‘Real Housewives of Miami' stars spill all the tea at white-hot premiere party
It's that time of year again, when it's hot in more ways than one.
The glamorous gang that make up Bravo's 'Real Housewives of Miami' was back together Tuesday night at Rosa Negra restaurant in Brickell. One by one, they walked the step-and-repeat with their own stories to tell.
Rocking all-white outfits, the fabulous ladies — Alexia Nepola, Lisa Hochstein, Julia Lemigova, Guerdy Abraira, Larsa Pippen, Marysol Patton, Kiki Barth and Adriana de Moura — celebrated Season 7 of the reality show, which premieres at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Everyone seemed to be on their best (ish) behavior, drinking cocktails, taking selfies, dancing and hugging it out. But judging by the trailer, the drama is off the charts this go-around. Expect breakups as well as hookups; serious health issues; tested alliances; and a really fiery Eurotrip.
Oh, and one newbie: Real estate tycoon, Stephanie Shojaee, who replaces anesthesiologist Dr. Nicole Martin.
The self proclaimed small but mighty Colombiana (née Mejia) admitted trying to fit in with the already tight knit crew was no easy task.
'It was hard, I'm not gonna lie,' she told the Miami Herald with a laugh. 'You're coming in to a bunch of established friends, with their inside jokes and everything.'
The welcome wagon wasn't exactly speeding down the tracks.
'It didn't start off amazing, but then it goes great, then s--t hits the fan. A little bit of all that,' teased the jetsetter who runs the Shoma Group with her husband, Masoud Shojaee (Shoma Bazaar, Sanctuary Doral Park, CityPlace Doral). 'They didn't realize how strong and opinionated I was, and I didn't realize how strong and opinionated they were!'
Thanks to 'RHOM,' Shojaee will never forget her 40th birthday, which was spent in Spain.
'It was one of the best times in my life, and at the same time, the absolute worst,' she said, adding, 'Now I'm ready for the 'Real Housewives' ride, strapped in and buckled up. I hope everyone else is too, because I'm a handful!'
One of Shojaee's rumored besties is Larsa Pippen, who has gone through her share of shenanigans (translation: boyfriends). Fans will now have a front row seat as to what went down between her and Marcus Jordan and why he's in the ex files. The 50-year-old entrepreneur has moved on with basketball player Jeff Coby, who was spotted towering over the crowd at Rosa Negra.
Speaking of strong women, Guerdy Abraira had another reason to celebrate at the shindig — her successful battle with breast cancer.
The event planner, 47, proudly showed off the scar on her chest from where doctors placed the chemotherapy port.
'I'm doing really good,' she reported. 'I'm trying to thrive and find my footing again. Every day is a blessing. I say, 'Thank you, God,' not, ''Why, God?' With that mentality, I was able to propel forward.'
That's the good news. The not so great? Viewers will witness a key friendship fall apart, with the tension between the two a major plot point. It doesn't appear Abraira has patched things up with this unnamed individual and is fine with that.
'Having cancer humbled me big time, and it taught me to trim the fat, get rid of anyone who doesn't want to see you rise to the top,' said the Haitian stunner, wearing a gown of her own design. 'Like, don't play with me this season. For those people who create a storm, then not expect it to rain? Oh, I'll make it rain! I'm taking my power back.'
Another one of the show's OGs who seems to have grown exponentially is Lisa Hochstein. The former model very publicly went through the divorce from hell from plastic surgeon Dr. Lenny Hochstein amid cheating rumors, and came through on the other side.
How mature is she these days? The 42-year-old brought her ex mother-in-law, Marina, to Tuesday's event, along with her kids. The reality vet, who was also accompanied by beau Jody Glidden, even posed for pics with grandma. The two have beefed on more than one occasion.
'It's called adulting,' said Hochstein simply. 'And this is the way it has to be.'
Big life changes are also afoot for Julia Lemigova, who is married to tennis icon Martina Navratilova. The couple document their journey adopting two young brothers this season.
'It's a really exciting time,' the budding opera singer gushed. 'I can't wait for everyone to see it.'
Speaking of which, if you can't tune in to Wednesday's premiere, new episodes of 'RHOM' will be available to stream on Peacock the following day.
