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By Amy Reiter

June 22, 2000 | Sharon Stone has a brand-new baby -- and she never even had to uncross her legs.

The actress and her husband, newspaper editor Phil Bronstein, have adopted a baby boy, Roan Joseph Bronstein (his first name is Celtic for "seal," as in the animal; his middle name honors Stone's father), born on May 22, a few weeks early, to an unwed teenage mother in Texas.

The actress, who turned to adoption after several miscarriages, tells the upcoming issue of Us Weekly that it was love at first sight for her and her new baby. The first night she and Bronstein brought him home, she says, "We sat up and watched him breathe."

"He's my wonderful, precious little Buddha," Stone says. "He eats like a champion. He sleeps peacefully -- and he's the apple of his daddy's eye."

Sounds like a new mother, all right. And she apparently smells like a new mother, too, having dived right into diaper changes and burpings.

"I've seen him throw up on her from head to toe," Stone's friend Mimi Craven tells the magazine. "One day, she was dressed in silk [when he threw up on her], but she couldn't have been happier."

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Beyond voguing

"Madonna can do some amazing things ... she can get both legs behind her head and walk along on her hands. She can do it all, and she's only been doing yoga for a few years now."

-- Rupert Everett on the astounding flexibility of the Ethereal Girl on British TV.

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The naked truth

The people have spoken, and they'd really rather not see Roseanne's naked booty in the pages of Playboy, thanks.

"There is an undeniable curiosity to the thought," Playboy photo editor Gary Cole says of the rampant rumors that the comedienne would bare her now-somewhat-less-ample wares in the magazine. "The editors on our staff seem to be very split on how we ought to react to this."

So they put the following question to Playboy.com's ... um ... readers: "Should Roseanne bare all for Playboy?"

And? At press time, with more than 1,000 voters weighing in, a mere 31 percent were all for seeing Roseanne -- all of Roseanne -- in the flesh, while a whopping 69 percent clicked the box marked "No. You're joking, right?"

Right?

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Ben's Afflection

"Fame is wasted on me. I already feel like I don't want to have sex five times a day. It's depressing."

-- Ben Affleck on fame's fleeting pleasures, in Australia's New Weekly magazine.

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Juicy bits

Maybe Patrick Swayze wasn't flying his airplane three sheets to the wind when he crash-landed in Arizona June 1. Investigators are now saying another vice may have been to blame: cigarettes. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, a broken clamp on a pressure hose may have caused Swayze's Cessna to lose pressure and -- combined with the dirty dancer's chain-smokin' habit -- might account for his erratic behavior immediately after his landing. Alert the surgeon general ...

Was Tito Puente a coke fiend? The mambo king's part-time publicist, Christopher John, has told the New York Post that a 40-year addiction to the fluffy white powder was responsible for Puente's death at 77. The addiction, John says, "was absolutely a daily thing. But it was a quiet, functioning addiction. He didn't show the classic symptoms ... He didn't have mood swings or anything. He was always banging on the drums in a frenzy anyway. People just figured he was a hyper guy."

Is Patrick Stewart the captain of his own mouth? Scant weeks after blasting the producers of Arthur Miller's play "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan," in which he is starring on Broadway, and being forced by Actors' Equity to apologize, he lambastes the whole U.S. of A. in the upcoming issue of George. It is "laughable that the U.S. considers itself the land of opportunity," he says. "How can you be truly free when there is so much poverty and poor education?" What's more, he says, "A lot of America's global actions stink." To whom shall he address his apology?

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