Arts & Entertainment
‘OITNB’ actress Samira Wiley recounts romantic proposal story
the couple got engaged last year
“Orange is the New Black” star Samira Wiley and her partner Lauren Morelli announced their engagement last year and are now revealing their proposal story in Out.
Wiley and Morelli, a writer on “Orange is the New Black,” met on the set of the show. At the time Morelli was married to a man but she says she felt an instant connection during Wiley’s audition.
“I’d already seen Samira’s audition tape and immediately had a crush on her — the complication being that I was married to a man at the time,” Morelli told Out.
Morelli says Wiley became her confidant while she came to terms with her sexuality and divorced her husband. The pair started dating and Morelli decided to pop the question before a weekend vacation to Palm Springs. Wiley says she had no idea Morelli was planning to propose.
“[Lauren] asked me to sit next to her,” Wiley told Out. “Then she got me up, and we started dancing together, and she pulled a ring from behind the couch. Lauren has been married before, so I wanted her to tell me she was ready, her to be the one to propose. I didn’t know she was as ready as she was.”
“I was crying uncontrollably and kept backing away from her,” Wiley continued. “I asked her after, ‘Who knows about this?’ and she said, ‘Oh, everyone. Your parents know.’ We didn’t tell anyone else for a few days. That was really important to us — to have some time where it was just ours.”
Morelli says she was just as emotional.
“I was so nervous and terrified she knew it was coming, but she was so shocked that I couldn’t get her to stop crying,” Morelli says. “She was hyperventilating. I thought, Oh, this is not good. This has gone too far. She was very clear she’d wait for me to be ready, so to give her something I knew she wanted so much was incredible. It was the most magical day of my life.”
Baltimore
This John Waters interview has been edited for readability — but perhaps not human decency
Pope of Trash dishes on Trump, plane etiquette, last meal, and more
By WESLEY CASE | At 80 years old, John Waters is still the ideal dinner guest — incisively sharp, quick-witted and funny as hell.
The chic Baltimore native proved it again and again in a recent Zoom interview, calling from his summer home in Provincetown, Mass.
The occasion was the Blu-ray releases of two of his movies — the 1977 dark comedy “Desperate Living” and his enduring 1988 musical “Hairspray” — on June 23 by the Criterion Collection, which publishes restorations of films it deems culturally important. The Criterion stamp of approval has become the gold standard among cinephiles.
“It’s like getting an award,” said Waters, who wrote and directed both films.
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
The Washington Blade held the seventh annual Pride on the Pier at The Wharf DC on Saturday, June 13.
(Washington Blade photos by Landon Shackelford)
The 2026 Lost River Pride Festival was held on the scenic grounds of the Lost River Farmers Market in Lost City, W.Va. on Saturday, June 13. Headliner Tom Goss performed at the festival and gave a second performance at the nearby Guesthouse Lost River.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
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