READ MORE: Larsa Pippen is playing matchmaker these days
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Miami Herald
2 days ago
- Miami Herald
It all began in Miami for TV genius Desi Arnaz. Then he made it big with Lucy
Desi Arnaz is returning to Miami as the focal point of a new book. Long before he loved Lucy, Arnaz loved Miami. The city and the budding celebrity fueled one another. 'Desi's time in Miami is where he became a professional musician, honing his skills with audiences and creating a sensation with the conga,' author Todd S. Purdum said in an email to the Miami Herald while traveling on his book tour. 'It was a crucial stop on his journey to stardom in the days when Miami Beach featured the top stars of show business, who were impressed by Desi's charisma and appeal. He and his parents were grateful for the foothold that Miami gave them to pursue the American dream.' Purdum will read selections from his new book, 'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television,' Saturday evening, June 21, at Books & Books in Coral Gables. The book is a tribute to a man who started his entertainment life in Miami. He died in 1986. Arnaz's TV vision The book's title isn't hyperbole. Sure, television existed before 'I Love Lucy,' the sitcom Arnaz starred in with his wife, Lucille Ball and which debuted on CBS on Oct. 15, 1951. But Arnaz's vision shaped the way we watch TV today. Do you enjoy streaming syndicated reruns of 'I Love Lucy' as well as 'Law and Order,' 'Friends' and 'Star Trek?' Thank Arnaz. Arnaz and Ball's production company, Desilu, formed during their 20-year marriage and 'I Love Lucy' partnership, was behind that 1960s 'Star Trek' TV show, too, a sci-fi staple that turned into a television and film franchise. Just another of the duo's behind-the-scenes achievements. 'He was a proud yet simple man with chispa, spark. He never forgot where he came from even as he built a studio empire in Hollywood and changed forever the way television sitcoms are created,' former Miami Herald Editorial Board leader Myriam Marquez wrote in a column in 2010. Arnaz's band life in the 1930s, '40s and '50s was the basis for the musical 'Babalu' that was playing at downtown Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts at the time. 'To this day, most sitcoms are shot with three cameras and before a live audience using video. He started with film until video was developed. Arnaz's technique opened the way for TV reruns and syndication,' Marquez wrote. Leading conga lines 'Babalu' took its title from Arnaz's signature tune, a joyous Afro-Cuban song he performed as host and music guest of the Feb. 21, 1976, episode of 'Saturday Night Live' during its first season. Arnaz, at 58 and starting the last decade of his life, closed that show by leading the 'SNL' cast on a conga line through the NBC studio in New York. This exuberant televised live showcase of the conga line with the late night 'SNL' Not Ready for Prime Time Players cast came a decade before Gloria Estefan's 'Conga' English-language breakthrough. Nearly 50 years ago, that 'SNL' performance was a reprise of the way Arnaz, in his struggling musician days, introduced the conga line to the U.S. direct from Miami Beach in 1937. He had done so from the stage of the Park Avenue Restaurant on the corner of Collins Avenue and 23rd Street, once a main artery of Miami Beach's entertainment scene. He initially dubbed his conga line his 'Dance of Desperation.' In October 2024, city of Miami Beach officials installed a permanent marker honoring Arnaz at Collins Park near where the Park Avenue stood. Today, the site of that former restaurant-entertainment venue at 2200 Liberty Ave. is the Miami City Ballet's headquarters. You can stream that 'SNL' episode featuring Arnaz on Peacock because of his original vision to film 'I Love Lucy' with multiple cameras, giving studios the opportunity to share classic TV moments for generations to come. Miami's blueprint Even that inspired vision could be traced to the actor-musician's earliest days in Miami and Miami Beach. Arnaz simply had an eye for a room and how to maximize the space for aesthetic as well as monetary purposes. From the 'Desi Arnaz' book: '[H]is father had joined some other Cuban exiles in starting a business to import Mexican tile — roof tiles, bath tiles, kitchen tiles. The Pan American Importing and Exporting Company was capitalized with all of $500 and was operating in a small building on Third Street southwest in Miami. Desi suggested to his father that they close off a portion of the warehouse as living quarters and save the $5 a week they had been paying the boardinghouse. Purdum's 'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Changed Television' recounts Arnaz's career, starting with his arrival in Miami from Cuba in 1933 with his father, Desiderio Sr. The elder Arnaz had been Santiago's youngest mayor and a member of the Cuban House of Representatives before Fulgencio Batista's first coup. Arnaz's maternal grandfather, Alberto de Acha, was an executive at rum producer Bacardi & Co. The man born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba on March 2, 1917, arrived penniless in Miami before his 17th birthday. He initially made a living in the U.S. cleaning canary cages. In the fall of 1936, he enrolled at Miami Beach's St. Patrick Parish School on Garden Avenue and completed his formal education at Miami Senior High School. In Cuba, Arnaz once envisioned a law career. After school at Miami High, Arnaz reinvented himself as a self-taught musician in Miami Beach. Without that South Florida start, it's likely there would have been no Lucy to love. Arnaz's father remained in Miami until his death in 1973. After 'I Love Lucy' ended in 1960, Arnaz continued his career in production and performing from a base in California. But he helped support relatives who lived in Miami. 