Schmaltz in the Afternoon

You know the type of person who never wants to find herself in the dark about anything other people are discussing?  I’m like that.  Some might unkindly characterize me as a know-it-all, but I chose to think of myself as up to speed on current events.

Which is why I tuned in yesterday to Oprah’s last (if only…) hurrah, the end of her 25-year stranglehold on daytime talk television.  When I heard she was to be her own last guest, I felt my eyes rolling up into the heavens at the same time my stomach did a cartwheel.  Who else, I’m sure she asked herself, would have the stature, the wisdom or the charisma to enrapture an audience of billions for a solid hour? 

So, yes, I tuned in at 4 p.m. Wednesday and saw the Big O take the stage in her Pepto Bismol pink sheath, tailored perfectly to her waspish waist and oh-so-womanly hips.  The soon-to-be Professor Emeritus of All Things Human did not sit with her $900 Christian Louboutin pumps’ red soles carefully pointed at the camera this time. No, she was about to bestow upon her audience the priceless Gospel According to O, and that required her to hit her mark at the center of the stage and stay there, hand glued to one hip.

Pearls of Oprah wisdom spewed forth.  Her delivery style was an amalgam of her mentor Maya Angelou, Rev. Billy Graham, Wanda Sykes, Barack Obama and Minnie Pearl.   It was all about thanks, she said at the beginning.  What she didn’t say was exactly who was thanking whom.  Were we, her loyal subjects there to thank her for hanging in for 25 years, so that we could study at her knees?  Or was she there to thank us for enduring her smarmy antics for all that time?

She told us we and The Oprah Winfrey Show were the loves of her life.  That must have really gone over well with Stedman Graham, her domestic partner for most of those years, who was sitting in the audience.  She gave instructions on how to become…well, her.  Fully actualized, spiritually fulfilled and “paying it forward.”  What she didn’t go into was how to amass her $2 billion fortune.  I suppose that would have taken longer than she had.

When she left the stage, I thought I was through and that she was finally gone. After all, the screen faded to black.  But back up it came, with Oprah stepping down into the audience to be greeted by the ever-tall, ever-handsome Stedman, who she dutifully embraced and kissed, then dismissed for the next fawning audience member. 

Hundreds of Harpo Studio employees lined the hallways, the stairways and the airways as she passed, shouting “We did it!” in that tiresome Oprah way she has.   Finally, mercifully, it was just her and one of her cocker spaniels smooching.  The longest goodbye in the history of mankind was over.

I wonder where she’ll pop up next.  Democratic National Convention?

 Photo from Oprah.com