Kamis, 14 April 2011
Minka Kelly Is the Sexiest Woman Alive 2010
Minka Kelly looks so small out there on the water, bobbing at the end of the towrope. She's a head. Her brown hair is pulled tight, and a perfect ponytail rises and falls to the surface like a question mark. She's smiling — 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't wait.
She wore that ponytail the first time most people ever saw her — 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 — 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 — before getting the call that she'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's eyes and flipped her hair and made you want to be in high school again.
Now, here, she's ready. Zach, the boat's driver — good dude, owner of an outfit called Island Riders that'll take you out and teach you to wakeboard — gives her the thumbs-up and eases the throttle forward. A white wake churns up behind the boat, and Minka'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'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 — 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, "You wouldn't want to jump out of that?" She was mocking me, and I looked down, waiting for it to pass. "That would be incredible, and what a beautiful day for it," she said. And she glared at me through her big sunglasses and smiled, all cherry-tomato cheeks and exquisite chin.
About that: She'd wanted to go skydiving today. And, yes, I'd said no. Not a chance. I have kids. I don't even like flying, but I'd rather stay in the plane. So Minka came back with the wakeboarding idea and everybody — me, her, my family — was happy. But of course she had to make this crack, and then Zach chimed in and said, "Oh, man, I would do that in a second," because of course anyone who runs a wakeboarding company would think skydiving was awesome, and so now he was cool and I was lame. "Live in fear if you want to," 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, "You lean forward, right?" 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'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's up, she's down.
The boat circles around, and she grabs the rope again.
"Ready!"
And she does look ready. Not embarrassed about falling, because it's part of the sport, and what's the big deal. She's thirty years old, dating Derek Jeter, looks great in a bikini, has dealt with some shit in her life, and she doesn't seem to sweat much at this point.
Concentration settles on her face again. Then: throttle, wake, walls of water. There's a moment as you're trying to get up on a wakeboard when the water's mass seems insurmountable. She's giving it everything she's got for a second or two, and ... she'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't help grinning, and after a minute she'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's a hammy wave — she'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'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'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's standing on the water, like magic. She doesn'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.
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