This Minka Kelly Cosmo cover has been staring at me from the Cosmo promotional email for days, but I only just got around to reading some excerpts from the interview. Can I just say something? I’ve really started to like Minka Kelly. I think she’s cool, and she comes across as a lot smarter than the average starlet. I think she comes across as a street-smart girl because her childhood was pretty funky. Unlike all of the people who had relatively normal, well-adjusted childhoods and uneventful school experiences – those same people who try to convince us that they were always tortured and misunderstood and bullied – Minka’s childhood actually seems kind of rough. And in the occasional interview, Minka will give a glimpse into just how hard it was for her without coming out and laying on some massive pity party. Her mom was a stripper who loved to have a good time. Her mom would take her grocery shopping after mom came home from work early in the morning. Her mom thought they were friends. See? Rough.

Mom doesn’t always know best. In Minka Kelly’s case, she often had to be the responsible one growing up. In the October issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (as excerpted by the Daily Mail) Derek Jeter’s 31-year-old ex-girlfriend opens up about the “pretty complicated” relationship she had with her stripper mother, Maureen Kelly prior to her death in 2008.

“She was 5’11”,” the Charlie’s Angels star explains. “Legs up to her ears, gorgeous. She got along on that for as long as she could.”

Kelly says her mother would sometimes wake her up in the middle of the night when she got home from working at the strip club. The mother-daughter duo would then go to the supermarket shopping, and her mother wanted to take her to Payless to buy shoes.

“That was like our big Friday,” she recalls. “She would want me to skip school, ‘Let’s go spend some money!’… I was like ‘No, Mom, I’ve gotta go to school!'”

Kelly’s mother chose to raise her daughter as a single parent. The actress’ father, onetime Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay, “wanted to try the family thing,” but Kelly says her mom “was too busy having fun.”

“It wasn’t like he didn’t want to be part of our lives,” the Friday Night Lights star adds.

“I didn’t know how to appreciate what good friends we were,” Kelly admits. “Because I just wanted her to be my mom.”

Sadly, three years ago, Kelly’s mother died of colon cancer. “That’s detectable,” Kelly says. “Talk about being reckless and not paying attention to your body.”

Fortunately, the two made peace with one another before it was too late. “By the time she passed I was holding her,” Kelly says. “I was with her until her last breath. We made it.”

[From Us Weekly, The Mail]

Sad, right? It’s a wonder Minka is so well-adjusted. Her mom sounded like a really fun person to hang out with, though. Crazy.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty much established at this point that Minka dumped Derek Jeter for her costar, Ramon Rodriguez. They were photographed together (on-set) two seconds after Minka and Derek split, and even People Magazine and all of the more ass-kissy tabloids are saying that Minka and Ramon are a thing now.

Photos courtesy of Cosmo, Fame.
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