Girl...how about them Gucci dresses that those girls had on the in Awww hell to the Naww thread? We can get some tiaras from the dime store!! LOL

I will beat yo.........girl you know that's one of my other babyfavahs!:mad: ;) :p

LOL!!! You so crazy!!:D

Yeah, I just saw the video today, too. Great job in recreating Flashdance, though, and at least she is actually doing her own dancing. But even my GIRLS were like, "UGH!!!" She definitely needs to tone it down. I'll be glad when she goes away.

Silent treatment worries family of R. Kelly's wife

April 8, 2003

BY MARY MITCHELL SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Despite his legal troubles, R. Kelly is on a public relations roll. After the E2 nightclub tragedy, Kelly stepped up and donated $63,000 to the families of the 21 victims. Given that most of the victims were young and uninsured, the money made a big difference to the grieving families.

Last week, Kelly scored points again, by releasing a new song to show support for the members of the military fighting in Iraq. "This song is my way of saying thank you to everyone protecting us, and allowing us to sleep comfortable at night and send our children off to school in the morning," Kelly said in a news release. Proceeds from "A Soldier's Heart" will go to support the soldiers' families, according to Kelly's official Web site.

But there's something else the public should know.

While Kelly may understand how difficult it is for military families to cope when they are estranged from loved ones, he apparently is not as understanding when the problem is a lot closer to home.

His wife, Andrea Lee Kelly, hasn't spoken to her mother, grandfather or aunt since the R. Kelly sex scandal broke.

"The last time I talked to her was over two years ago on the phone," said Gerri Cruze, Andrea's mother. "She was crying hysterically and violently. Of course you are worried when you go from talking to a person every day to not talking to them period."

After that disturbing conversation, Cruze said she was unable to reach her daughter because the telephone numbers were changed. Desperate, she asked the Olympia Fields Police Department to check out the home to make sure her daughter was all right.

Although police verified that Andrea Kelly was fine, Cruze, who currently lives near Atlanta, is planning to move to Chicago to find out why her 29-year-old daughter has broken ties with her family.

"I don't know if my child is under the influence. I don't know if she is being controlled. I don't know if people are watching her. I don't know if she is being brainwashed," Cruze said.

I did try to reach Mrs. Kelly myself but couldn't get past the lawyers. Obviously, I have no way of knowing why Mrs. Kelly is estranged from her relatives. But sources who know her claim she is living in luxury, is happy, and has a nanny for each of her three children.

Cruze isn't buying it.

"If everything is all right, then she should call her mother and her father," Cruze said. "I find this behavior bizarre."

Although there have been published reports about Kelly's falling out with his own family, Cruze describes the family he married into as "close-knit" and "strong." She divorced Andrea's father years ago but has managed to maintain a good relationship with her former in-laws.

"We are a very, very close family, and this is very uncharacteristic of my daughter," Cruze insisted. "We always communicate. Prior to everything going haywire, that has been a rule in this family."

"We are just infuriated by this," Cruze continued. "She is an adult, but my instincts are that this is a control situation."

Andrea Kelly's paternal grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Lee, 78, lives a community away from the Kelly family's Olympia Fields mansion. He also hasn't been able to see his granddaughter.

"I was there a few minutes ago," Lee said when he contacted me two weeks ago. "One of the nannies told us that she couldn't get in touch with her. We haven't been able to get in touch with Andrea since she had this last baby. We have not seen her, nor have we been offered any visitation. This has really been debilitating for the entire family."

Franchon Lee, Mrs. Kelly's aunt, is also concerned.

"Everybody is just upset and freaked out," she said. "This is very unusual. Andrea is very outgoing and very friendly. If nothing else, she is going to talk to me or her mother."

Obviously, Andrea Kelly doesn't have to talk to her mother. She's a grown woman with a family of her own. There is also no evidence that she is a domestic violence victim or is being held hostage in her own home.

Still, it is understandable that Mrs. Kelly's family is worried about how this scandal may be affecting her. After all, what mother can read published accounts in which her daughter is described as being treated like a "puppy dog" and not worry about that daughter's well-being?

"There is a possibility that she doesn't want to talk us, but I doubt it," her aunt said. "When this scandal happened, she was so upset and just cried and cried and cried. It was awful. There is no law that can help us get in there and talk to her. But it seems to me when you get in this kind of trouble, you would call your mother and your pastor."

"I want it to be documented that the fact she is not calling us is not the Andrea we know," Cruze said. "We know her not calling us is sending a signal that something is wrong."

