C.J.
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WCCO-TV anchor Jamie Yuccas looks very turned up — as in sexy — in a photo on alyssastyled.com.

Alyssa DeRusha, the wife of Yuccas' "WCCO This Morning" co-anchor Jason DeRusha, has started a fashion blog on which Jamie was the first guest contributor.

Yuccas writes about her passion for shoes, and one of the attached photos captures her in something that I think might be shorter than anything we've seen her wear on TV. It's a hot pink mini dress with spaghetti straps, a peplum and two other layers. Fingers in her hair and eyes closed, the better to show off the eye makeup and lashes long and lush enough to cause a concussion.

"In that photo we were just playing around," Yuccas said, casually as she could muster, when I called to find out what was going on here. Asked if her husband thought the photo was sexy, Yuccas laughed hard. "He thinks I'm a goofball more than I'm sexy. You'd have to ask him," she said. When I tried to do that, Yuccas sent an e-mail saying, "Husband is a little shy." He didn't seem shy the last time I saw them at an Il Foro party.

Yuccas said that photo was taken for Lavender magazine's Pride issue. Lavender's owner Stephen Rocheford told me the photo remains the property of photographer Kyle Lieberman.

"I used a makeup service, WarPaint Beauty [@WarPaintMakeup on Twitter]. Warpaint was asked to do a style shoot for Lavender and WarPaint picked the model; Lavender shot the shoot," said Yuccas.

"Jamie was the inspiration for me starting the [month-old] blog," Alyssa said Monday. The blog will mostly "chronicle some of what I wear, my daily life with the kids, and the things I do at night, either events or just personally. Jamie chose to write about her shoes. The blog is for all kinds of fashion."

Asked if she thought that photo of Yuccas was sexy, Alyssa said, "I thought it was fun. She looks great." Sexy was the question? Alyssa laughed said "Ahem, sure. A little. I don't know."

Alyssa sure isn't very chatty for a blogger. "That's not my area of expertise, talking to the media," said the woman who talks to the media every day via Jason DeRusha. Alyssa, who needs to make blog photo credits more obvious, was so shy I didn't dare ask her to compare Jamie's dress to the gigantic chrysanthemum bra morning show traffic reporter Kim Johnson wore for a charity event before working at WCCO-TV. TV people today.

Mom gets brutal honest truth

Edina's former Makeup Queen Carroll Britton got a verbal black belt of a fashion critique from her son Sunday.

Britton and her husband, Harold Kail, drove in from Glenwood to attend a black belt test in taekwondo for their son, Evan, the Stone Arch Entertainment producer and screenwriter. I was there, too, because Evan says I have been one of the important adults in his life. (More about his plans to highlight that on YouTube in a future column.)

Perhaps because of his moviemaking projects, Evan treated his mom like one of his actors when the self-deprecating Britton remarked that she "looked like hell" in a spray tan she applied herself.

"You look like a cartoon character with the tan, the ridiculous electric blue nails and the hair," Evan said.

Made me want to kiai! but Britton said: "That's why I reproduced; so in my golden years I could have the truth told me. If your husband is never going to tell the truth, get a child. They always tell the truth."

Yes, Harold told every woman who walked into Britton's former 50th and France location how beautiful she was.

During the afternoon long black belt test at Lake Hiawatha Park, a young man caught my eye. I learned he is an actor friend of Evan's, Chris Massoglia, who lives in his native Minnesota between movies. In other observations from Sunday, Evan's success was celebrated with dinner at a Korean restaurant in Eagan, Hoban, attended by two grandmasters, including Ralph Truesdell, Evan's teacher since he was 13, and a handful of masters in taekwondo. Hoban gets packed on a Sunday night, so get there by 5:30 p.m.

C.J. can be reached at cj@startribune.com and seen on Fox 9's "Buzz." E-mailers, please state a subject; "Hello" does not count. Attachments are not opened.