Hitting the High Notes

This is not so much a career shift as a return to her first love, insists Gloria Reuben, familiar to “ER” fans as the HIV-positive physician’s assistant, Jeanie Boulet. After four seasons on the show, Reuben is now accompanying Tina Turner as one of a pair of backup singers on Turner’s Twenty-Four Seven Millennium Tour. Raised in Toronto by a Jamaican gospel singer, Reuben studied at the Canadian Royal Conservatory. “I don’t think I’ll ever be as proud of anything as I’ll be for what I did on ‘ER,’ ” she says, “but working with Turner is totally a fate thing.” Even her fashion sense is rooted in the world of melody. “This may sound ridiculous, but I took ballet for years and I just loved the tutu,” she recalls. “Mine was pink. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.” As an adult, Reuben still has a fondness for a tight fit, and while she’s more often in a pair of Gucci jeans than a leotard, she still practices her plies. When the occasion calls for couture, Reuben calls New York designer Melinda Eng, who designed the sexy chiffon number that Reuben wore for her second recent life shift, her marriage to VH-1 executive Wayne Isaak.

Husband Isaak accounts for whammy number three, Reuben’s relocation to a Manhattan apartment. “L.A. can be--ironically, in a place which has millions and millions of people--incredibly isolating,” she says, though she’ll miss her idyllic canyon home in the hills above Brentwood and weekend jaunts to the beach, the desert and her favorite getaway, Big Sur. “If I change one thing, everything has to change,” she says. “It’s a habit and, knock wood, things really work out when I do that.”