I hope this family's plea doesn't fall on deaf ears. The least a daughter can do is tell her mother why she isn't taking her calls.

After all, that's one way of proving that the freedom her husband is singing about is the freedom she has at home.

Liya Kebede, model, becomes face of Estee Lauder
 

From the New York Times:

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/...on/08dres1.jpg

April 8, 2003
A Black Model Reaches the Top, a Lonely Spot
By GUY TREBAY


hampagne flutes were lofted last Thursday to toast Liya Kebede's first day on her new job. Ms. Kebede had just been officially named the new face of Estée Lauder, the flagship brand of the cosmetics giant. As Leonard A. Lauder, Aerin Lauder and a small group of executives gathered in the 40th-floor headquarters on Fifth Avenue with decorous hush, there were rote speeches and little to suggest there was anything epochal about the decision to hire a reedlike 24-year-old with coffee-colored skin as one of just three women (the others are Elizabeth Hurley and Carolyn Murphy) who symbolize the global image of Estée Lauder.

Yet Ms. Kebede is the first black woman in the company's 57-year history to represent the Estée Lauder brand, and she is also that greater rarity, a minority woman with a beauty contract, one reported to be equal to that of Ms. Murphy, who is paid $3 million annually.

"The first thing with Liya is the beauty," said Ms. Lauder, the vice president for advertising for the Estée Lauder line, who played a key role in casting the Ethiopian model as part of a corporate effort to revive sales by reaching a wider audience, including the African-Americans who some studies say account for 19 percent of all cosmetic sales.

"The beauty buzz is first," Ms. Lauder said. "Second is ethnicity."

Fashion is rarely a proving ground for racial diversity. In fashion, after all, the beauty buzz always comes first. Yet it seemed fitting that Ms. Kebede's hiring coincided with oral arguments in the Supreme Court that challenge the University of Michigan's consideration of race in its efforts to increase minority enrollment. These arguments have revived debate about issues of inclusion that twine through every aspect of American life, even fashion.

A New York Times survey of magazine covers last fall found that from 1998 to 2002, fashion magazines nearly doubled their use of nonwhite cover subjects, and this gave encouragement to some in the industry.

But on the runways — which serve as the feeders for magazine work and high-profile beauty contracts like Ms. Kebede's — the story has been different in recent seasons, with so few black women working regularly that virtually anyone in the business could cite them all by name.

"Liya, Yasmin Warsame and Alek Wek," said Conor Kennedy, a booker at Elite Model Management, referring to the three African women who seemed to have filled an unofficial quota for women of color for the past several seasons.

"It's like there's only room for one very successful black model at a time," Mr. Kennedy said. "For the past year it's been Liya. It's amazing to see her do so well. But it's frustrating when so many other black and African-American models are trying to craft out a living and all anyone wants to hire is blondes."

For the hundreds of shows staged for the past two seasons in New York, Milan and Paris, numerous designers, both American and European, employed few Hispanic, Asian or black models, Mr. Kennedy said. This is not to suggest that fashion designers discriminate. "Ralph Lauren I will send every black model and he wants to see them," said Nian Fish, the creative director of KCD. "Puff Daddy obviously wants to see every black model. Tom Ford is also colorblind."

There is little question that all the marquee American designers, like Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, have used minority models on their runways for years. Yet many inside the industry point out that these hirings have dwindled to a point where they are far from representative.

This observation appears to be borne out by a 116-page pictorial in the February 2003 issue of Italian Vogue, a twice-yearly survey of the previous season's catwalk shows, one in which a diligent reader is forced to search for faces that are nonwhite.

Ms. Kebede came to Estée Lauder's attention thanks to an Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche advertising campaign shot by Steven Meisel. "We were thinking, `Who is this person?' " Ms. Lauder said. Earlier Ms. Kebede, then a struggling newcomer, had been spotted on a Milan runway by Mr. Ford, who cast her for his Gucci shows in spring 2000 and afterward in the Saint Laurent ads.

"I would not call it racism, per se," Oluchi Onweagba, a Nigerian model, said last week, referring to hiring practices that can appear exclusionary. Ms. Onweagba herself found a degree of success in modeling after she won an Elite modeling contest in Africa in 1998.

Since that time, she has been photographed by Mr. Meisel and Peter Lindbergh, has appeared on the cover of i-D magazine and Italian Vogue and has worked on runways for Gucci, Dior and Chanel. Yet when she went to Milan this year for the seasonal castings, Ms. Onweagba had, she said, "the experience of walking into a casting where you can tell they don't want you to be there."

