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"       Latest: Check Out Our 2013 Sexiest Woman Alive, Scarlett Johansson &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  BONUS GALLERY: More Photos and Exclusive Minka Kelly Interview Quotes &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  PLUS: WATCH EVERY WOMAN WE LOVE VIDEO IN HD &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  Share DAY She screams.  &amp;quot;Ready!&amp;quot;  Minka Kelly looks so small out there on the water, bobbing at the end of the towrope. She&amp;#039;s a head. Her brown hair is pulled tight, and a perfect ponytail rises and falls to the surface like a question mark. She&amp;#039;s smiling \u2014 you can see her teeth from the boat. The sun feels good, and an offshore breeze curdles the waves on the Great South Bay of Long Island, an hour or so outside the city. The 385-horse MasterCraft hums in the water, and the excitement that had built during the drive from Manhattan is all right there in her bobbing, far-off smile. She can&amp;#039;t wait.  She wore that ponytail the first time most people ever saw her \u2014 on her television show, Friday Night Lights, season one, episode one. She was the high school cheerleader, kissing the quarterback in the driveway. That was four years ago, when she was twenty-six in real life and working as a scrub nurse \u2014 C-sections, amputations, craniotomies (a bone flap is temporarily removed from the skull to access the brain), gunshot wounds, organ harvests, boob jobs, tummy tucks \u2014 before getting the call that she&amp;#039;d been picked for a principal role in a new network drama. In the pilot, the floodlight on the garage illuminated her from behind as she giggled and looked into the quarterback&amp;#039;s eyes and flipped her hair and made you want to be in high school again.  Now, here, she&amp;#039;s ready. Zach, the boat&amp;#039;s driver \u2014 good dude, owner of an outfit called Island Riders that&amp;#039;ll take you out and teach you to wakeboard \u2014 gives her the thumbs-up and eases the throttle forward. A white wake churns up behind the boat, and Minka&amp;#039;s smile dissolves into the stern, jutted-chin look of a fighter waiting for a punch. She knows what her muscles have to do, knows where it&amp;#039;ll hurt tomorrow. Friday Night Lights was filmed entirely in Austin, and a couple who worked as camera operators lived on Lake Austin and had a boat. One day she went over and tried it, and after that Minka wakeboarded every chance she got.  The bay is pretty here \u2014 tidy cottages on postage-stamp lots jutting into the water like crown molding. As we were putting out of the harbor, she sat back and took in the seagulls roller-coastering in the sky and the collar of houses along the channel. The hot-pink straps of her bikini top clung to her tan shoulders, her toes wiggled in her flip-flops, and she smiled the least-awkward smile in the history of the Sexiest Woman Alive. She appeared to be actually having fun. Then she squinted up at an airplane and said, &amp;quot;You wouldn&amp;#039;t want to jump out of that?&amp;quot; She was mocking me, and I looked down, waiting for it to pass. &amp;quot;That would be incredible, and what a beautiful day for it,&amp;quot; she said. And she glared at me through her big sunglasses and smiled, all cherry-tomato cheeks and exquisite chin. About that: She&amp;#039;d wanted to go skydiving today. And, yes, I&amp;#039;d said no. Not a chance. I have kids. I don&amp;#039;t even like flying, but I&amp;#039;d rather stay in the plane. So Minka came back with the wakeboarding idea and everybody \u2014 me, her, my family \u2014 was happy. But of course she had to make this crack, and then Zach chimed in and said, &amp;quot;Oh, man, I would do that in a second,&amp;quot; because of course anyone who runs a wakeboarding company would think skydiving was awesome, and so now he was cool and I was lame. &amp;quot;Live in fear if you want to,&amp;quot; Minka added helpfully. Now she is on her back in the water, knees to her chest, wakeboard in front of her, arms outstretched, weight away from the boat. (At the surf shop, when we were buying bathing suits and going over the basics, I had said casually, &amp;quot;You lean forward, right?