(USA TODAY) Announcing your engagement live on TV must get good ratings because it's been happening a lot lately.
Today's lucky bride-to-be: Jenny McCarthy, who announced she's engaged to boyfriend, singer/actorDonnie Wahlberg, live on The View, sending her co-hosts and the studio audience into shrieks of excitement.
McCarthy jumped up and down on stage by herself and with her co-hosts, except for Barbara Walters, 84, who's about to retire for good and isn't prone to jumping around on stage.
Then Wahlberg himself showed up, sneaking on stage behind McCarthy, causing more squealing and more jumping up and down.
McCarthy showed off her really big ring, a yellow sapphire, she said, and explained how Wahlberg, 44, proposed, enlisting her autistic son Evan, to help deliver separate notecards with the words 'Will You Marry" to her. After the last card, Wahlberg appeared wearing a T-shirt reading, "Me?"
McCarthy, 41, and previously married to actor/comedian Jim Carrey, dissolved in tears just telling the story. A date for the wedding has not been set.
All the squealing may have drowned out the tense debate McCarthy is still embroiled in over her antipathy to vaccines, which she believes may have caused her son's autism.
An actress and former Playboy Playmate, she's also a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, where she published a column over the weekend claiming that she is not as anti-vaccine as she is portrayed in the media.
This prompted Fox News' Megyn Kelly to contradict McCarthy on her show Tuesday night, running a montage of video clips of McCarthy making strident anti-vaccine comments. Kelly said she was "shocked" to hear McCarthy claim to be pro-vaccine given all she's said in the past.
