Monday, January 19, 2015

Celebrity wedding in Buffalo, a 'Parenthood' kiss and Trump on Rivers

Let me play gossip columnist for the day.
According to an informed source, there is going to be a celebrity wedding in Buffalo over the summer.
OK, the source doesn’t have to be anonymous.
It is Vanessa Williams’ brother, Chris Williams, who is one of the stars of the upcoming NBC comedy, "One Big Happy," produced by Ellen DeGeneres.
At a party here, I overheard Chris Williams telling another person at the party that he was a Buffalo Bills fan. So I stopped and asked why. He explained that his mother lives in Buffalo and his sister is going to be married there this summer.
Then he told me his sister is Vanessa Williams, the actress and former Miss America.
“She is excited and said we’re going to have a destination wedding and I was really excited about it,” he explained “Then she said, 'we’re having it in Buffalo in the summer.' And I said, ‘ok, that’s good.’”
His voice went into a high pitch when he said ‘that’s good,’ an indication that he was repressing his true feelings. Where was he really hoping the destination would be?
A still from
“I was hoping for someplace tropical, so Jamaica would be nice,” said Williams.
In September, Williams, 51, announced on a daytime talk show that she and Jim Skrip, a St. Bonaventure graduate who lives in Depew, made their wedding plans official a few weeks earlier.
The couple met a couple of years ago while on separate vacations in Egypt. Williams previously told The Buffalo News that she and her daughter were on a Nile cruise when she noticed another tourist wearing a Sabres shirt.
Williams said, “I went up to him and asked him, ‘Are you from Buffalo?’ ”
The two began a long distance romance. Williams lives near New York City. She said a while ago that she gets to Western New York often.
She has described Skrip as “just a nice, regular, gorgeous guy.”
Williams previously was married to her onetime manager Ramon Harvey for 10 years and to former NBA player Rick Fox for five years.
Now on to more romance.
At the same party where I met Chris Williams, I interviewed Erika Christensen, one of the stars of my favorite network TV drama, “Parenthood.” She plays Julia, who was separated from her husband Joel (Sam Jaeger) for a long time before they officially got back together in last Thursday’s moving episode.
The long-awaited final reconciliation came at a skating rink, when Joel surprised Julia by joining her and their two children. The reconciliation was sealed with a kiss.
“That was really fun,” she said, before explaining how it happened. “Actually, that wasn’t scripted that Joel kisses Julia. It was a moment, I guess. It kind of proved that it just felt right. (Sam) said, ‘it feels like that is right, doesn’t it?’ And absolutely it did. And it’s great because they needed that shot of the kids grasping that this is real and it is happening. What better way to communicate that definitively than with a kiss.”
I’ll have much more about the end of “Parenthood” – it only has two episodes left – shortly.
Donald Trump of "Celebrity Apprentice" is a reality TV star who seems to live in his own reality. So it may be tough to take his word about how special tonight’s episode of the series featuring the late Joan River is going to be.
But here’s what he said about the first of tonight's two episodes, which was taped a few days before Rivers’ tragic death: “We have an unbelievable show coming on Monday, maybe the best we’ve ever had. We’ve had some great shows. Joan Rivers, it was a big decision. Joan came back twice. She’s on two shows, and this was the first of the two. And she came back, and she was fantastic. She was strong. She was vibrant. In fact, when she left, actually, the second show, and then left my office three days before the tragedy — whatever happened, it’s a tragedy — I said, 'She’ll be around forever. She is unbelievable. Look at her.' She is so good on the show ... It’s actually the first show on Monday night.
"And we had a decision to make, do we leave her or do we not leave her? And we’re doing a show in memoriam, essentially. We’re doing two shows, but this is the first of the two, and it’s an unbelievable show, and leaving Joan in, I think it’s very inspirational because it shows — she was 83 years old, almost 84 years old — how smart, how sharp, how incredible she was, and I think a lot of people are going to see something that’s really inspirational.

“One of the things with Joan that’s so great, she won when she was 76 years old. She won ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ A lot of people forget, but actually she did a documentary. Her career was not doing well, and ... her career went through the roof after ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ She had more strength, more brain power. I’ll never forget. We had athletes. We had a baseball player that hit 400 foot home runs. We had a wrestler. We had an MMA guy. They were exhausted after a couple weeks, and Joan was like killing. And she won and she was amazing.”

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