Unlike advertising campaigns and editorial spreads, the casting of runway shows is under the control of the designers themselves. The surfeit of television, magazine and Internet coverage focused on the catwalk has not, however, turned designers into demographers. Expressing an aesthetic vision on the catwalk remains a designer's first right.

"Fashion is about the right moment and every season you have to have the new moment and the new girls," said Mohammed Fajar, an agent at Supreme models, a division of the agency Women. "But there is no black moment. There is not now and there never will be."

If this is so, the reasons are not easy to ascertain. Designers "will tell you black girls don't move merchandise," said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent with Kevin Krier & Associates, a fashion production house. It was Mr. Scully who is generally credited with alerting Mr. Ford of Gucci to the existence of Ms. Kebede several years ago. Before that, the young Ethiopian had been languishing as a catalog model in the Midwest.

Most designers contacted to discuss current runway castings were quick to acknowledge the shift toward fewer black faces in recent seasons, but reticent to discuss the reasons. "It definitely has changed," said Cynthia Rowley, one of the few designers who would speak for attribution. "I'm not sure why."

According to the young designer Peter Som, "We're going back to 1950's America, where only what's familiar is what people want to see."

An apparent paucity of minorities on the runways at the twice-yearly Seventh on Sixth collections in New York is "not something that we've focused on," said Peter Arnold, the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Stan Herman, the organization's president, noted, "There was a flash of representation in the late 80's," referring to an all-but-forgotten period when fashion runways reflected what David N. Dinkins used to call the gorgeous mosaic.

The 80's, by consensus, was the last time when "things were really creative and you saw all colors," said Bethann Hardison, a model-turned-agent, who brokered the multimillion-dollar deal between Polo Ralph Lauren and Tyson Beckford, the Jamaican-born model. "That's all over now," said Ms. Hardison, who is at work on a documentary about the fashion industry with the working title "Invisible Beauty."

"There used to be room for the honey-browns, the café au laits, the chocolates, the beige-y people," said Alva Chinn, a former model and the founder, with Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb and Ms. Hardison, of the Black Girls Coalition, an ad hoc group of industry advocates formed in 1992.

Beauty is a tough commodity to regulate and "with African-Americans, part of the problem is that their complexions become part of the fashion," said Patricia A. Turner, an author ("Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies," University of Virginia Press, 2002) who teaches at the University of California at Davis. "It's part of what's worn, in the same way as shoes or hats."

If for the moment the runways are lagging behind the realities of the global population, some point to Ms. Kebede's hiring as an optimistic sign. When Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, the president of Estée Lauder, greeted his company's new model last Thursday, he alluded to the most potent force in changing racial attitudes: the market.

"Not only is she helping us to communicate with a wider audience as our first ethic model," Mr. Bousquet-Chavanne said. "She has a kind of beauty that brings fashion to the brand."

"I don't know if my child is under the influence. I don't know if she is being controlled. I don't know if people are watching her. I don't know if she is being brainwashed," Cruze said.

i think this is a control issue. when R. Kelly was on that home show on BET we saw his house in detail, an adult house, no kiddie toys. when the scandal broke, we heard he had a wife and 2 kids, one on the way. i was like, "what?:confused: where did this family come from?" before it was like he kept a tight lid on the family so it didn't ruin his "lover, player"-image. then he felt the need to play family man, for damage-control purposes. to this day i've yet to see her so it seems to me she bought into this as well.
unless, i'm not reading the right magazines:p

She was one of his dancers, but i agree with your summation.

Queen Latifah airbrushed for ads
 

This came from the Age, an Australian paper. It's very dismaying that this happens, but it does. And people wonder why lil' girls have body image issues. Boo, hiss to that Miramax official who may have signed off on the airbrushing. :mad:

Airbrushing an 'accident'
April 4 2003
http://www.theage.com.au/ffxImage/ur.../Latifah,0.jpg



Picture: AFP
Latifah arrives at the Academy Awards in Hollywood.


It's happened again. Not three months after GQ magazine embarrassed itself by airbrushing out Kate Winslet's curves for a cover shot, Miramax has done the same thing to Queen Latifah.

Miramax, the distributor for the Oscar-winning Chicago, admitted to Inside Edition that Queen Latifah's body was altered in a print ad for the film, blaming it on a "ratio mistake".

Inside Edition reported that when it contacted Miramax after noticing an unnaturally lithe Latifah in an ad, the company admitted it altered her body, saying it was an error.

