logo
'American Idol 'Alum Triston Harper, 17, Welcomes His First Baby with Wife Paris Reed

'American Idol 'Alum Triston Harper, 17, Welcomes His First Baby with Wife Paris Reed

Yahoo19 hours ago
American Idol alum Triston Harper, 17, welcomed his first baby with wife Paris Reed
Harper's mom revealed the exciting news in a Facebook post
The singer, who was a contestant in season 22 of the hit show, tied the knot with his wife in November 2024, just months before welcoming their first childTriston Harper is a father!
The former American Idol contestant, 17, welcomed his first baby, daughter Brenley Lichelle Harper, with his wife Paris Reed, also 17. Harper's mother, Hattie Mae Sullivan, revealed the exciting news via Facebook on June 23.
"Everybody my Grand Baby has made her Grand Entrance …. weighing a solid 6lbs and 6 ounces," the proud grandmom wrote. "Brenley Lichelle Harper Has now arrived on the scene and she ain't here to play. She's already in boss mode!!!!! Feed me, Change me, Cut that bright light out. Yes ma'am whatever you want G MA is gonna make it happen!!!!!"
Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Harper first revealed the exciting news of his marriage and his wife's pregnancy in November 2024. On Nov. 6, the country singer wrote on Facebook, "Iv got big news harpies," as he updated his relationship status on the platform to "married" and "with Paris Reed."
Just two days later came another surprise update. Harper's mom shared a Facebook post (which the singer reposted on his own page) featuring a photo of Harper holding a positive pregnancy test while posing with Reed.
Sullivan wrote, "Now Everybody has congratulated me on Triston and Paris getting married but to me that is old news but now I'm bout to be a 'G Ma.' ' She added the hashtags #TeamPink, #TeamBlue and #BlessingsonBlessings.
Harper, who is from McIntosh, Ala., was a contestant on season 22 of the singing competition show. He made it to the top five before being eliminated on the May 12 episode. Abi Carter was ultimately crowned the winner of the season.
When a then-15-year-old Harper auditioned for the show in front of judges Katy Perry, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie — performing Jason Isbell's "Cover Me Up" — he opened up about his difficult childhood.
"I grew up in a small town. I've been through a lot in my life," he told the trio, as an emotional video segment followed. While Harper sat outside his home in McIntosh, he told the camera, "I grew up right here, since I was born basically."
is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more!
Harper said he never imagined having the opportunity to share his story with millions on American Idol. "It makes me happy just thinking about it," he said in the video.
After he finished his audition performance, Harper received lots of applause and even a standing ovation from Perry and Richie. "Your voice — you got it," Richie told him. "Your voice is a storytelling voice.
"You were so authentic, so connected to yourself. Singing from your soul," Perry praised the up-and-coming singer, who released a new single — called "H.O.P.E." — after his appearance on the show.
Read the original article on People
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Tupac's friends and family smoked his ashes hours after his death, Suge Knight claims
Tupac's friends and family smoked his ashes hours after his death, Suge Knight claims

New York Post

time2 hours ago

  • New York Post

Tupac's friends and family smoked his ashes hours after his death, Suge Knight claims

Tupac Shakur's closest friends and family rolled the rapper's cremated ashes into a blunt and smoked it just hours after he died, his pal Suge Knight sensationally claimed in a new interview. The former Death Row Records CEO told People on Tuesday that he coughed up $1 million in cash to have the slain rapper immediately cremated so the bizarre ritual could take place — and because he was so terrified of Shakur's mom. 'A bag with his ashes was passed around,' Knight said. 'His homies rolled him up. They smoked him. Advertisement 4 Tupac Shakur was shot and killed on September 13, 1996. Getty Images 4 Former Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight is currently serving a prison sentence. Getty Images 'You gotta understand, that's what made sense. It was symbolic. It's like… you keep part of him,' he added. Advertisement Knight — who was behind the wheel when Shakur was shot dead in the passenger seat — claimed he was the only one who didn't partake. 'I was so happy to say I was on probation — I couldn't smoke,' Knight said. 'I told his mother, 'Moms, I'd love to, but if I hit that, I'll get in trouble.'. I was probably the only one who didn't hit him.' 4 Tupac Shakur was 26 years old at the time of his death. Getty Images Advertisement Knight, who is currently serving time in California for manslaughter, said he paid a huge sum to have his pal cremated because Shakur's mom, Afeni Shakur, demanded it just moments after he was pronounced dead. 'She came up to me and said, 'Get it done. Now,'' Knight recalled. He said he hesitated because Shakur had told him just weeks earlier that he didn't want to be cremated. 'He told me, 'When I go, I want every rapper at my funeral to grab the mic. I want them to kiss me head to toe. Just like in 'Life Goes On.'' Knight said. 'He didn't want to be cremated.' Advertisement 4 Suge Knight with Tupac Shakur in 1996. BEI/REX/Shutterstock After telling his mom he didn't think he could make the cremation happen so soon, Knight said the rapper's grieving mom 'gave me one of those mama looks, like, 'Shut your a– up and do what I said.'' 'Then she started cussing me out. 'Get this sh-t done!'' Knight said, adding, 'I paid someone a million dollars cash to take care of it.'

