Oprah Winfrey

A few years ago, my favorite facetious way to answer questions about my future career was to say that I wanted to be Oprah Winfrey. (Eventually this gave over to wanting to be Ted Turner, but then Jane Fonda seemed so chameleonic and insecure, and Atlanta seemed like such an unpleasant place to live, so I went back to wanting to be Oprah.) I mistakenly signed myself up for a year of free Time magazine (I wanted National Geographic, fuckers!) when I signed up for the NYC Ford Triathlon, which promises to be a meaty mouthful of Hudson brownwater, which makes this sentence so digressive that I can't even finish it.

So Time magazine reports that Oprah is one of the "100 most influential people in the world." It's hard to put much stock in a magazine that nominates some NASCAR flunkie one of the most influential people in the world, but that doesn't stop me from believing that Oprah has assets of $1 billion. Or believing that Oprah is one of the world's most influential people. I believe in the Oprah myth. The musky scent of the Oprah mystique stimulates my salivary glands. Oprah says jump, I say, "How high?" Oprah says jump again, and I round up all my friends and we all jump in unison. Oprah, the pandemic.

Ain't nothing wrong with that. I don't even watch her show, and haven't since that sad summer of 1993 when I had nothing to do but execute disc-slipping sit-ups in front of the television between trips to the A-1 Liquors to beat Street Fighter II in 25 minutes as Blanka and twenty minutes as Guile, when I watched Jerry Springer quite fanatically and Oprah less for the entertainment than for the promise of filling in the hourlong vacuum between Darkwing Duck re-runs and Roseanne re-runs. But I knew even in 1992 that Oprah would one day be my Supreme Leader and Commander.

She's slow in spreading her tentacles but steadfast. Tonight, after watching one vaguely entertaining show in which five flat-tummied youth put live beetles in their mouths, and one voyeuristic fly-on-the-wall dating show, I tuned in to Oprah to see how my emotions could be jerked around at 2 o'clock in the morning.

The answer: very crudely, and very much!

She was having a show about people who had accidentally killed their or other people's loved ones: a man who leaves a car running in the garage and aphyxiates his sleeping wife, a man who shot his son because he mistook him for an intruder, a woman who runs over an 11 year-old girl. Oprah furrowed her brow appropriately and the audience alternated between sniffles and silence. Dutifully, I opened my eyes and poured myself forth. Lolo was fast asleep in a puddle of drool, so I clutched her passionately and furrowed my brow with worried intent. Lolo turned over and continued to sleep. I lay in bed worrying, and realized, not without some triumph, that I had become exactly like my dad.

Oprah ended the show with some anodynes and I turned off the television. My pathetic mewling ("Oprah made me cry") failed to wake Lolo, so instead I am writing all about it here.

Oprah made me cry.

Thank you, Oprah Winfrey!