The lobby of the NBC affiliate KING5 featured huge TV screens everywhere and couches like thrones. Everybody looked like they were going to church—dressed up, serious, whispery, slightly nervous. A plate of chocolate-chip cookies with M&M’s served as a metaphor for pre- and post-Oprah; either we were, in Oprah’s phrase, “ordinary folk,” or we belonged on the outsize television screen on which, at three in the afternoon, preternaturally attractive soap opera figures played. Between us and Oprah was this plate of cookies. I, too, wanted to be rich and thin and famous. I abstained.
Before the show, one woman said to another, “I think your hair looks great.”
“A little bit too curly….Carey has coiffed her hair for the event.”
Another woman said, “I saw Oprah on The Tonight Show. When she was talking about her weight going up and down, she spoke right to me.”
Someone else said, “Hi. I’m from the sexual harassment committee.”
The set of the show was made up of magazines, pink couches, wood painted blue and pink, flowers, vases, books, plates, and paintings of nothing, absolutely nothing—pastels and vague landscapes. It wasn’t anyone’s living room.
“I have a friend who looks like Candice Bergen,” said a member of the press sitting next to me. “She lives in New York and everyone always mistakes her. It’s so funny.”
“No one looks that similar,” said her colleague.
A KING person asked if we were all big Oprah fans. Not fans of the big Oprah, but big fans, enthusiastic devotees of Oprah. Applause. A member of the audience informed us that she had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the KeyArena and offered to entertain us while we waited for Oprah. The offer was noted.
“This is your opportunity to talk to Oprah, so start thinking of things, okay?” asked another KING person, in a manner remarkably similar to that of Miss Lytken, my first-grade teacher: all solicitous concern and benign neglect.
“I just wanted to make sure you guys know you won’t be asking any questions during the show,” the KING publicist told the press people.
“Oh, no, we’re going to be harassing her,” said the reporter whose friend looked like Candice Bergen. Everyone laughed; the runway had been cleared for takeoff.
“Who are we here for?” a KING person asked the audience.
“Oprah!” we shouted.
“One more time!”
“Oprah!”
“I know that with Oprah here, you won’t need to be told to applaud. But when the APPLAUSE sign lights up, be able to applaud, okay?”
APPLAUSE sign.
Applause.
“Again.”
APPLAUSE sign.
Applause.
The hosts of Seattle Today, Cliff Lenz and Susan Michaels, came out to prime the audience before Oprah actually appeared. As the audience applauded, Susan made the oddest noise, which I can equate only with the sound of a seal, as if, without meaning to, she were trying to produce for us—in parody form—the essential ingredient of our well-trained reaction. Cliff wondered why there were so many children in the audience on a school day. He was informed that it was a school holiday.
“Public schools, too?” he asked.
Cliff and Susan asked what sort of questions people would want to ask Oprah when she’s on the show. People wanted to ask her what she’ll do with her “fat clothes”; whether she’d ever heard of the actress Dorothy Dandridge, who was the questioner’s sister; what Oprah’s most significant career break was. All the questions had to do, in other words, with the gap between regular life and celebrity. Someone told Cliff that she was going to ask Oprah whether she’d pose for a picture with her. Cliff explained that Oprah was awfully busy and may not have the time.
“Well, that’s the thing,” the woman said. “I don’t want you to answer. I want her to answer.”
What Susan wanted to know was “What does she wear when she’s kicking around the house? I’ll bet she’s my kind of lady—a sweats kind of lady.” Susan looked like she hadn’t seen the inside of a sweatband in her life. Reality kept getting praised, weirdly, in the middle of this discourse, whose every syllable was fantasy.
“Oprah’s almost here,” we were informed.
“She’s in the dressing room.”
“We like to tease,” said a KING person, stoking the crowd, pumping his fist.
“Suck it in, folks,” said Cliff. “You look fatter on the air.”
“The things that bring me pleasure are the things that bring other people pleasure,” Oprah told us.
“What brings you happiness?”
“A great book.”
Later, asked to name her two favorite books, she named two books she was attempting to develop into movies.
“What have you learned from guests, great or not?” she was asked.
She had learned the most from “ordinary folks, just an ordinary family. I believe we’re all ordinary people.”
Someone from the Rape Crisis Center wanted to know whether Oprah was ever going to do a show on male victims of rape. Someone from the Northwest Women’s Law Center wanted to know what she thought about abortion, then gave her a packet and a note from Gloria Steinem.
“From Gloria?” Oprah asked.
Someone from a volunteer organization asked if she was going to do a show about “volunteers, the ordinary heroes of this country.”
Oprah explained that she failed as a television reporter because she’d get all choked up on the air about the people whose tragedies she was relating. As an actress, she always cried over everyone else’s scenes; when it came time for her to cry, she was all dried up. In other words, she couldn’t help it: she was just too empathetic.
“Has anyone on your show ever been rude, snobby, or arrogant?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No. Never.”
When asked what her message was, she said she hoped that people would see the light in her and think there was maybe a little bit of that, too, in themselves.
“I hate to break,” said Cliff, “but this is TV.”
“Didn’t she do a great job?” we were asked at the end of the show, and told to applaud one last time as she walked off the stage, leaving behind the packet the woman from the Northwest Women’s Law Center had given her. Oprah was being broadcast on the huge screen in the lobby as we exited. The topic was stand-up comedians.
When I got home, I found a message from the KING publicist on my answering machine. I’d forgotten to wait around to find out whether a ticket for Oprah’s Saturday-night performance at the Paramount would be left for me at the Four Seasons Hotel, where Oprah was staying. “I hope there wasn’t a problem and that’s why you left,” said the publicist—member of a new race of people who love problems and solutions to problems.