Gore weighs in

Incredible bulk can't fit wedding ring on flabby finger; swept-away lovebirds put the kibosh on new vows; Gyllenhaal snogging Natalie Portman? Plus: Barbra bombs!

Published October 3, 2002 4:53PM (EDT)

Till girth do us part?

Anyone who's been watching Al Gore's newly naked left ring finger a bit too closely and worried that he and Tipper may have headed to splitsville when none of us were looking, take comfort.

The reason the former veep's not wearing his wedding band, he explained to a curious crowd during a speech Wednesday at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is not because his love has gone cold, but rather because his fingers have gone flabby. He has, he admitted, gained too much weight to fit into it.

Later, Tipper, who was in the audience, commented that she hadn't even noticed that he'd stopped wearing the ring.

Guess Al's not the only one who's getting a little thick.

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Another happily married couple heard from

You know those reports that Madonna and Guy Ritchie are so swept away by their interest in Jewish mysticism that they're planning to get married all over again, in a cabalistic way?

Totally, completely untrue, Ritchie insists.

Despite his wife's continued study of cabala, Ritchie says, he and Madonna feel their church wedding nearly two years ago about covered it.

"I think we are happy with our vows as they are," he told Access Hollywood.

Plus, his wedding kilt might look just a tad out of place.

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Deny, deny, deny

Jake Gyllenhaal may be a newly minted star, but he's already well practiced in the art of rumor denial.

He is not, he tells the press, dating Natalie Portman, no matter what you read in the papers.

"We're just friends," he tells the World Entertainment News Network.

So how did the rumor get started? He has a theory.

"You know, when you sit next to someone while you're out to dinner with friends, and reporters are there, 'sitting next to each other' becomes 'snogging' very quickly," he explains. "She's a buddy."

The snogging kind?

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Smack!

"It was like kissing your brother!"

-- "Dawson's Creek" star Katie Holmes on snogging with her costar James Van Der Beek on last night's season opener, to TV Guide Online.

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Juicy bits

The wife of a certain celebrity chef's got a bun in the oven. Emeril Lagasse's wife, Alden, is preggers with the couple's first child. The baby is due in March of next year. (Set the kitchen timer.) And no, I don't suppose they'll call the little tyke Bam!-Bam!

Will this give her stage fright all over again? No sooner has Barbra Streisand come out of hiding to perform a few tunes at a Democratic Party fundraiser than she's come under fire for mistakenly attributing a quote -- "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword" -- to Shakespeare. The quote actually seems to have originated on the Internet in late 2001. At least she didn't tell the crowd to wear sunscreen.

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Miss something? Read yesterday's Nothing Personal.


By Amy Reiter

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