A year from now, Tracee Ellis Ross isn't sure if she'll be shooting episodes for the ninth season of her hit CW sitcom "Girlfriends" or already be on to other ventures.
Either way, she seems to be at peace.
“We don’t know. I have a feeling it is [the final season] but you know, you never know," she told me recently. "You just never know. It’s been an amazing run, an unexpected eight years. I don’t know that any of us thought we would go this long. We’re the longest running half-hour on TV."
So if this is the last season of the show, which had its first six seasons on UPN which then merged with WB to become CW (got that?), what does Tracee hope for her still-single career gal character?
“I just want to get married for God’s sake! I just want to seal the deal! (laughs) I figure art imitates life and maybe it’ll help me out.”
Last spring, Ross won the outstanding actress in a comedy series prize at the NAACP Image Awards and it was all the more gratifying because she had been nominated several times before: “It’s just fun to win, that was really exciting - very unexpected. A really wonderful treat. It was great.”
But she certainly knows the ups and downs of show business since she is the second-eldest of Diana Ross' five children - three of whom are performers. The family seems to be extraordinarily close and are usually together as a group whenever their legendary mother is being honored somewhere. That will happen again in December when Diana Ross is of the five 2007 recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors to be presented in Washington D.C. by the president.
No one is more excited about it than Tracee Ellis Ross: “Is that cool or WHAT? I will be there with bells on. That’s the coolest thing.”