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Not everyone can say they’ve watched Law & Order: SVU in a former president’s bedroom… in the middle of a house flood. But Brooke Shields? She absolutely can.
While co-hosting the Thursday, March 20 episode of Today with Jenna and Friends, the 59-year-old Hollywood icon shared a very real, very awkward story with host Jenna Bush Hager — one that involved both of Bush Hager’s late grandparents, President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush.
“I met your grandparents in the ’80s,” Shields told the 43-year-old former first daughter. “I never had a grandfather, so since I was quite young, he would give me boy advice.”
Years later, when Shields was filming in Boston, she got a surprise call. “‘Excuse me, young lady. I hear you’re in the area. If you do not come to Kennebunkport, you are in trouble,'” the Pretty Baby actress recalled. “It, of course, was Papa Bush.”
So Shields packed up her daughters, Rowan, now 21, and Grier, now 18 — whom she shares with husband Chris Henchy — and headed to Maine to visit the Bush family’s home. And that’s when things got weird.
“I sneak downstairs to do a puzzle, go get a beer, and as I get a beer, water is flooding into the living room from the ocean,” the award-winning actress said. Panicked, she tried to clean it up herself — “shutting all the doors” and grabbing towels — but eventually had to alert the homeowners.
“So I go to the downstairs bedroom,” Shields said, explaining she found the former president and first lady fully settled in, kicked back in their La-Z-Boys, eating TV dinners, and locked into an episode of SVU.
Trying not to stare at Barbara in her dressing gown, the Blue Lagoon star delivered the news. “I’m like, ‘I just want to tell you, I think the house might have flooded, but I think I’ve got it,'” she recalled. Instead of panicking, the Bushes waved her in.
“[Barbara’s] like, ‘Come in here! Come in here!'” Shields remembered. “‘George, maybe Brooke can answer this question. Sit down.’ So I sit down on my knees in between the two Barcaloungers and she goes, ‘Okay, ask her, ask her.’ And he goes, ‘Well, who do you think did it?'”
Wrapping up her story, the mom of two said, “I sat there in between [them] and we watched the rest of SVU and I was like, ‘This is a moment of my life that was so special.'”
After responding with an “aww,” Bush Hager asked, “So did they fix the flood?”
Shields said they did — and thankfully, “it actually didn’t warp” because she “got the towels there.”
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