dayanara torres

Anna Fong is just 29, but this Humboldt Park resident's fashion career is off to a brisk beginning.

This summer, Fong won AOL Latino's Fashionista online design contest. Now she'll be designing a gown for former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres to wear to a Los Angeles Fashion Week event. Fong also will see her designs showcased in People en Espanol.

Working with Torres isn't Fong's first brush with celebrity fashion. She has dressed Nadine Velazquez, who plays Catalina on "My Name Is Earl." Velazquez and Fong both attended Notre Dame High School for Girls and Columbia College.

Fong's designs aren't just celebrity-bound. She has launched a small fall collection on her Web site (www.anna-fong.com) and plans to release a spring collection as well.

"The clothing line that's coming out this fall has a lot of color," she said. "It's very feminine, very flirty, with a bit of an edge."

Her goal, she said, is to have women "look classy and sexy at the same time."

After graduating from Columbia College in 2001, Fong moved to New York City, where she worked for a design house. After two years, she returned to Chicago, working out of her Humboldt Park home.

"Chicago is being really supporting of local designers," she said. "Unfortunately in New York you need a lot of space to get exposure. Chicago gives you not only the visibility but also the affordability to do what you need to do."


Jennifer Lopez's husband Marc Anthony has her name tattooed on his wrist to show the world who his heart belongs to.


The singer-and-actor got the body art during their first year of marriage. Marc says, "It's so I can see it, and when I'm on stage everyone can read it." Jennifer adds, "He's had that for a while."

The Do It Well singer married Marc in June 2004, just four days after his divorce from first wife, former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres, was finalised.

Jennifer recently sparked pregnancy rumours when she sported an apparent baby bump under a loosely-fitting green dress at her catwalk show during New York Fashion Week. It was then reported she and Marc ― who are said to have turned to IVF treatment after struggling to conceive naturally ― had gone for their first ultrasound scan, suggesting the 38-year-old JENNIFER Lopez and her husband of three years, Marc Anthony, have cracked a window to their enclosed celebri-couple world and invited us to take a peek inside. So, in the interest of advancing the weird science of celebritology, we've come to observe and catalogue They-Lo's behaviour in their temporary new habitat: the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey, where the Bronx-born Latin-entertainment actor/singer/dancers are rehearsing for their first US concert tour together.

Having just swept into the darkened arena here, they're suddenly transfixed by the multilevel stage, on which lighted panels are changing colours, from yellow to orange to red. Lopez and Anthony are swooning over this feature, which they're seeing for the first time.

"Isn't it cool that the stage lights up like that, mama?" Anthony says, lifting his tinted glasses so he can see the colours more clearly. "It looks fantastic." Lopez agrees: "I love it!"

"Too bad you don't get to use it," Anthony jokes.

"Oh, not even! You will not see it until my set!" replies his wife.

"Don't even start that shit with me, baby!" he laughs. She giggles.

This fake marital spat is somewhat newsworthy, as Lopez has just indicated that she - and not her husband - will be taking top billing in their bilingual family affair.

Never mind that she's never actually toured. For all of her multi-platinum dance-pop-R&B-rap success as a studio singer and video star, Lopez, 38, has only ever performed on awards shows and elsewhere on television, usually doing just a single song. Yes, Lopez is nervous about how she'll fare on the road, singing, dancing, bantering and costume-changing night after night.

Never mind, too, that Anthony - the world's bestselling salsa artist - has been wowing concert audiences with his superlative voice for years, ever since he opened for Tito Puente at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1991. Whereas Lopez never booked a tour because she was always too busy taking Hollywood roles for upwards of $15 million per movie (her reported salary on the romantic comedy Monster-in-Law), Anthony turned down various movies because he was too busy singing somewhere, anywhere around the world.

But Anthony says: "There's no competition."

"There isn't," Lopez insists. "But somebody has to go first during the tour."

Anthony says: "I want to open, so I can run back and play Xbox. I'll be kicking back, going, 'Let mama sweat now' while I'm playing."

Lopez shrieks: "That's exactly why he wants to do it! I don't even want to go on after him; he's a hard act to follow. But it's good because, while he's on stage, I'll have an extra hour to do my hair and make-up."

"Just an hour?" Anthony prods.

