Cue the May sweeps stunts!

The very important week of ratings gimmicks that set local advertising rates obviously put pressure on Fox's Good Day New York host Jodi Applegate to reveal, ON TOMORROW'S SHOW, she grew up thinking she was adopted, when in fact she was raised by her birth mother! Scandal

Applegate's mother, Margaret, died in 1981 of breast cancer when Jodi was only 17. When she passed away, a family secret was supposed to have gone with her.

"In late 1963, she found herself pregnant and not married, which was a real scandal in those days, especially if you were Irish-Catholic," says Applegate, especially in Wheeling, W. Va.

"She hid her pregnancy, disappeared for several months and returned with a baby she said she'd gotten at an orphanage.

"She said, 'I'm going to keep her and adopt her' . . . It was a story that allowed her to live in that town and go to that church."

Applegate grew up believing she was adopted. Eventually, her mother married, but never had any more children.

Only after her mother's death did Jodi learn from an aunt - her mother's older sister - the story that had been concocted all those years before was not true.

The news was not completely shocking. From an early age, she sensed that things weren't quite as they seemed.

"I got the sense that something was unusual, but that we weren't supposed to talk about it," she says.

Coincidentally, tomorrow is also the anniversary of her mother's death - an appropriate moment, says the TV newswoman, to tell her story. [NYP]