Real Life For These Two Resembles Reel Life, Too

Loose talk

“Reading Rainbow” host LeVar Burton on the move by Congress to cut funding for Public Television (in TV Guide): “The attack on PBS by the new Congress is a no-brainer. Anyone who opposes funding for PBS and does anything to discourage kids’ programming should have their head examined.”

There’s much to recommend about the NBC cop show “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” authenticity being right at the top of the list.

Now two cast members have taken the show’s reality base a step further. Isabella Hofmann and Daniel Baldwin, who as characters Capt. Megan Russert and Detective Beau Felton dallied unclothed, have paired up in real life.

Hesitant to get involved because both she and Baldwin were divorcing others, Hoffman reconsidered when, she told TV Guide, “I soon realized I’d met my other half.”

And, Hoffman insists, the romance will endure. “I know in Hollywood people talk publicly about how much they’re in love, and the next you hear they’re getting divorced,” she says. “But you can talk to me 10 years from now, because Daniel is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

Now a clothier, he works on the Glove Boat

Gavin McLeod turns 65 today.

Besides, the new name looks better on a marquee

We knew him as Jeff Gillooly. But when Tonya Harding’s former husband emerges from prison on March 13, he’ll be known as Jeff Stone. Gillooly, who is serving time for his part in the attack on Harding rival Nancy Kerrigan, has petitioned for the name change because, says his attorney, he wants to “resume a measure of personal privacy when he is released.”

Of course, for a while there he shot just as many Japanese

The quote: “Damn, you’re right.” The speaker: The late movie legend John Wayne. The occasion: Gregory Peck, a special guest at the Miami Film Festival, said that this was Wayne’s response to Peck’s statement that it was wrong for Wayne to shoot so many Indians in his movies.

Just to put things in the proper perspective

From an official Pearl Jam news release: “There have been `theories’ that the world is flat. But it’s not. There have been `theories’ that the sky would fall. But it hasn’t. And there have been `theories’ that Pearl Jam and Neil Young are touring together this summer. They’re not.”

That would be, what, longer than a three-hour tour?

Comedian Emo Phillips, whose strange stage antics made even Peewee Herman seem normal, is trying a career comeback. But he’s not desperate. “I don’t really think I’m in the Bob Denver stage of my career yet,” he told Spin magazine.

Stop it, stop it, you’re killing me!

Our nomination for quote of the day comes from Buzz magazine: “I really like the fact that now I have an agent who can kill somebody with his bare hands,” Conan O’Brien says of his martial arts-trained talent agent Gavin Polone.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster