Sherri Shepherd: 'I'm Smiling. I'm Happy'
Shepherd reveals what Barbara Walters thought of her Broadway debut
— -- It turns out that not even Sherri Shepherd can believe what is written in the press about her very public divorce and the end of her seven-year run on “The View.”
"I read about myself in the tabloids and I go, ‘Wow, that girl has it baaaad.’ Then I realize they’re talking about me,” Shepherd said today on “Good Morning America.”
“It’s not me,” she said. “I just feel like I am doing so well. I gotta be honest. I’m smiling. I’m happy. Life is good. I’m living for my son, Jeffrey.”
Shepherd, 47, won a court battle against her first husband earlier this year to retain custody of 9-year-old Jeffrey.
She is now in the midst of a divorce from her second husband, Lamar Sally, who has claimed publicly that he and Shepherd had a surrogate son together who he is now raising on his own.
Without mentioning Sally specifically, Shepherd said today she is relying on “a lot of prayer” to get through.
“I know that I get up every morning and I go, ‘I’m going to smile my way through it,’” Shepherd said. “I’ve smiled my way through things and I act as if, when all is said and done, this is my said and done time.”
“Get up. Smile. You make it through,” she said. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel. All of that stuff. It’s true.”
After leaving her perch as a “View” co-host in August, Shepherd made the leap to Broadway, where she is starring as the evil stepmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella.”
Shepherd says she is having “the best time of my life,” in the role even though it is a musical and she is not a trained singer.
“I ‘Milli Vanilli’ my stuff,” Shepherd said, referring to the 1980s music duo that lost their Grammy for lip synching. “They knew I couldn’t sing.”
Even without the vocals, Shepherd says she got praise from the two “View” co-hosts who have come to see her perform on stage.
“Barbara Walters came to see me and she said, ‘Dear I didn’t have high expectations for the show but you were adorable. You should try acting more,’” Shepherd recalled.
When Whoopi Goldberg surprised her at the show, Shepherd says she could not stop crying and remembers exactly what Goldberg said: “Child, you were good.”
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