Before the holidays Molly Shannon was in her Manhattan apartment engrossed in an episode of The Bachelor when her boyfriend of nearly two years, artist Fritz Chestnut, tried to interrupt to ask her a question. "I was so involved in the show," Shannon says, "that I told him to be quiet." Only when the program had ended did Chestnut get to butt in and ask Shannon to marry him. Chestnut proposed with an antique diamond ring, shaped like a bursting flower, that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Shannon happily accepted and then stayed up much of the night making phone calls to spread the news and start planning the wedding (no date has been set yet). "I was on a high for the next week," says Shannon, who stars with Matthew Broderick in The Music Man on ABC Feb. 16. "I've been making a lot of unnecessary gestures with my left hand."
Fred Durst has insisted that, despite his having had strong feelings for Britney Spears, nothing ever happened between them in the romance department. But when we caught up with the Limp Bizkit lead singer at the opening of Caramel, a bar-lounge at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, on Feb. 8, he told us that he spent an "unbelievable" weekend in January with Spears. He says the pair took a helicopter to "a private mansion on a cliff over a beach" in La Jolla, Calif. "We relaxed the whole time, " said Durst. He insists, however, that they're "just friends." Besides, isn't Britney with Colin Farrell? Oh, wait, that was last week.
For a promotional stunt, the cast of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter were given Sprint cell phones and told to rack up as many minutes as they could in three weeks. The person with the highest total would get a matching contribution to the charity of their choice. Martin Spanjers, who plays John Ritter's teen son Rory on the show, won with 4,790 minutes; that's nearly four hours of yakking a day. "I should have known there was no way that I could beat teenagers in a talking contest," says Ritter, who could only muster 495 minutes. "A guy can only call his agent or wife so often."
Stars, even pregnant ones, have to fulfill their civic duties. Brooke Shields, who is expecting her first child in early May, was called to jury duty on Feb. 3. The actress sat around for the entire day with other prospective jurors in a Van Nuys, Calif., courthouse before being dismissed. Shields did stand out from the rest of the jury pool in one way: She had a bodyguard.
- Contributors:
- Hugh McCarten.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
