A Sunny Attitude Helps Her Weather All Those J.Lo Jokes

Sure, Jennifer Lopez is an actress, singer, fashion diva, gossip magnet. But can J.Lo tell you tomorrow’s high and low?

It depends which one you ask.

Meet another Jennifer Lopez. She’s a meteorologist on the Weather Channel, co-host of the nightly “Evening Edition.”

And yes, she gets jokes about the name. “Everybody calls me J.Lo; I’m used to that,” she says from the cable channel’s studios in Atlanta.

Her favorite story is from a cable convention in Chicago last year, where a young man came to the Weather Channel booth, walked up to her and asked excitedly, “Is it true that the real Jennifer Lopez is going to be here?”

She told him it was true. He grew increasingly flustered and sought further assurance. She directed him to a bulletin board where the weathercasters’ photos were posted. He went over, looked and was crestfallen to discover the Jennifer Lopez they were billing wasn’t the Jennifer Lopez he was panting to see. Then he realized that was the woman he’d just been talking to.

“He looked at me, turned beet red and fled,” Lopez recalls.

Her name didn’t always elicit such reactions. “It was never a problem--until the green dress,” she says, referring to the skintight Versace number with the plunging cut that the other Lopez wore to the Grammy Awards in 2000. “That really put my name on the map.”

She doesn’t mind. She likes Lopez’s films and music. But the two women are nothing alike, she hastens to point out, noting that unlike actress-singer Lopez, who just filed for divorce from her husband of 10 months, she’s been married for four years and is expecting her first child this month.

Indeed, Lopez considered switching to her married name when she started at the Weather Channel in May 2000 after weathercasting stints at two TV stations in her native Florida. But management discouraged her because her husband’s Armenian name was more difficult to pronounce.

So Jennifer Lopez she remains.

There are some advantages.

“When I call hair salons,” she says, “they get quite excited. They say, ‘Oh, we’ll fit you right in.’ ”