'He did make a number of emotional return visits — to perform or celebrate the first Carnaval — and he always retained a warm affection for Miami and the friendships and formative experiences he had there,' Purdum said. Arnaz was the first king of Carnaval Miami in 1982. He played his music with his children Lucie and Desi Jr. at that inaugural event before a crowd of 35,000 on Southwest Eighth Street. Miami in the 1930s 'It's easy to forget that when Desi and his father arrived in Miami, it was 25 years before the mass exodus of Cubans after Fidel Castro's revolution,' said Mindy Marqués Gonzalez, editor of 'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television' and a vice president at publisher Simon & Schuster. 'The main Cuban emigre community was in Tampa and Miami was still a sleepy southern town. They would have been one of the few Cubans here. In some ways, Desi and his father were trailblazers for the thousands of Cubans who would follow and transform the city into a multicultural mecca,' said Marqués, a former Miami Herald executive editor. This earlier era of Miami was where Arnaz and a school chum, Sonny Capone (son of the gangster, Al, who had lived on Miami Beach's Palm Island), would get together after class to sing and play the bongo drums. Arnaz parlayed his talents to a spot in a rumba group called the Siboney Septet, named for the seaside Cuban town just outside Santiago, that was playing at Miami Beach's original Roney Plaza on Collins Avenue. For $39 a week. Arnaz's Latin rhythm skills on the conga drums and infectious stage mannerisms came to the attention of popular band leader Xavier Cugat. 'Miami was the formative stage of Desi's new life in America after Cuba,' Marqués said. 'It's here that he picked up a $5 guitar at a pawn shop and started playing again, like he did in Cuba. And that led to his being 'discovered' by Xavier Cugat, which led to everything else.' That introduction to Cugat, and joining his orchestra for six months, led to Arnaz's musical career at New York clubs and his winter return engagements with his own band at Miami Beach entertainment venues like La Conga on 23rd Street. Thanks in part to Arnaz's musical chops and other musicians he played alongside, the area came to be known by locals and music fans as a 'corner of Havana in Miami Beach,' Purdum reported in his book. 'Desi left his mark, without ever denying who he was,' Myriam Marquez, the Herald's former opinion editor, wrote in her 2010 column. 'How hard must it have been 75 years ago in a country that still had segregated public facilities and often looked at 'foreigners' with suspicion. I recall his writing about his days on the tour bus heading from one gig to another, how he would hang out with his Black musician friends, even when promoters weren't too thrilled about that.' Marrying Lucy Arnaz met Lucille Ball on the set of a 1940 film, 'Too Many Girls,' in which they both had roles. The New York-born redhead and the Cuban Miami music maverick wed that year. 'Today, this kind of marriage in Miami is commonplace. It was such a precursor of what was to come in this community,' Miami filmmaker Joe Cardona said in a 2001 interview with the Herald on the 50th anniversary of 'I Love Lucy.' 'To Cubans in South Florida, this was kind of like looking into a crystal ball,' Cardona said. 'Here was a show that actually featured somebody who sounded like my father. Somebody who looked like my uncle. Somebody my brother could grow up to be,' wrote former Herald columnist Ana Veciana Suarez in 2001. Within a decade of their marriage, the world would come to consider the Ball-Arnaz couple family, a relationship that outlasted their marriage, their professional union, Arnaz's post 'Lucy' career, and their lives. Arnaz died of lung cancer at age 69 in 1986. Smoking Purdum recounts in his book, 'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television,' how, upon arrival from Cuba by ferryboat to Key West in the early 1930s, father and teenage son were driven to their first home in Miami. 'On the bus ride to Miami, the mayor made a gesture that implied recognition of how fast Desi had grown up since they'd last met: He offered his son a cigarette,' Purdum wrote. Arnaz, like so many actors of the time, smoked on camera. His habit formed the basis for a sketch on the 1976 'Saturday Night Live' episode he hosted. Arnaz played an acupuncturist treating an ailing patient portrayed by John Belushi. But not 'Chinese acupuncture with needles' Arnaz warns the wary Belushi. 'Cuban acupuncture, with cigars.' When Arnaz died at his California home, after visits from his family, including ex-wife Ball, and with their daughter Lucie at his bedside, the Miami Herald's obituary quoted the musician-actor's doctor. 'He died of lung cancer. It was from smoking those Cuban cigars — that's the truth.' Remembering 'Ricky' Actress and singer Lucie Arnaz said of her father's lifelong work ethic in a 2006 interview: 'He had a lot of moxie and integrity because he had to keep on going. He had to start over, and he had to build everything again. He was fearless.' Ball, in a 1983 interview with Ladies Home Journal six years before she died in 1989 at 77 after heart surgery, said of her ex-husband: Desi 'was much smarter than anyone thought. He was a great showman, a great businessman, a fantastic entrepreneur, and I loved watching the executives finding that out.' In his 1976 autobiography, 'A Book,' that he plugged on 'SNL,' Arnaz recalled his 'great days in Miami Beach.' Basketball. Hot dogs. Beach picnics. On one of his last visits to Miami in 1982, to take his crown as king of the first Carnaval Miami, he told Herald reporters, 'I am returning to my first place — Miami. I started here.' If you go What: An Evening with Todd S. Purdum and moderator Carlos Frias discussing Purdum's book, 'Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.' When: 7 p.m. Saturday, June 21. Where: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Cost: Free. You can buy the book at the event. Or buy tickets in advance and get one copy of the book for $29.99 plus tax.
