Grandmothers

Real estate reality star Jeff Lewis, 41, a home designer/project manager and former house flipper, is filming his second Bravo series, "Interior Therapy," while the fifth season of "Flipping Out," the first show about his home remodeling business, continues through Sept. 13. So you're living with a family now to film "Interior Therapy. " Yeah. I think the air date is in December or January. How's that going? Honestly? The first family was lovely. The second family I adored and wanted to move in with them.

Clarice Taylor, an actress best known for portraying the self-possessed Grandmother Huxtable on the hit television sitcom "The Cosby Show," died Monday. She was 93. Taylor died of congestive heart failure at her home in Englewood., N.J., said Ulysses Carter, her public relations representative. Bill Cosby said she was "perfect" as the mother of his character, Cliff Huxtable, on the NBC series that aired from 1984 to 1992 except she looked "young enough to play my sister. " "She did stand-up comedy.

An 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson were rescued Sunday after being buried under rubble for nine days after the worst earthquake in Japanese history and a massive tsunami toppled their home. The two were trapped in their kitchen after the magnitude 9.0 temblor struck March 11 and survived by wrapping themselves in towels and eating yogurt and drinking, water, milk and Coke, Japanese news reports said. Teenager Jin Abe eventually dug his way out of the debris onto the roof of the home, where he was able to alert rescuers.

? Looking back, says the pop singer called Jero, the songs were a soundtrack to his childhood, the strange and sorrowful melodies enjoyed by his Japanese-born grandmother ? traditional folk ballads he came to know as enka music. In the early 1990s, Jerome White Jr. was a skinny mixed-race kid ? three-quarters African American, one-quarter Japanese ? who found respite from the tough streets of Pittsburgh's North Side in the mysterious music that emanated from his grandmother's living room.

Maria Altmann, who escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna as a newlywed and returned to wage a triumphant fight to recover Gustav Klimt's iconic gold portrait of her remarkable aunt, has died. She was 94. Altmann died Monday at her Cheviot Hills home after a long illness, said family friend E. Randol Schoenberg. Altmann was an 82-year-old grandmother living in Cheviot Hills in 1998 when she enlisted Schoenberg, an attorney who was the son of a friend, to investigate the Nazi theft of her Jewish family's Klimt collection.

Divers searching the Delta-Mendota Canal on Friday found the car used by a kidnapper who grabbed a 4-year-old boy from his grandmother's arms. The bodies were not in the vehicle. All evidence, from tire tracks to an eyewitness, had indicated that the silver Toyota of kidnapper Jose Esteban Rodriguez was in the canal. A farmworker who saw the car go into the canal told police it was airborne and that two people ? one much smaller than the other ? were inside. Detectives had been careful to not extend hope.

I worried that news accounts of the shooting death at Inglewood's Rogers Park of a grandma on a family outing would feel like a bullet to the heart of Rhonda Foster. Foster's son, Evan, died in similar fashion 13 years ago this month; the victim of errant bullets in a gang-related shooting at Inglewood's Darby Park. I'd written about the family over the years and often thought about them. But Foster hadn't heard much about last Saturday's shooting. She's been too busy counseling would-be gang members ?

Hearty felicitations on your engagement, Kate and William. Most of your wedding decisions sound great, but your choice of the date has sent me reeling in shock. Maybe you didn't know that April 29 was the day Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun in 1945. But surely, someone in the royal household might have checked. Sixty-five years later, that early morning ceremony in a Berlin bunker still sends shivers up and down many spines. Fooling around with the Fates is always risky; can't you pick another day?

Viola Rowland's jalapeño jelly, mango chutney and corn relish started making the rounds at swanky Hollywood cocktail parties in the early 1930s. Actors Doris Day and Dan Duryea, cosmetics magnate Max Factor and Los Angeles Examiner Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons hired the private cook to dollop her spicy-sweet condiments on cream cheese-topped toasts and seafood canapés. Today, her granddaughter, Nancy Rowland, is carrying on the local cocktail condiment tradition with her own versions of her grandmother's recipes.

Sandra Austin recalls gazing at her 1-pound, 4-ounce granddaughter -- tubes in her throat, stomach, chest and arms -- and wondering whether she could ever live outside an institution. But three years later, tiny Angel Green left a nursing home in Plantation, Fla., for a new world: the family home, with four siblings and an uncle to take care of her. "This baby is like my miracle," Austin said. "Many times we didn't know if she would make it. She had to have so many surgeries.