&amp;quot; She looked at me like, Hoo, boy.) The boat surges, cuts through the waves, the towrope straightens, and she is yanked forward. As our speed picks up, she pushes the board hard with her legs, and little walls of water rise and fall before her. She pulls on the towrope hard, as if she&amp;#039;s trying to pull all 385 horses back through the water. Her face winces and contorts with the effort. The board fishtails, and before she&amp;#039;s up, she&amp;#039;s down. The boat circles around, and she grabs the rope again. &amp;quot;Ready!&amp;quot; And she does look ready. Not embarrassed about falling, because it&amp;#039;s part of the sport, and what&amp;#039;s the big deal. She&amp;#039;s thirty years old, dating Derek Jeter, looks great in a bikini, has dealt with some shit in her life, and she doesn&amp;#039;t seem to sweat much at this point. Concentration settles on her face again. Then: throttle, wake, walls of water. There&amp;#039;s a moment as you&amp;#039;re trying to get up on a wakeboard when the water&amp;#039;s mass seems insurmountable. She&amp;#039;s giving it everything she&amp;#039;s got for a second or two, and ... she&amp;#039;s up. It happens so fast, as if unseen hands pushed her up out of the water like a cheerleader to the top of a pyramid. She grins because she can&amp;#039;t help grinning, and after a minute she&amp;#039;s carving up the blue-black water, skimming back and forth in the wake, even jumping it to ride the chop. She waves a couple times. It&amp;#039;s a hammy wave \u2014 she&amp;#039;s hamming. Minka stays up for a good three or four minutes, zipping along, ponytail swinging, going one-handed sometimes. She rides the waves like moguls, using muscles some people don&amp;#039;t know they have. And then, just as quickly as she rose up, she casts away the towrope and raises her long arms in the air with her palms up, so she&amp;#039;s a perfect Y, and beams out this huge tah-dah! smile. The board slides smoothly to a halt, and for a moment it looks like she&amp;#039;s standing on the water, like magic. She doesn&amp;#039;t move a muscle, holds the goofy Miss America pose and the zillion-watt grin even as she sinks, ever so slowly, beneath the surface. BEYOND MS. AMERICA: The Sexiest Woman Alive ...in Every Country on Earth  NIGHT She&amp;#039;s sitting facing the window at Maialino, a bubbling Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan, wearing good jeans with a swoopy brown top and her hair down. She sits back, asks the waiter to recommend a ros\u00E9, advises me to order the steak, and exhales a deep, satisfied breath. She has showered and looks refreshed, ready for the evening. The staff is falling all over her. The chef comes out to say hello, they send out the special ravioli filled with fresh sweet corn, the waiter is overjoyed that she likes the ros\u00E9. She seems surprised. &amp;quot;I gotta go out with you more often,&amp;quot; she says. Nobody gave Minka Kelly much growing up. Earlier I asked her offhandedly whether as a kid she lived in a house with a yard. She shook her head and said no, no, not at all \u2014 almost stuttering, as if she didn&amp;#039;t know where to begin. This is how Minka Kelly grew up: Her mother got pregnant, and her father, a musician named Rick Dufay \u2014 he played with Aerosmith for a while in the early eighties \u2014 wasn&amp;#039;t a part of her childhood. It was just Minka and her mom, a team of two, a couple of girls getting by. Early on they lived in Los Angeles, moving around a lot because there was never much money. They were buddies, partners, each doing everything for the other, and their bond got them through the moves, the no money, the new schools, the unfamiliar towns. They were resourceful. At dinner we split spaghetti carbonara, which is made with a raw egg that cooks when mixed into the hot pasta. &amp;quot;My mom could add an egg to anything and make it better,&amp;quot; she says. Top Ramen instant noodles, for example. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;d say, &amp;#039;Nothing for dinner? Watch this.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; And she would cook that stuff up, add whatever vegetables were in the freezer, drop a raw egg in so it cooked in the hot broth \u2014 dinner. &amp;quot;My mom lived a fast life,&amp;quot; she says now. &amp;quot;It was all about what we could do to have fun with nothing. She \u2014 for most of my life, she was a dancer. An exotic dancer. She was a stripper. Um, so she would come home at like three, four o&amp;#039;clock in the morning, and sometimes she would have a really great night, and so she would wake me up in the middle of the night and we&amp;#039;d go to Ralphs and go grocery shopping. And that was so much fun. We&amp;#039;d have the whole grocery store to ourselves, and we would have a blast and buy a hundred dollars in groceries. And it was just the best day ever. The best day.