Top Story
Nickelodeon will go ahead with its scheduled telecast for children about same-sex parents Tuesday night despite 100,000 e-mails and phone calls in protest of the show, The Associated Press reports. In fact, the network received so many e-mails that it had to set up a separate address to avert a computer crash.
Nick News Special Edition: My Family Is Different, a half-hour discussion produced by Linda Ellerbee, is being targeted by the Washington-based Traditional Values Coalition, which believes Nickelodeon is actively promoting the normalization of homosexuality. Ellerbee, who won a Peabody Award for a Nickelodeon special explaining the Monica Lewinsky scandal for children, maintains the show is about tolerance, not sex. The program, which also features gay parent Rosie O’Donnell, airs commercial-free tonight at 9 p.m. EDT.
Celebs
Newlyweds Paul McCartney and Heather Mills arrived in the tropical Seychelles islands this week following their Irish wedding, Reuters reports. Although the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation would not divulge the couple’s exact whereabouts, locals say the McCartneys are vacationing on the privately run, paparazzi-free Fregate Island.
Actress Tea Leoni and husband David Duchovny have a new 7-pound, 10-ounce baby boy, the AP reports. It’s the second child for Leoni, 36, and Duchovny, 41, who were married in 1997. They have a 3-year-old daughter named Madelaine West Duchovny.
A Long Island newspaper has hired Amy Fisher to write a biweekly column, the AP reports. Fisher’s first column will appear in the July 3 issue of The New Island Ear. Otherwise known as the Long Island Lolita, Fisher, now 28, made headlines in 1992 after she shot and wounded the wife of auto mechanic Joey Buttafuoco, with whom she was having an affair.
Movies
World Wrestling Entertainment star Dwayne Johnson, also known as The Rock, is in talks to play the famous Hawaiian warrior-king Kamehameha in an upcoming film for Columbia Pictures. The movie would be the first feature film based on Hawaii’s most famous king, who ruled the islands from 1795 to 1819, the AP reports.
Tube
NBC is producing a new comedy about six single friends, targeted for a potential midseason launch, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Coupling, a comedy based on a British series of the same name, is being referred to by the network as Friends with sex. It focuses on a group of thirtysomethings looking to get involved or who are formerly involved with one another.
Captain Kirk’s command chair from the original Star Trek series is being sold at auction in Los Angeles on June 27, Wired.com reports. Fans can place bids for the chair, first used by Jeffrey Hunter as the early Captain Christopher Pike, through eBay. The gray plywood chair with a Naugahyde-covered seat, wooden armrests and plastic control buttons comes with an authentication letter and is valued somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000.
Music
Plans for a Grateful Dead reunion concert are alive and kicking. Clear Channel Entertainment is appealing a decision by a Walworth County highway committee to deny it a permit. Clear Channel Entertainment, which is promoting Terrapin Station–A Grateful Dead Family Reunion at its East Troy, Wis., music theater, was denied a permit for the show earlier this month because of concerns that the county’s 80 sheriff deputies could not handle the expected draw of some 200,000 fans. An appeals hearing is set for June 27.
