wants to return to college – when she made the Centerfold, she was studying medical technology, hoping to become a diagnostic sonographer – but for now, she wants to pursue a career as a model. She’s still shooting and hosting for Playboy, and when she’s not working, she’s at home, cooking and spending time with her family. “Life is good,” she says. “Especially for my husband – after all, he’s married to a Playmate.”

“I cried on the phone,” says Kelley Thompson about the day she learned she was on her way to becoming Miss November. A 21-year-old small-town beauty from Texas, Kelley was working as a bartender at the time. She had done some test shooting in Dallas, but she never thought…. Surely she wouldn’t…. A few days after the shoot, she says, she received a sign: A trio of cottontails had dug a bunny hole in her front yard. The next thing she knew, the phone call arrived, and she was headed to the airport, bound for Los Angeles, where paradise awaited. She had never been on an airplane before.

“To get off my first plane ride and go directly to the Playboy Mansion was just surreal,” she says. Kelley has wanted to be a Playmate ever since she became a fan of The Girls Next Door four years ago. “I immediately fell in love with Hef and the girls on that show, and I was, like, Wow, it would be really awesome to experience something like that. It’d be like a dream.” So what has all this good fortune taught Miss November? “To live life to its fullest,” she says, “to not be afraid to go after something you want. Being from a small town I always knew there was so much more out there, and now I want to go everywhere and see everything. Life’s too short, so give all your dreams a shot.”