This is not your typical in-law relationship.
When Katherine Karamasos went on a three-week trip to Australia, she asked her biotech project manager mother, Eva Harris, to “keep an eye on” her partner, Gabriel Cruz, a sushi chef and rapper.
Little did Karamasos imagine the adventures the pair would go on — and the TikTok fame they would achieve as a result.
“My daughter is out of town, so I’m taking my son-in-law to do ‘old lady white people s—,'” Harris said in one of her viral videos in which the dynamic duo visit a farm petting zoo and do goat yoga. It has over 7 million views.
So Harris and Cruz decided to keep the adventures rolling.
“I had no idea it was going to go viral, but that’s exactly what happened,” Harris tells TODAY.com. “It blew me away, how people really just wanted some wholesome content.”
What exactly is “old lady white people s—“? Harris describes it as “stuff that someone over 50 would go do for fun.” She adds, “Sometimes it’s not just ‘white lady,’ but it’s mostly ‘old lady.’ But I think it’s just doing things that my husband wouldn’t go do, or just things that are a little more mellow in energy.”
The pair have attended a paint-and-sip class, a house sale, a farmer’s market and a garden center. They’ve even had pedicures together.
Perusing a house sale with your mother-in-law isn’t necessarily something that a younger person would be dying to do, but Harris says that Cruz has never refused an adventure. “He’s down for anything,” she says. It’s been fun for Harris to watch Cruz’s response to trying new things … and she’s even tried a few new things herself.
Cruz, who hails from Latin America, turned the tables and took Harris to do “brown people s—.” He dressed her in baggy gaucho-style denim pants, a baggy shirt, a baseball cap and a gold chain.
“Spending time with her, I enjoy it, and I learn things from her and it just made me see life different,” says Cruz. “When I met her, I feel like she was my mom, and it’s just made me feel happy.”
For her part, Harris says she’s learned that Cruz is “very curious and creative.” Plus, he’s surprisingly talented at painting, even though he never painted before. The pair has plans to enter a taco eating contest, play bingo and attend a drag show.
When Karamasos returned from her trip, she was pleasantly surprised to see the new bond that had formed during her absence. She has no desire to be on camera herself, and now acts as the team’s social media manager.
Harris doesn’t have to deal with sibling rivalry because her other children — a son and two daughters — “don’t like cameras. They don’t like attention from people,” says Cruz.
“And we’re both big hams, so we love it!” adds Harris.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