&amp;quot; Around the time Minka was in junior high, they ended up in Albuquerque, where her mother&amp;#039;s boyfriend lived. He sold tamales out of an AMC Spirit, and Minka would help make them in his mother&amp;#039;s kitchen: shred the meat, clean the hojas (corn husks), spread the masa, roll it all up. He became like a father to her. When she turned seventeen, the Spirit was her first car. A friend who painted auto bodies sanded the TAMALE EXPRESS signs off the doors. She wasn&amp;#039;t embarrassed about the car, but she didn&amp;#039;t want to be made fun of, the way she had been as the new girl in junior high (Minka Kelly = Stinka Smelly). &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a very nice girl, but nobody pushes me around,&amp;quot; she would write me later in an e-mail. She was talking about a fight she got into at school once. She had befriended a girl who knew how to kickbox \u2014 who, in fact, &amp;quot;came from a family of kickboxers&amp;quot; \u2014 and Minka eventually ended up kicking another girl&amp;#039;s ass in one of those big fights after school where everybody shows up. Even today, when you mess with her or one of her friends, she wrote, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s when you&amp;#039;ll see a whole other side of me. That&amp;#039;s when you&amp;#039;ll see the side that grew up in Albuquerque.&amp;quot; She got the job working as a scrub nurse after high school, when she was living back in Los Angeles. On a test shoot for a modeling agency, the makeup person approached Minka with an idea. The woman turned out to be a former Playboy Playmate, and she said she wanted to manage Minka, turn her into a Playmate of the Year. Minka was nineteen. The woman got her a job answering phones at a surgeon&amp;#039;s office, the idea being that Minka would work enough hours to get free breast implants. The procedure was already on the calendar when Minka decided she liked herself the way she was and called it off. The old Playmate had her fired from answering phones \u2014 but Minka, having gotten to know the scrub nurses in the office, asked about becoming one. She went to school for a year and became a surgeon&amp;#039;s assistant. She wanted to act and went on casting calls when she could, but the office hours were unforgiving, so she missed opportunities. One day, four years into her nursing career, she was able to get away to audition for a new TV show based on a movie she had vaguely heard of, Friday Night Lights. A football movie. She was not optimistic. TV shows based on movies are never good, she thought. Go back and watch some old episodes of Friday Night Lights \u2014 watch Minka flirt, watch her cheer, watch her be disgusted, watch her wake up in her underwear with the quarterback&amp;#039;s best friend, watch her find Jesus. Jesus, just watch her. Try not to watch her. She&amp;#039;s one of those electric actresses who seem unbearably beautiful and yet real. She breaks your heart twice: She&amp;#039;s good, so you feel for the trials of her character, and she&amp;#039;s real enough that, like the prettiest girl in school, you might both know her and know she could never go for you. Her glorious run on FNL is over. (On shows about high school, characters graduate.) She was the girl at the end of (500) Days of Summer, the one who gives Joseph Gordon-Levitt reason to live. She did a few episodes of Parenthood on NBC this fall, and she has a scary movie costarring Leighton Meester, The Roommate, due in February. She&amp;#039;s the biggest name in an upcoming indie black comedy called Searching for Sonny. Still, she feels like she hasn&amp;#039;t done anything yet. In the car on the way back to the city from the beach, her body still dusted with salt, the new Band of Horses CD on repeat (&amp;quot;I love Band of Horses&amp;quot;), we were talking about the world before cell phones. I was doing the math on whether she would&amp;#039;ve had one in high school. &amp;quot;How old are you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thirty.