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Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Oprah’s Summer Vacation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Girlfriend’s back!
Oprah returned for a new season Monday, and seriously, if we didn’t all love and admire her so much (hey, Serfy needs a new pair of shoes…or a yacht), we’d kind of have to despise her. She’s like that kid in grade school who always volunteered to write a report on the hardest topic, like “Our Wonderful Solar System,” so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. And then she’d go and turn it in early. With yarn binding together the construction paper cover upon which she’d hand-drawn a perfectly to-scale picture of Saturn, complete with the right number of rings, color-coordinated to match the yarn.
The title of Monday’s show was “Oprah & Gayle’s Big Adventure.” But they might as well have called it “What I Did On My Summer Vacation by A-Plus, Plus, Plus Student Oprah Winfrey.” Here’s what we saw: Oprah and her BFF Gayle King starting out on a 11-day driving trip across America in a red Chevrolet Impala. I don’t know why anyone says American Automaking has lost its mojo, since it appears that the Impala now comes standard with two or three in-dashboard cameras, a makeup artist and a professional lighting studio. Oprah never said as much, but we know it must be true, because while she and Gayle bickered a lot over where they were going, when to stop for food and who got to work the radio, they looked FABULOUS the whole time they were doing it!
She promised to give the car to somebody when they’ve finished showing us this whole “Big Adventure” thing, which, presumably will be many, many ratings-swollen weeks from now. But the studio audience did get a consolation prize: Homemade root beer shipped in direct from Mr. D’z Route 66 Diner in Kingman, Arizona, where the duo had stopped on Day 2. I know what you’re thinking: What if they have to pay taxes on it, like the “Oprah” audience that all got cars a few seasons ago? Here’s what I’m thinking: How much can a root beer possibly cost in Kingman, Arizona?
Meanwhile, as if all that wasn’t bad enough in a “Hey, did you see her construction paper cover?” sort of way, the last 15 minutes of the show featured Oprah in Hawaii. Along with 400 of her Harpo employees and over 600 of their nearest and dearest. That’s a total of 1,065 American Airlines tickets we saw her marching up to the ticket counter to buy and then — presumably after she had sailed through security without having to turn in her lipstick and bottled Snapple, thank you very much! — entertaining them all for a week at some fabulous resort on Maui. She even greeted them all on the tarmac and personally draped leis around their necks! Meanwhile, the Serf can’t even get the Evil Overlord (aka her editor) to stop torturing her with reminders that only six days remain before she has to start watching that incomprehensible new show, “Heroes” on NBC.
Sigh. Oprah, next time you’re taking a trip, call me. I promise to be your BFF. But even more important, I promise to let you work the radio the whole time.
