(Twitter)
GRANDE ROCK: O’Donnell, who met fiancée Michelle Rounds at a Manhattan Starbucks, showed off the engagement ring she got for her on Twitter. (Getty Images)
GRANDE ROCK: O’Donnell, who met fiancée Michelle Rounds at a Manhattan Starbucks, showed off the engagement ring she got for her on Twitter.
Rosie O’Donnell’s whirlwind courtship with 40-year-old stunner Michelle Rounds happened so fast, the bride-to-be didn’t have time to tell her parents she was gay.
O’Donnell’s announcement Monday that she was engaged to a tech-company headhunter caught many fans by surprise, if only because the couple had been dating for less time than Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries.
Rounds’ parents didn’t even know their daughter was gay until a photo of her with O’Donnell appeared in People magazine in September, they told The National Enquirer.
“It totally hit us out of left field,” Roger Rounds, her father, said. “We only found out about Michelle liking girls when all this came out about them a few weeks ago.
“This has been a painful experience for me and my wife,” he said from their home in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where Rounds grew up.
“We’d always held out hope that Michelle would eventually find a nice guy to marry, settle down and have kids.”
TV’s latest celebrity couple are still trying to figure out how to handle the glare of publicity.
The first picture was taken at O’Donnell’s annual Rosie Theater Kids Gala (which was also where O’Donnell introduced the press to her last girlfriend, LGBT activist and artist Tracy Kachtick-Aders, in September 2010).
O’Donnell ordered the red carpet cleared of paparazzi — except for one favored photographer, Rosalie O’Connor — and posed with Michelle for the first time.
O’Donnell — who was then just a few weeks away from making a well-publicized comeback to talk TV on Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN — was able to control the story.
But, in the weeks that followed, O’Donnell seemed to have a hard time keeping the romance private. There was a steady stream of snapshots and tweets on O’Donnell’s Twitter account, talking up Rounds.
On Howard Stern’s radio show, O’Donnell hinted to the shock-jock about her impending marriage.
Still, people knew very little about Rounds — other than the fact that the two met at a Manhattan Starbucks (the exact location has still not been disclosed), that they bonded over a puppy and that O’Donnell did not know at first that Rounds was gay.
“I thought she was a 28-year-old heterosexual girl, because that’s what she looked like to me,” O’Donnell said on “Nightline” last October.
“My gaydar was way off!” she said.
Rounds owns a condo in well-to-do Red Bank, NJ, and a small apartment in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, according to public records.
She has been traveling often with O’Donnell to Chicago where her OWN show is taped.
O’Donnell bought a $2.5 million house — fully furnished — from a former “Oprah” exec.
Viewers likely will be hearing more about Rounds in weeks and months ahead because O’Donnell opens her shows with a monologue that often centers on her family life.
As of yesterday, however, there are no plans to bring her on the show.
“Michelle is a civilian like the rest of us,” a person close to O’Donnell told The Post yesterday. “She’s got a career and life.
“I don’t think she’d go on — unless some topic comes up which she’s really connected to,” the source said.