Winfrey Continues To Beef Up Her Resume
For the second straight year, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and “Home Improvement” star Tim Allen were tabbed as the top television performers in this year’s People’s Choice Awards (which, despite the name, we have absolutely nothing to do with).
Kirstie Alley (“Veronica’s Closet”) and Tony Danza (“The Tony Danza Show”) were named best actress and actor in a new series at Sunday’s ceremony, based on the results of a special nationwide Gallup poll.
Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts were the most popular movie actor and actress, replacing Mel Gibson and Sandra Bullock.
Whitney Houston and repeat winner Reba McEntire tied for top female musical performer, while Garth Brooks again took the male music honors. (With, we assume, John Tesh not too far behind.)
Loose talk
Former “Entertainment Tonight” co-anchor John Tesh, on life as a New Age musician: “I enjoy being grubby. And I don’t miss attracting large swarms of bees to (my) hair spray.”
You could say men are like putty in her hands
Julia Louis-Dreyfus turns 37 today.
Heifers who protest too much, on the next Oprah
Oprah Winfrey will move her show from Chicago to Texas next week while she testifies in a defamation lawsuit brought by cattle ranchers for saying she would stop eating hamburgers during last year’s mad cow disease scare. Wrote the president of Amarillo’s Chamber of Commerce: “We are not going to have any red carpet rollouts, key to the city, flowers … sent to her or her production company and no chamber employees are to be at her show if she has them in Amarillo.”
No word on how well they liked their happy meals
Among the star-studded celebrity list for Saturday night’s opening of the Joia (“happy” in Italian) restaurant on Miami’s South Beach: Rupert Everett (“My Best Friend’s Wedding”), Jennifer Lopez (“Selena”), supermodel Helena Christensen, Donald Trump, Antonio Sabato Jr., Jon Secada and Gloria Estefan.
Leave it to Donald to play his Trump credit card
Speaking of Donald Trump, he was lunching at his Trump International Hotel & Tower when in walked Leona Helmsley, with whom he had fought bitterly over control of the Empire State Building. Trump, who finished eating first, quietly picked up her check - which left Helmsley fuming. “If he thinks he’s going to get away with this, he’s out of his mind,” she growled to a waiter.
In the Martha Stewart lifestyle, you never get gas
Homemaking guru Martha Stewart’s glowing face will grace yet another magazine cover - this time, the annual report of Connecticut’s Yankee Energy System, accompanied by the headline “Martha Stewart warms up to natural gas.” Said a spokesman: “Natural gas is a lifestyle choice. If you were going to pick anyone who epitomized a good lifestyle, it would be Martha Stewart.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino