Tears of Laughter
Everybody Loves Raymond's Ray Romano has a new comedy CD, but not everybody is laughing. "My brother [Richard, a former New York City policeman] felt a little weird," says Romano, 43. "My mother would call me and say, 'Why does your brother have to seem so dumb?' " The teasing isn't limited to the shtick on the Live at Carnegie Hall CD. "I did a line on the TV Guide Awards my wife didn't like about the noise she makes when we are having sex. She was upset, but she was crying on a bag of money," says Romano, whose job before his Top 10 sitcom was delivering futons. "That makes it better."

My Mother, Myself
Playing a single mom in the coming-of-age film Riding in Cars with Boys gave Drew Barrymore an incentive to end the years-long estrangement from her own mother, former actress Jaid Barrymore. "It made me forgive [her] because I was in her shoes for the first time," says Barrymore, 26, whose father, actor John Barrymore Jr., split with Jaid before Drew was born. "For so many years I only looked at life as a child who resented her parent. I idealized my father because he wasn't around to make mistakes." Some of the ones Jaid made included posing for Playboy and trying to sell her daughter's baby things on the Internet. Why has Drew decided to let bygones be bygones? "You get older and your perspective changes," she says, adding that she has not forgotten her past. "I put very personal touches in the movie. For instance, my mother always put on way too much lipstick when she was nervous and that would irritate me so badly when I was a child. So we put it in the movie. My mother would smooth my hair down, which also bugged me. That's in the movie too."

Let's Talk Turkey
At age 18, actress Leelee Sobieski got
$1 million for her leading role in the thriller The Glass House, but beat the urge to go on a spending spree. "I bought a few posters—two Matisses and a Picasso," says Sobieski, who hung them in her dorm room at Brown University, where she's a freshman. So far Sobieski's roommate seems rather blasé about bunking with a movie star (one also in Joy Ride and My First Mister with Albert Brooks). Says Sobieski: "It's more about, 'Do you have any turkey in our little fridge? I'm starving.' "

Super Saver
John Schneider, who plays Clark Kent's father on the WB series Smallville, hopes onscreen son Tom Welling can learn from the fiscal mistakes he made in his Dukes of Hazzard days. "Denver Pyle [Dukes' Uncle Jessie] told me to take the money from the first 13 episodes and put it away," says Schneider, 41, who didn't follow Pyle's advice. "When I started with Dukes in 1979, spent my money on exotic cars. The plan was to buy the cars, fix them up and sell them. I bought them, fixed them up and kept them. At one time I had 26." By 1986 he owed the IRS $1.5 million. Now Schneider has more practical plans for his Smallville salary. "What I make from my first season," he says, "will put my three kids through college."

On-the-Job Experience
Heather Graham has dated a string of actors, including Kyle MacLachlan and Heath Ledger. But her two-year relationship with Edward Burns, her costar and director in the upcoming romantic comedy Sidewalks of New York (which wrapped before they broke up in June 2000), taught the actress there's a downside to meeting your honey where you make your money. "I learned that I don't want to date people I work with," says Graham, 31, who is now unattached and costars with Johnny Depp in From Hell, the new thriller about Jack the Ripper. "If you're an actor in love with someone in a movie, you start believing it will work in the real world. In fact you really don't know the person at all. They're a character. I think it's better to get to know people first and not date in the industry."