Seeing Oprah The First Time

I hope you all appreciate the sacrifices I make for you, the lengths I go to report to you the latest news. It is staggering, beyond human endurance. Case in point...

I gave in and finally, after 25 years, watched a tape of a full Oprah Winfrey show. Well, almost a full show. I fast forwarded through some of the more schmaltzy moments of her first two farewell hours.

Oprah, no doubt, is a national, even an international, treasure. She reaches 40 million viewers a week, in 150 countries. She has inspired millions to achieve more than they apparently could have on their own. She has been generous with her billions.

I just could never swallow her brand of Kool-aid. I guess I just miss out on some defining cultural milestones of the last several decades. I have, for the most part, not partaken of Starbucks coffee. Nor was I more than a passing user of Blockbuster Video rentals. And I’m pretty vapid when it comes to music.

Watching celebrities pay tribute to Oprah, dressed in a regal purple dress, I couldn’t help but wonder why she was so awestruck when the likes of Michael Jordan, Will Smith, Tom Cruise and Stevie Wonder showed up at the United Center in Chicago to send her off in style. Hearing Oprah repeat the names of the guests with awe in her voice was a little disarming. Few, if any, of those who came to “surprise” her are as big as she. The farewell was one big celebrity roast, without the raunchiness that characterized the shows that Dean Martin used to host and are still a staple of Comedy Central.

I was amused to see how Team Target helped refurbish an elementary school library in New Orleans, one of 25 across the country that will receive new fixtures, carpeting, books...the works, complete with enough Target logos embedded in the floor and affixed to the walls to make a NASCAR race proud.

Maya Angelou read an original poem tracing Oprah’s life that began “in a little village in Mississippi with an unpronounceable name.” That village was Kosciusko. Yes, a difficult name to pronounce, but to New Yorkers, a piece of cake. They hear it almost every traffic report, a bottleneck at the Kosciusko Bridge linking Brooklyn and Queens. The bridge is named after Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish officer who was a general and hero in our Revolutionary War. I guess those outside the Big Apple would find Kosciusko hard to pronounce.

Perhaps the weirdest, eeriest part of the first hour (Monday’s show) was hearing Josh Groban and Patti LaBelle sing “Over the Rainbow.” The show was taped last week. How were they to know that this iconic song from The Wizard of Oz, sung by Judy Garland just before she is transported by a tornado from Kansas to Oz, would be so poignant, and to some so poignantly out of place, given the real-life tornado that leveled Joplin, MO, Sunday evening?