Jennifer Lyn
Jackson

The five guys who followed Jennifer Lyn Jackson out of a crowded elevator at Chicago's Drake Hotel on a recent wintry evening looked, well, kind of stunned. And very happy. As if the elevator doors had magically opened into some exotic tropical beach scene instead of onto a big-city hotel lobby. You could see the heads turn as she walked through the crowd, a dazzling flash of beauty on an otherwise chilly night. People must have been asking themselves: Who is that lady? Well, we could have unmasked her for them. We found her in the Great 35th Anniversary Playmate Hunt and she's our choice as April's Playmate. Jennifer's a double-major student (finance and business management) at Ohio's Kent State University, and she sees a master's degree and a Ferrari in her future. Her family and closest friends call her J. And she has a pet ferret whose name is Shmeebee.

Jennifer is taking off the spring 1989 semester to earn some extra money to help pay off her student loan - an effort aided considerably by her $15,000 Playmate fee - before returning to school in the fall. "I've got a lot of work ahead of me, so I hope that when I go back, I'll have a whole new outlook," she says. On the home front, meanwhile, life should be far from dull. Her mom's a belly dancer, her kid brother's a drummer in a rock-and-roll band and one of her regular dates is an ex-dancer from Chippendale's. Yet some people out there say life in the Midwest is nothing but one long yawn. Well, excuse us, but what do they know? As for J, she hopes her maximum exposure on our pages will lead to new horizons in the modeling world. And who knows - maybe that Ferrari.