Oprah Watch
By Margaret Hicks in Miscellaneous on Feb 3, 2008 9:29PM
If you were wondering what happened to Oprama, you don't have to worry anymore: They're back. Even though Obama will be in St. Louis and Illinois, he's sending Oprah, Caroline Kennedy and his wife, Michelle, to California. That's quite a trifecta of women....watch out, Hillary. In more hilarious news, we learned from our friends at SFist that the sculptor, Daniel Edwards -- the artist best known for making the "Britney giving birth" sculpture -- has sculpted the Oprah Sarcophagus. Ebay, here we come.
Monday's show saw the return of 62 year old Bette Midler. We gotta say, if we look that good at 62, we'll make sure to go get ourselves a new Vegas show too. She looks awesome and is just as energetic and hilarious as always. Oprah also talked to Martin Lawrence, Mo'Nique and Cedric the Entertainer about the new movie "Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins." It was Mo'Nique's story that reminded us of what it is that makes Oprah so great. Mo'Nique remembers seeing Oprah as a young girl and thinking that there was no one on TV that looked like her or talked like her, and what an inspiration Oprah was to so many people. It was really quite touching. [Ed note: I totally cried.]
On Tuesday, Oprah had on Gavin de Becker and his book The Gift of Fear. We LOVE Gavin de Becker. He looks like just came right out of a "Dragnet" episode, he's so old school. He's full of advice on trusting your instincts to keep yourself out of trouble. He reminded us that women tend to not trust their instincts because they want to be "nice" and how our not wanting to hurt someone's feelings can really get us in to trouble. Our favorite quote from de Becker was this one: "When a man says no, it's the end of discussion; when a woman says no it's the start of a negotiation." He also said that at the core, men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. That seems a little extreme to us, but it is a great conversation starter while you're sitting around eating pizza bites for the Super Bowl.
Wednesday was some pretty nice time-wasters with world record holders. We saw the fastest clapper, the woman with the smallest waist and the lady who could shove herself into a suitcase really fast.
On Thursday Oprah had Dr. Oz and medical miracles. Kevin Everett was on, walking on to the Oprah show after having his neck broken during a football game. It was really inspiring--we teared up a bit. And as a side note, a brother of Chicagoist actually got a chance to meet Dr. Oz in person this weekend and had bit of a chat with him. We asked what Dr. Oz was like and got this answer "He is the real thing, the amount of information in his head is astounding." Neat.
Also this week, Oprah announced her new book club book. The book is Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. Oprah's trying something new this time around and will be running actual online classes with Eckhart Tolle. We read one of Tolle's other books, The Power of Now, and remember feeling very much like a whiny, egotistical, consumer-loving heathen worried about our selfish pride, so we think it probably worked. We signed up for this online class and will let you know how it goes on March 3rd. And speaking of signing up for Oprah things, we signed up for the Bob Greene Best Life Challenge a month ago and haven't heard boo from anyone. Where are all of our emails with encouraging words? Where are easy 20-minute recipes that will help us shed our winter pounds? We don't know, but so far all we know is we're not supposed to be eating emotionally, or drinking. Oprah, how can you just leave us like this?