Friday, June 08, 2007

Celebrity Friday: Princely Birthday, ABC Drama Drama, Frasier's Gay Brother

Happy Belated Birthday, Prince!
Thursday June 7th was Prince Rogers Nelson's 49th birthday.

The r&b singer-songwriter extraordinaire has a new album called Planet Earth coming out next month on Columbia Records. As I have said before, Prince is one of my favorite artists and I blogged about my 10 favorite Prince songs last year after word of The Purple One's second divorce hit the media. For the record, my favorite Prince song is "Adore" from 1999 Grammy-nominated Album of the Year "Sign O' The Times."

Update on ABC Drama's Drama


It was confirmed yesterday that executive producer Shonda Rhimes of Grey's Anatomy has decided not to renew the option of Isaiah Washington to play Dr. Preston Burke for the fourth season of the show. This was not unexpected after Washington had an on-set violent altercation in with another cast member (Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey), referring to another cast member (T.R. Knight who plays George O'Malley) as a "f-gg-t" that generated bad publicity for Disney-ownd ABC and the show for months. T.R. Knight subsequently came out of the closet within weeks of the incident. Isaiah Washington initially apologized but then repeated the use of the slur at the Golden Globes on live television. The incident became a larger touchstone and talking point for how race and sexuality are treated differently by the media and blogosphere since a Black man was being castigated for public homophobic comments but there was a white man named Charles Knipp who does racially offensive drag in black face as Shirley Q. Liquor.
Openly gay T.R. Knight along with his Grey's Anatomy co-stars Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Gray), Patrick Dempsey and Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh (Christina Yang) all received raises of $125,000 per episode plus profit participation in the show. All the other co-stars such as Katherine Heigl (Dr. Izzie Stevens, who is in the recently released Knocked Up), Sara Ramirez (Dr. Calliope O'Malley) and the very handsome Justine Chambers (Dr. Alex Karev) .
Yes, Niles Crane IS Gay!
To almost no one's surprise, actor David Hyde Pierce is now officially openly gay. AfterElton.com had the exclusive story a few weeks ago but the story has not really been commented upon much in the blogosphere. Since I was one of the few Black people who regularly watched Frasier I took notice of the story and applaud Mr. Pierce for finally coming out. Of course, everyone he worked with and people in the industry knew that he was gay but for some reason the actor never answered questions about his sexuality while he was on the Emmy award-winning comedy series for eleven years. Pierce was nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his portrayal of Dr. Niles Crane (brother of the title character Dr. Frasier Crane played by Kelsey Grammer) a record 11 consecutive years and won four times (1994, 1998, 1999 and 2004). Frasier was a situation comedy with the most amazingly erudite yet consistely funny writing.

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