"Oh, no; I'll have to start, like, an hour before that," says Lopez, who doesn't appear in public looking anything less than perfectly dolled up. "These are all very practical decisions, see? I get extra time to get ready. But the truth is that it's two performers working together on one show. He'll go on first and we'll interact in the middle of the show, then he'll come back later. It's not somebody opening for somebody else."

Lopez glances at her other half for affirmation - something both of them do frequently. But Anthony isn't paying attention: he's gazing at the arena rafters, apparently still suffering from the previous night's soirée to celebrate his 39th birthday. (Lopez rented a yacht and filled it with Anthony's friends for a surprise party on the East River.) Lopez repeats herself, Anthony nods approvingly.

"It's rare to find what we have in our relationship," Lopez says. "We expect a lot of each other, and we push each other to do more than we think we can do, but there's no competition. It's just: how can I help Marc do better? And he's doing the same thing, helping me and protecting me and pushing me to do more than I think I can do. It's a real blessing to find somebody who you have that with."

"Definitely," Anthony says. As a general rule, Lopez and Anthony don't sit together for interviews. They almost never pose with each other for portraits, either. "They don't do 'couples' covers," their publicist says. "They're two people with their own careers."

But now Lopez and Anthony are sitting in adjacent, cushioned, totally unglamorous folding chairs in a New Jersey sports complex, answering questions together about their professions and their lives because they've been working together with increasing regularity. Anthony did some production work on Lopez's first Spanish-language album, Como Ama una Mujer (How a Woman Loves), which arrived with a commercial thud in March; and the couple co-starred in El Cantante, a biopic about the late salsa singer, Hector Lavoe. Now comes the tour, dubbed Juntos en Concierto (Together in Concert).

Lopez may not wear los pantalones in the relationship - on this day, she's glammed up in a black belted scoop-neck dress over black leggings with grey suede boots - but she's still the boss. We know this because Anthony has told us as much. Twice.

We've been talking about El Cantante, which opened in the US to mixed reviews and middling box-office figures during the summer. The gritty movie was made by Lopez's New Yorican Productions, which means she was her husband's boss on the project. "When isn't she the boss?" Anthony asks. To which Lopez, giggling, replies: "I think one of the reasons Marc and I do work so well together and we're able to do so many things together. It's that we look up to each other. We admire each other and have a mutual respect for each other as artists."

Lopez gesticulates when she speaks, punctuating certain words with the crash of bangles on her forearm. Her Bronx accent has been scrubbed away for the most part, though it bubbles to the surface in her more excitable moments - and when she's referring to Anthony as "papi," as she sometimes does.

She sits upright, legs crossed; very poised. She's decorated with lots of sparkly things, including major rocks on both hands. Her cheeks are rosy, her skin buttery smooth, her smile bright and bleached. She almost looks like a waxwork of herself. So strangely perfect.

Anthony is wholly human, full of nervous energy - fidgeting with his boots, bouncing his legs, swatting away gnats. He's wearing multiple crosses on his necklaces - and has JENNIFER tattooed on his right wrist.

"That's huge, right?" he says of the permanent tribute. "Tell her!" She already knows. Lopez quickly points out the tiny tattoo under Anthony's wedding band, too - the one that says "JLM," for Jennifer Lynn Muniz, a combination of Lopez's first and middle names and Anthony's surname.

Anthony and Lopez have been married significantly longer than the combined length of her first two marriages. But you already knew that from the tabloid headlines.

Quick refresher: Husband No1, from February 1997 to January 1998, was Ojani Noa, a model whom Lopez met while he was working at a Miami restaurant. Following a high-drama relationship with hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, Lopez married one of her former back-up dancers, Cris Judd, in September 2001. By the following June, they'd separated; Lopez filed for divorce a month later.

There was also the almost-marriage to actor Ben Affleck, but Lopez pulled the plug just before their scheduled wedding in September 2003.

Lopez had appeared in one of Anthony's music videos and the not-yet-a-couple had recorded a duet, No Me Ames (You Don't Love Me), from Lopez's 1999 debut album, On the 6. But it wasn't until June 2004 that they officially became They-Lo, marrying at Lopez's home in Beverly Hills. The surprise wedding came just four days after Anthony's divorce from former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres was finalised. He'd married Torres in May 2000, and they had a child, separated, reconciled, renewed their vows in 2002, had another child, separated again in 2003 and finally put an official end to their relationship in 2004. Total tabloid gossip-fest.

