Flying solo. Ryan Seacrest joked his Live! With Kelly and Ryan cohost Kelly Ripa had retired after winning the lottery amid her week-long absence from the show.
The American Idol host, 47, was showcasing custom embroidered pillowcases alongside guest host Katie Lowes on the Tuesday, August 9, episode of the ABC morning talk show when the Scandal alum, 39, gave Ripa, 51, a shout-out. “Kelly, we miss you. We got you a Consuelos one,” she said, referring to Ripa’s husband, Mark Consuelos.
In response, Seacrest joked, “I heard she won the lottery. She’s fine.”
The New Jersey native is currently on vacation with Consuelos, 51, in the Hamptons, just one month after the former soap opera stars enjoyed an empty nester’s getaway. “This is our first vacation in 25 years without children and parents. … It’s usually us, with the kids or … kit and caboodle,” she confessed during a July episode of Live! “So Mark and I were like, ‘What are we going to do without the kids?’ And the kids were like, ‘What are you going to do without us!? We’re your whole lives!’ And I was like, ‘Wrong again, kids.'”
The couple — who tied the knot in 1996 — share children Michael, 25, and Joaquin, 19, and Lola, 21. During their trip, they went on a rock-climbing excursion in Utah and Colorado, where they had “the time of our lives,” as Ripa told viewers last month. “There was some work involved in this trip but that’s not what we were doing. We just went rock climbing. We went to the Amangiri [resort], out in Utah. It is luxury. It’s like, the kind of trip we would take without kids.”
Though the twosome enjoyed their time away together, the Hope & Faith alum joked that she felt like others were wondering about their children. “We got a massage! I mean, there were kids there, don’t get me wrong. But I could see the other families looking at us. People were like, ‘Where are your kids?'” she told Seacrest. “And I was like, ‘They’re adults now. They have jobs. They couldn’t get off work.’ And they were like, ‘Wait, what? You have kids who are adults?’ ‘Yes, we have kids who are adults. But more importantly, they’re not on this trip.'”
Earlier that month, Ripa opened up about one of the last child-free trips she and Consuelos took — their honeymoon — where he convinced her to travel to a nude beach. “I did go topless on my honeymoon and I’m so grateful — I’m so, so grateful,” she recalled on her talk show in July. “I was like, ‘How could you take that photo of me? The man at the photo mat saw me naked!’ … [But] do you know that I often rifle through the shoebox? And I go, ‘Well, just remember! It used to look like this!'”
More than two decades after that vacation, the Riverdale star still knows how to make Ripa feel sexy. “We’ve been together a long time, but all Mark has to do is look at me [and I] feel so special, so pretty and so young,” she told ET Canada in September 2020. “It’s probably his superpower. He knows how to treat his spouse like the only person in the world.”