South Holland to levy nonresident fee for Friday fireworks display
South Holland to levy nonresident fee for Friday fireworks display

Chicago Tribune

time3 hours ago

  • Chicago Tribune

South Holland to levy nonresident fee for Friday fireworks display

People who don't live in South Holland will be charged a $10 fee if they want to see the village's fireworks display Friday night. South Holland residents will be admitted for free after showing proof of residency, such as a driver's license or utility bill. The fireworks show and a Family Fun Festival take place on July 4 at the village's Veterans Memorial Park, 500 E 160th Place. 'Due to the overwhelming popularity of our fireworks show in recent years, we're introducing a nominal nonresident fee to better serve our residents and ensure an experience with plenty of space and resources,' Julia Huisman, the village's communications director, said. She said the fireworks show can draw thousands of people and said the fee is a way of curbing the large crowd. Huisman said South Holland isn't looking at the fee as a revenue producer. South Holland Mayor Don DeGraff said the show drawn larger crowds, partly due to the quality of the production and partly due to some other communities having dropped their own displays. 'We have one of the best, if not the best, fireworks displays in the Southland region,' he said Tuesday. The bigger crowds, however, have had an effect of crowding out residents who are unable to find parking, DeGraff said. 'The fireworks are primarily for our residents,' he said.'We want to prioritize the opportunities for them in our own park.' Huisman said the fee had 'been discussed internally' among staff and that village trustees agreed with going ahead with it. The ticket for nonresidents is $10 at the gate for those 6 and older, but tickets can be purchased in advance, for $8, on the village's website, or at the South Holland Community Center, 501 E. 170th St. The family fest at the park starts at noon and runs until 4 p.m., offering live music, food trucks, balloon artists and bounce houses, according to the village. It is free to residents and nonresidents. After the fest ends, the park is cleared ahead of the evening's fireworks show. Huisman said that has done the past two years to get the park ready for the fireworks display. The park will reopen at 6 p.m. for the fireworks, with the display scheduled to start at 9 p.m. Huisman said that South Holland police and village staff will be at the park entrance to check identification, and said there will be separate traffic lanes for village residents entering the park. She said the village has worked to let people know about the fee, using sponsored Facebook posts and a mailer that went out last week to all village homeowners. 'Sometimes you have residents who are joined by family or friends who don't live in the village,' Huisman said. The village has also publicized the fee on electronic message boards posted at main entrances to the village.

