This is definitely shaping up as the year of me plugging the birthdays of all my fellow Generation X 1968ers as I creep along to the big four oh.
Jeri is a pretty cool actress and quite a nice person from my brief encounter at GenCon in 1998. You’d think an attractive woman who appears in a Star Trek show would’ve been sick of it all after three years of nerds asking her about bra size (this is no joke). I think she found a bright side to it because her career is doing pretty well post-Voyager; starring roles in dramas, recurring guest spots elsewhere.
Oddly she got stuck in my memory through the failed Fox sitcom Top of the Heap that was a spinoff of Married with Children; it lasted a mere 11 episodes and Christina Applegate’s cameos couldn’t save it. I recall Fox plugging it pretty hard because it starred vets Joseph Bologna and Rita Moreno. It ended up being more famous for having pre-Friends Matt LeBlanc as a lead character. As for Jeri, she was the guest on a wedding episode; she was getting married, her fiance was a creep, Matt’s character caught the creep cheating while Jeri and Matt’s characters still had big crushes on each other from their teenage days at camp. I think Jeri’s distinctive facial features, around the eyes namely, is what my brain latched onto for the “she looks familiar” signals.
Sadly, Jeri has the unfortunate fame of being the ex-wife to failed US Senate candidate Jack Ryan. Barack Obama was already clobbering him in the general election but when the guy’s general sleaziness was revealed from their divorce filings, Jack withdrew. Personally, what couples do is their own business as long as nobody is getting hurt physically, mentally and emotionally. I take issue with the moralizers telling everyone else what’s right or wrong. When the stories surfaced, the Democrat in me laughed since the Family Values platform has another hypocrite in its camp; the geek in me just thought what an idiot he was for throwing away his marriage to one of the best-looking (inside and outside) actresses in the Sci-Fi genre; she has appeared in other things besides Star Trek. Good thing they divorced in 1999, it would’ve been an awkward campaign in 2004 if Jack Ryan tried to corner the Trekkie vote.