Miami Herald
2 days ago
- Miami Herald
Marcus Jordan spotted living his best life in Miami, despite ‘Real Housewives' drama
Whose ears are burning? Marcus Jordan may be a major plot point in the new season of 'Real Housewives of Miami,' but he's in a totally different era now. The sneaker entrepreneur's on-and-off relationship with Larsa Pippen is spotlighted big time in the first episode, which started filming last summer. The ladies get into a few tiffs over Michael Jordan's son, because Pippen is annoyed that a few of them still follow him on Instagram. These days, the exes, who were so close that they had a podcast together called 'Separation Anxiety,' are completely kaput. How do we know? First off, Pippen went social media official with basketball player Jeff Coby a few weeks ago. The 31-year-old 'A Mindful Journey' author also appeared by her side at the premiere party last week at Rosa Negra restaurant in Brickell. On the show, the 50-year-old claimed her family wanted her to break things off with the fellow Chicagoan. 'When I was with Marcus, my kids were like, 'Stop getting back together and breaking up, and just get off the ride,'' the Bravolebrity told her mom. 'That's when I was like, 'I need to get away from the situation.'' As for the NBA legend's heir, he was spotted over the weekend getting cozy in Miami Beach with two mystery women whose identities were not outed by TMZ. Despite the fact that he looks like he's living his best life now, the 34-year-old had quite the tumultuous time after his split with Pippen. Jordan was arrested in February after getting his Lambo SUV stuck on train tracks in Maitland, Fla., outside Orlando. One lucky break: Officers initially thought he was carrying cocaine in his pocket, but further testing revealed the powdery substance in his pocket was ketamine, the anesthetic that led to Matthew Perry's death. Prosecutors officially changed the drug possession charge to a third degree felony. That will likely mean a less harsh penalty when Jordan heads to court to plead his case in September.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
50 Cent Trolls Elon Musk Over Eye Injury, Backs Trump Amid Billionaire Beef
50 Cent has jumped headfirst into the public spat between U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, adding his signature brand of mockery to the mix. The rapper and entrepreneur, known for his unfiltered social media presence, took aim at Musk's recent eye injury in an Instagram post on Tuesday evening (June 10), further solidifying his allegiance to Trump. In the post, 50 Cent shared an A.I.-generated image featuring himself and President Trump on a golf course. The image was accompanied by a caption that poked fun at Musk's black eye, which has recently sparked widespread speculation. 'So what happened with Elon,' 50 Cent wrote. 'Heard he let some punk punch him in the face.' While Musk claimed the bruise was simply the result of roughhousing with his 5-year-old son, X, rumors have swirled online that the injury may have stemmed from a more serious altercation. Fif's taunt added fuel to the speculation, even as Musk attempts to downplay the incident. The feud between Trump and Musk escalated earlier this month when the president signed a Republican-backed spending bill that cut electric vehicle tax credits—a direct blow to Musk's Tesla empire. In response, Musk lashed out at Trump online, even accusing him of appearing in the Epstein files. That outburst quickly prompted a political and financial backlash, including threats from Trump of 'serious consequences' tied to Musk's government contracts. Musk has since attempted to walk back his attacks, posting, 'I regret some of my posts about President @realdonaldtrump last week. They went too far.' The Queens rapper, meanwhile, continues to revel in the chaos, inserting himself into the Musk-Trump saga with characteristic humor and calculated loyalty. See 50 Cent's Instagram post from Cardi B Speaks Out Against Pres. Trump's "Dictatorship Vibe" And Recent ICE Raids Rep. Jasmine Crockett Compares Trump-Elon Feud To 'Real Housewives' Drama 50 Cent Questions If Ex Daphne Joy Is "Jane Doe" In Diddy Sex Trafficking Trial