What trans people need now
What trans people need now

Los Angeles Times

time3 hours ago

  • Los Angeles Times

What trans people need now

There's a scene toward the end of 'Will and Harper' that I can't get out of my head. I'm referring to the 2024 road-trip documentary where Will Ferrell is reintroduced to his old 'Saturday Night Live' buddy Harper Steele as a trans woman. The two zigzag through several red states, as Ferrell, star of 'Anchor Man,' 'Talladega Nights' and 'Elf,' is his quirky self, posing awkward questions ('How are your boobs?'), donning cartoonish disguises and pulling a series of public stunts, some of which backfire. The goofiness comes to a halt when Harper drives them to Trona, Calif., a tiny town in the Mojave Desert, southwest of Death Valley. She pulls up to a dilapidated house with boarded-up windows on a small dirt plot — sad to even look at. She bought the place six or seven years before, wanting to get away from the world after another holiday season of uncertainty, regret and suicidal thoughts. 'I just hated myself so much,' she says, and breaks down crying. ' I just felt like a monster.' She brings him inside. The house has been vandalized; there's broken furniture, walls full of graffiti, a bare mattress stained and smeared with who knows what. They step out on a small balcony overlooking an empty street with telegraph poles, the desert horizon in the distance. 'I was going to be a woman here,' Harper tells Will. 'That was the plan. … I was just gonna close the curtains and walk around this house and it was a safe space.' That's pretty desolate: an Emmy-winning comedy writer and producer, willing to forfeit everything, just to be a woman residing alone in the middle of nowhere. But the most desolate thing in the scene is Will Ferrell's face, stricken with pathos. He has shifted from curiosity to certainty. Trans identity is real. He gets it. Transgender and cisgender people are the same in this way: We'd sooner die than live outside of our gender. The difference is that cis people don't have to face that predicament, while every trans person has. Earlier this century, mainstream America started to catch on to the same thing about gay people: They're real. They were born this way. Homosexuality isn't a disease that straight people were going to catch. It took decades of LGBT organizing and fighting and (way too much) dying to get to that place. It also required a majority of straight Americans to perceive that gay identities are as real as theirs, to pave the way for marriage equality. Transgender children are equally real, though conservative politicians and Christian nationalist groups have campaigned furiously to convince us otherwise. To be sure, many children go through phases of experimenting with gender expression. The way parents know one of their children is trans is by observing if their urge to transition is consistent, insistent and persistent. Consistent means you watch, insistent means you listen and persistent means you stay patient. These three things will make it quite obvious. There's one other thing. All parents of trans children experience a moment similar to Ferrell's in the desert: They witness a person whose life is on the line, a person they must protect. Red state lawmakers, who know nothing about medicine, want us to think 'do no harm' means stripping trans kids of medical care, lest they make 'permanent' decisions before they're adults. Parents of trans children, and every major American medical organization, know that 'do no harm' means preventing the catastrophe of undergoing puberty in the wrong gender. They also want to prevent suicide, and the nightmare of being forced to live in exile from your identity, which is a living death. Even Ron Burgundy, the Anchor Man, knows that. The Supreme Court Skrmetti decision handed down June 18, upholding a Tennessee law banning healthcare for trans minors, was as contorted as it was predictable. The justices had one thing to decide: Did a law explicitly targeting trans people deserve the heightened scrutiny applied to laws discriminating against protected groups or on the basis of sex? Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the conservative majority, argued that the Tennessee law doesn't 'exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status but rather removes … gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence from the range of treatable conditions.' This is like saying we're not targeting diabetics, just removing their insulin. Cisgender kids in Tennessee, however, can still receive hormones and puberty blockers because 'the state has an interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex.' Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for good measure, claimed that transgender people don't qualify as a protected group because a) we're too hard to 'define,' and b) we don't suffer from a history of legal discrimination. The Skrmetti decision will go down as discriminatory, deadly and patently false in its claims. After the Trump administration declared trans people nonexistent (then went about trying to eradicate what doesn't exist), the court now sets a precedent and a permission structure for states to do whatever they want to us. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor effortlessly defined transgender people as a group, then pointed to 'a lengthy history of … cross-dressing bans, police brutality, and anti-sodomy laws' that have criminalized trans people dating back to 1843. 'Those searching for more evidence of de jure discrimination against transgender individuals,' she added, 'need look no further than the present. The Federal Government, for example, has started expelling transgender servicemembers from the military and threatening to withdraw funding from schools and nonprofits that espouse support for transgender individuals.' Under New York state law I could have been arrested for cross-dressing in the 1980s, and instantly have lost my job as a public school teacher. A generation earlier, in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, police often walked into Gene Compton's cafeteria, a gathering place for neighborhood trans women, and randomly arrested customers for 'female impersonation.' Amanda St. Jaymes was one of them. She described repeated arrests, being stripped and locked up for refusing to let them shave her head. 'One girl [spent] 60 days in the hole because she wouldn't let them cut her hair. That's how important it was to us back then.' In 'Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria' (another movie worth watching), historian Susan Stryker chronicles, through firsthand accounts, 'the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history.' It started with a police raid on a hot August night in 1966 (three years before Stonewall). When one of the cops grabbed one of the queens, she flung coffee in his face, and a riot erupted. Tables were turned over, people threw everything in sight, plate glass windows were smashed. They kicked and punched and beat the police with their heavy purses. 'The cops retreated outside to call for backup. But cafeteria customers, maybe sixty in all, poured into the streets through the broken doors and windows and kept fighting' — in fearless feminine wrath. 'There was a lot of joy after it happened,' said St. Jaymes. 'A lot of [us] went to jail, but there was a lot of 'I really don't give a damn. This is what needs to happen.'' The Compton's riot demonstrates that transgender identity was as real 60 years ago — before we even had the word 'transgender' — as it is now. 'I just ask you as my friends to stand up for me,' Harper Steele wrote in her coming out letter. I make that same appeal here, and I thank everyone who is standing up for trans people, as well as those who one day will. We're real. We need you. Diana Goetsch is a poet, essayist and journalist and the author of the memoir, 'This Body I Wore.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store