An aspiring actress from Rockford, Illinois, she and a commercial photographer named David Esterson participated in a two-day long photo shoot in the hopes on getting their names in the Guinness Book of World Records for the "world's longest photo shoot." Esterson and Nickell went without sleep from 8 a.m. Saturday, December 7, 1991 to 10 a.m. the following Monday, over two cold, drizzly days outside a photo developing store at a Burbank mini-mall required Nickell to change clothes 147 times. But after 50 hours, 550 poses and 9,000 photographs, the editors at Guinness Publishing, who said they are phasing out most records of endurance from their famous book, issued a polite rejection from their offices in Middlesex, England saying "Since we do not have a category in our Guinness book of records for the longest photo shoot, we would not be interested. The category of longest photo shoot is not one we are really interested in creating.".