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay, so that would mean that in 19\u2014&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That sounded really cool,&amp;quot; she said abruptly. &amp;quot;What did?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thirty.&amp;quot; Pause. &amp;quot;Are you newly thirty?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;June.&amp;quot; We were on the parkway, treelined, and we were tired and full from some roadside cheeseburgers, and the music was quiet and perfect. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a big one.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It is a big one&amp;quot; \u2014 she uses italics a lot when she speaks, and it&amp;#039;s both effective and endearing \u2014 &amp;quot;and I love it. I think it&amp;#039;s the most exciting birthday I think I&amp;#039;ve ever had. I&amp;#039;m so excited to be a woman. Done with the twenties. I&amp;#039;m confident \u2014 confident in my skin, and I&amp;#039;m cool with my flaws and all that stuff. It just feels nice to be at peace with yourself. I think my thirtieth birthday gave me permission to have all that. The twenties were a pain in the ass \u2014 figuring it all out. What am I doing? Where do I go?&amp;quot; She stretched her legs, pulled on her hair a little, then looked absently at her hand. &amp;quot;What are your thirties going to bring?&amp;quot; She pushed out a deep laugh, which is funny because her normal voice is girlishly high. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know. And I&amp;#039;m glad I don&amp;#039;t know.&amp;quot; She seemed pleased, in a way, when she said it. And when she says tonight that she feels she hasn&amp;#039;t done anything yet, she says it partly as a lament but also as a declaration of possibility. Aside from the way she looks, Minka Kelly has not been all that lucky. She has worked. She worked craniotomies, for crying out loud. She could have ended up a lot of different things in life by now, but she seems finally to be who she wants to be. All night at dinner, she goes out of her way to thank the men who bring us bread and clear our plates and change the silverware. They are mostly Mexican, I think. She does not just thank them, she pauses if she is talking, looks up at them and smiles and says, &amp;quot;Thank you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My boyfriend noticed that about me, too,&amp;quot; she says when I point this out. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s the same way, and he said it was a good way to judge someone&amp;#039;s character. It&amp;#039;s actually unfortunate, in a way, that you would notice that. It blows my mind that anyone could be unkind to anyone. The guy clearing our plates is a person. I don&amp;#039;t care if you&amp;#039;re sweeping the floor. I don&amp;#039;t care if you&amp;#039;re cleaning my toilet.&amp;quot; She dabs the corner of her lips with her napkin. &amp;quot;Not that I have someone to clean my toilet \u2014 I clean my own toilet.&amp;quot; She picks up her fork, takes a bite of cheesecake, and sits back, chewing, smiling, eyebrows raised. BONUS: The Ultimate Megan Fox Guide  LATE NIGHT A black SUV waits outside the restaurant for her. She smiles and waves the driver off, telling him he doesn&amp;#039;t need to get out and open the door. In the cool of the backseat, she texts. She asks the driver to turn up the radio broadcast. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox, and it&amp;#039;s already the top of the fourth. He knows the back way \u2014 no FDR Drive, no highways, no traffic. As he drives farther north, closer to the Bronx, she looks more and more excited, and dinner feels distant. So, I imagine, does Albuquerque. As we approach, Yankee Stadium is glowing grandly. She gets out across the street from the main gate, passes the T-shirt vendors and hot-dog guys unnoticed, and approaches an inconspicuous door. We part. A guard smiles and waves her in. I watch her pass through a set of glass doors. Everyone will be watching her as she takes her seat. But she, of course, will be watching the shortstop.  Even More:Hot Pictures of Kate UptonBest Sex Positions and Moves for Men  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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