A day after Inside Edition's inquiry, Miramax changed the ads; they now show Latifah in all her plus-sized glory.

Ad Week's national editor Jack Feuer said he wasn't surprised by the alteration.
"It happens all the time, especially in movie ads. I assume a 'ratio mistake' is what we in journalism call spin," he said.

- KRT

Cornucopia of Celeb News
 

THINGS THAT LOVERS DO: R&B couple Kenny Lattimore and Chanté Moore, who just released a duets album called Things that Lovers Do, welcoming their first child, a baby boy, Thursday morning--which is also Lattimore's b-day. Kenny Lattimore Jr. was born in Los Angeles and weighed nine pounds. Everyone is doing well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SINGIN' THE BLUES: Rap impresario Sean "P. Diddy" Combs set to play legendary blues musician Robert Johnson in the HBO Films feature Love in Vain. The flick starts shooting in Mississippi in September with Tim Blake Nelson at the helm.

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BACK IN THE ACT: Fox green-lighting Homey the Clown, a big-screen comedy featuring Damon Wayans reprising his signature character from his In Living Color days. Shooting stars in June.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From this month's Sister2Sister (Queen Latifah on the cover)

Jaime: You don't want them to know what your sexuality is?

Tevin: I'm not gay, but there are a lot of different things that I do like, sexually. Being in the business, you are introduced to a lot of different things. I'm not gay but I'm a freak and I think a lot of people know what a freak is.

Jaime: I don't. What is it?

Tevin: Basically, I'm trying a lot of things. Being open-minded. It has nothing to do with attraction. It's just having fun and I did a lot of that on the road with dancers. We had truth or dare.

Jaime: So you're saying it could be male or female? Whatever is happening at that time?

Tevin: Right. I am not exculsively attracter to men. I'm not gay, but sexually...

Jaime: Would you say you're bisexual?

Tevin: No, just TRY-sexual (CT4: TRY SEX with anyone.:p)

Jaime: What is that? You, me and he?

Tevin: Leave that to the imagination

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

Um...Tevin...COME OUT THE CLOSET. THX.

Gunmen Open Fire On Snoop Dogg Convoy
Rapper Avoids Injury; Bodyguard Wounded

POSTED: 10:39 a.m. EDT April 11, 2003
UPDATED: 11:25 a.m. EDT April 11, 2003

One person was injured Thursday night as three gunmen opened fire on rap star Snoop Dogg's convoy after a verbal incident.

The Los Angeles Police Department says one of which was carrying the rapper, but he wasn't hurt. One of Snoop Dogg's seven bodyguards -- an off-duty police officer -- was hit and wounded in the back. He was released from the hospital early Friday.

Police say the shooting happened at about 9 p.m. Thursday as one car pulled alongside the convoy. Police say it appears that one of the gunmen wanted to speak with the rapper. Words were exchanged, followed by gunfire.


"The officers tried to find the vehicle that apparently shot at this entourage of vehicles but were unsuccessful," Los Angeles police Sgt. John Pasquariello said.

The 31-year-old rapper -- whose real name is Calvin Broadus -- was acquitted of the 1993 shooting death of a gang member. No charges are expected against him in the latest incident.
Copyright 2003 by TheKansasCityChannel.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



:eek: :eek: he betta watch his back fo'shizzy!

Ummm Suge, can you account for your whereabouts on Thursday around nine p.m.???


Lord, let me edit this before he comes after me !:D

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/cha...hristina.shtml

Christina - she is beautiful, no matter what she weighs
Last updated 07 April 2003


Gossip mongers are saying that Christina Aguilera could be pregnant after she appeared at a Los Angeles fashion show.

As you can see in the picture she was wearing a Passion Venus inspired gown by designer Jeremy Scott during a show previewing his autumn collection in Hollywood.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/images/a...gnant1_120.jpg http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/images/a...gnant2_120.jpg

The singer has nothing but praise for the designer:

"I feel like a little mermaid right now. But Jeremy Scott - he's great. I love his bold, ambitious, being unafraid to be out there and be different and go as under or overboard as he wants to. I love that. I love people who take it to that level of being unafraid to go there."

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I just saw her on MTV when they were talking to her before the show. She is getting a little to plump. Y'all know that girl is rail thin and that weight gain is unexplained...."

Xtina
 

Who would be Xtina Aguilera's baby daddy? I haven't heard her name linked w/anyone lately.:confused: