Morning Wood w/ January Jones (H/T- Helga)

Look who is the big star now;

The rest of the first-class cabin is quiet, and January is leaning back into the seat, clutching a cashmere blanket she bought earlier today at the Oprah store with her family, who’d come to Chicago to see her. She’s drinking Bud Light now, telling stories about growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where her family moved from Hecla (population 314) after she was born. “I hung out with dudes in high school,” she says. “We were the hippies—into the Dead, Zeppelin, Phish. I was a lifeguard at the water park, and I remember the day Jerry died. Over the loudspeaker, it said: ‘Jerry Garcia has died. Everybody meet in the parking lot.’ I probably shouldn’t say that—we were saving lives! But that was definitely a sit-in-the-chair-with-sunglasses afternoon.”

Despite spending high school with the stoner crowd, she graduated early and, at 18, departed for New York City to model, mostly because she didn’t know what else she wanted to do—and, she jokes, she liked the idea of “showing all those bitches in high school who said I wasn’t pretty enough” that she was. She settled into a models’ apartment and started dating Julian Steinberg, whose father, Saul, a notorious Wall Street raider, had made billions during the ’70s and ’80s. Julian was a senior at the Trinity School, one of the nation’s most exclusive private schools, and the culture shock of arriving from small-town South Dakota, where she’d worked at a Dairy Queen and lifeguarded, to what was essentially the set of Gossip Girl should have been jarring—had January realized exactly how privileged her new world was.