But that has now subsided: Lopez no longer peers from the cover of every supermarket weekly in America ("consciously not," she points out). But there is still the occasional blip. Just last month, In Touch Weekly reported that Lopez is pregnant with the baby due in the spring. The couple quickly knocked down the rumour through a publicist, though gossips continue to speculate.

Even so, Lopez is a ubiquitous drama magnet no more: "Luckily, Marc knew how to live in a way where you could have success and credibility and still have a normal life and not be on the cover of every tabloid for two and a half straight years," she says. "At the end of the day, people want good music and they want to see a good movie. That's what keeps you in this business. The other stuff burns you out."

"It's just so destructive when you play that tabloid game," agrees Anthony. "I decided very early on not to do it." By this, he says, he means not giving the paparazzi anything to work with and setting ground rules in interviews, though none was given to us.

"When interviewers ask me silly f***ing questions about what I ate in the morning, or whether this rumour is true or whatever - why would I even answer those questions?" Anthony says. "It's a waste of my life. I'm sitting in front of you to tell you about art, whether it's a movie, whether it's an album, whether it's this tour."

Our discussion hasn't been exactly all about the art. But, then, it's just part of the dance. This, they get. "We're entertainers, and we talk to the press to let people know what we're doing," Lopez says. In an interview about a particular project, she or Anthony might discuss some aspects of their relationship. But not all of them, she says. "It's not open season."

Let's talk about the intersection of art and life, then. In El Cantante, Anthony plays one of his musical idols, Lavoe, and Lopez plays his wife, Nilda "Puchi" Perez. The couple have a tempestuous, dysfunctional relationship. They argue and fight, then they fight some more.

Brawling in character with your real-life spouse: Difficult? Stressful? Trying?

"It was fun!" They-Lo say in unison.

Fun? "It really was, bro," Anthony says. "You got to say a lot of shit you can't say in real life. We went there. But it wasn't difficult to step out of it, because it was so different. That's so not me, that's so not Jen, that's so not us. It just made me feel normal, you know what I mean? On the way home from the set, I was going, 'Thank God that's not us!'"

Lopez nods. "When we did some of those intense, emotional fighting scenes, it was exciting," she says. "But it was also scary, in a way."

The crew begins to arrive at the Continental Airlines Arena: lighting guys, sound guys, stage directors; the production manager and tour promoter; musicians; backup dancers in their sweats and scarves. Anthony seems to have an easy rapport with everybody he encounters. Lopez may or may not be a taskmaster.

She oversees a business empire that includes two fashion labels, a successful line of perfume, that film production company and a Southern California restaurant. This year, Forbes ranked her ninth among the richest women in entertainment, with a net worth of $110 million. Jenny from the Block, as she referred to herself in a smash hit, can now buy the block.

Or, she can rent a basketball arena for days at a time and turn it into her personal rehearsal space.

Upon arriving, she wonders why nobody else is rehearsing. (She seems to be joking.) Later, she yells for the band to start playing and for everybody to get to work. "We've wasted a half-day already!" she says. (This time, she is probably not joking.)

"I'm sure you're aware that some people have referred to you as - " I ask.

Lopez: "You're trying to find the delicate word! OK, what?"

"Ummm, powerful. Strong. Driven."

"Yes?"

"In Latino culture..."

"Are there Latino women who aren't like that? 'Cause I don't know any," retorts Lopez.

"I've never met a Latina who wasn't strong. I was raised by them. My mom, my sisters, all of them," adds Anthony.

"Women in general, when they are strong, get a tough rap," says Lopez. "Whether it's Barbra Streisand or any of these other strong women who have accomplished a lot and have multifaceted careers and have an opinion, they're always going to be looked at a certain way. Just because they're women. But it's never something I looked at like, 'Oh, this is a bad thing that people are saying this.' No! I think they admire that I really work hard."

"Where do they even get that from, sweetheart? You're just a hardworking woman. You're actually too sweet. I wish you were meaner," says Anthony. Lopez cackles. Anthony leans in to kiss her shoulder. Is it a genuine display of affection, or just another stage move? In their constructed world, who really knows?

? Jennifer Lopez's new album, Brave, is released on 15 October.