Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, September 11, 1993                   TAG: 9309110128
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PEOPLE

Dan Caplis had been explaining to viewers Thursday night how judges determine criminal sentences when he pulled a boxed ring from his pocket and dropped it in front of Sporer.

Then he referred to the audience as an extended family with whom Sporer would want to share the big moment. Sporer touched his arm and accepted. "I would love to marry you. I love you," she said. Verging on tears, she turned away from the camera.

After a commercial break, the camera took a close-up of the ring. Caplis, 36, and Sporer, 27, have been dating for a year. The bride-to-be said later the proposal came as a "complete, total surprise." Her intended said he, too, was overwhelmed. "I was chokin' it. I couldn't get air," Caplis said.

What you always suspected about the always-hatted Dwight Yoakam is true - there's no hair under there.

The country star blows the whistle on himself in the Sept. 30 issue of Rolling Stone. Yoakam, 36, notes that he often doffs the hat offstage - "because I don't ever want to feel trapped in it" - but sticks to it onstage.

Kathie Lee Gifford is livid over being featured on the cover of a national mag. We're not talking Playboy, but the fall issue of Maternity Fashion & Beauty mag.

Inside is a two-page puff piece on the talk show host in which she shills on about her line of maternity clothes. So what's the problem?

Gifford discovered after the fact that MF&B is published by Larry Flynt, who also publishes Hustler. Gifford apparently freaked at the connection and sicced her lawyers on the mag.

"Things might have been different if we had time to find someone else," said editor-in-chief Linda Arroz, "but we . . . were about to go to press."

She added that Gifford initially contacted the magazine about doing a story on her and noted that Gifford had appeared on a recent cover of Longevity, a mag about health and aging published by Penthouse's Bob Guccione. Gifford will not discuss the matter.

Life as a lobster isn't always easy.

Just ask Daniel Brown, who was paid $5 an hour this summer to pace Freeport, Maine, sidewalks in a lobster suit to promote a restaurant. He was mistaken for a carrot, a pumpkin, a honeynut and even a roach.

"Somebody from Florida said, `Look at that orange cockroach!' " said Brown, a high school student. "People laugh and make fun of me, tell me to get a real job, which doesn't bother me because if I was a tourist and I saw a lobster-boy, I'd probably say the same thing."

Rush Limbaugh toked pot and appeared to enjoy it back in the '70s when he worked in the sales office of baseball's Kansas City Royals.

So says an unauthorized biography of the talking head by Paul Colford. Limbaugh has confessed to reefer use twice in his life, both times taking sick. But in "The Rush Limbaugh Story," Colford quotes witness Randy Raley, a DJ, as saying: "If that was sick, gimme some!"

From the police blotter of The Vinita (Okla.) Daily Journal: "Dale Aspach, transporting an open container of beer, speeding in a posted zone, transporting a loaded fireman."

OK, class, raise your hands if you would want to trade places with Chelsea Clinton. Class: No way!

A survey by The Bonjour Group clothing company finds that 69 percent of American teens would not want to trade places with the First Adolescent.

Twenty-four percent said they would love to live in the White House; 7 percent said, "I dunno."