NEW YORK (AP) – Evan Rachel Wood thinks her fellow teenagers should be free to explore their sexuality so they can be “responsible about it” – unlike the character she plays in “Pretty Persuasion,” due out Friday.

In the film, directed by Marcos Siega, Wood portrays a scheming schoolgirl named Kimberly who uses her sexuality to achieve her goals.

“I’m not against teenagers exploring their sexuality,” the 17-year-old Wood told the New York Daily News for its Sunday editions. “They should be able to find how to use it in the right way and be responsible about it.”

Wood said she thinks the media and adults try to ignore sex and cover it up.

That, she said, “just sends wrong messages and makes kids more crazy about it. If the media and adults would just deal with it, kids would realize it could be a beautiful thing.”

Wood’s film credits include “Thirteen,” “Practical Magic” and “Little Secrets.”

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PEORIA, Ill. (AP) – Instead of packed arenas, comedian Richard Pryor now tours medical clinics. Instead of applause, he gets eight checkups a month in what his wife jokingly calls “the round robin of doctors.”

Still, Jennifer Lee Pryor says her husband’s crippling multiple sclerosis is a blessing that stripped away his taste for the drugs and alcohol she was convinced would have left him dead. Today, he’s just months shy of his 65th birthday.

Nearly two decades with the disease has left Pryor in a wheelchair and out of the public eye, long after his expletive-laced standup act spawned dozens of movies and made the Peoria native box office magic through much of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Now, Pryor – who has also suffered three heart attacks – spends most of his time at his home near Encino, Calif., with two rescued dogs and Jennifer, his fifth wife. The couple divorced after a brief marriage in the early 1980s but remarried in 2001.

Entertainers from Bob Newhart to Chris Rock cite Pryor as one of the most influential comedians ever.

“As productive and brilliant as he was, he was also self-destructive,” she said in a telephone interview. “He said God gave him MS to slow him down. This disease saved his life.”

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NEW YORK (AP) – Pamela Anderson says they’re not getting back together, but ex-husband Tommy Lee sounds like he’s ready to give it another try.

“We’re crazy in love,” Lee tells People magazine in its Aug. 15 issue. “We’re going to take things slowly and see where they go.”

Lee served about four months in jail after he pleaded no contest to kicking Anderson while she held their baby son, Dylan, in February 1998. The couple, who were married in 1995, divorced that same year, but have been on and off again ever since.

“They’re the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton of our era,” Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx tells the magazine.

Meanwhile, Anderson has brushed off reports that she’s getting back together with Lee.

“Absolutely not,” the 38-year-old “Stacked” actress told reporters recently. “(I’m) just trying to get him a little press for his new show.”

Lee says their sons, Brandon, 9, and Dylan, 7, “miss Pam and me together. When we’re together, they’re so happy. At the end of the day, that’s truly what my heart wants. I want us all to be together.”

“Tommy Lee Goes to College” debuts Aug. 16 on NBC. It follows the 42-year-old drummer as he attends classes and auditions for the marching band at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Knight Ridder Newspapers

Rolling Stone Keith Richards offers some insight into his and Mick Jagger’s working styles.

“Mick has to get up in the morning with a plan,” Richards says in the Aug. 15 issue of Newsweek. “Who he’s going to call, what he’s going to eat, where he’s going to go. Me, I wake up, praise the Lord, then make sure all the phones are turned off.

“If we were a mum-and-pop operation, then he’d be mum.”