By Scott Buckner
I leave the TV world for a few days to come back last night all Abominable Snowman-like to the Home Plate Pub only to end up next to a guy who looks like Kid Rock’s retarded cousin while the daily repeat of Oprah plays on the corner TV. Why am I even bothering to pay attention to it? Because there’s some weird Chinese doctor dude sticking acupuncture needles into Oprah’s hand and foot while she sits in some sort of dentist/tattoo parlor chair.
I intentionally miss the last 10 minutes of the show, so I’m left to wonder exactly what Oprah got cured of in about the time it takes to get a pair of glasses at Lenscrafters. I’m pretty confident that she didn’t get a tattoo in that chair, though.
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Fortunately, Oprah’s show airs while I’m at work. Unfortunately, the powers that be at Channel 7 see fit to re-show her program at 11 p.m. in order to hold off Jimmy Kimmel for an hour in the continuing hope that everyone has truly forgotten by now that Bill Maher ever existed. But I digress. Tonight, Oprah’s repeating that morning’s “Ask Dr. Oz” program.
After my second shot of Sambuca, I can’t seem to get this thought out of my head: What the fuck is up with Oprah’s hair? I’m not sure about anyone else, but I kept thinking she looks like a modern version of the Morgan dollar to be used as a model in case the brand new dollar coin now being introduced by the U.S. Mint doesn’t catch on. But that’s beside the point. Someone – and I’m assuming it’s Oprah – has proclaimed Dr. Mehmet Oz to be “America’s Doctor.” I find this unusual because, well, I live in America, and Dr. Oz is not my doctor. I don’t have a doctor, but I ask myself whether I’d even want Dr. Mehmet Oz as my doctor. I dunno, because I’d certainly be raising some serious questions over whether I’d be getting a general family doctor or a surgeon, given his outfit of blue scrubs he’s always showing up on Oprah in. For all I know, he’s a plastic surgeon who would just stick me with tits as massive as those on Dog Chapman’s wife.
Actually, what I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what Oprah’s audience thinks, and her audience is filled with 60s-ish white women from Glencoe and Elmhurst all thinking the same thing about Dr. Oz: “I have a spinster daughter this good doctor needs to meet before one of us dies”
If you’re not familiar with Dr. Oz, all you need to do is imagine someone who’s one-third Quentin Tarantino, one-third Kyle McLachlan, and one-third Simon Cowell. And there he is tonight, jumping up and down in front of a 12-foot-high green screen that’s illustrating something – I don’t know what – that looks like a big slice of lasagna with hair growing out of it. Even the 1960s couldn’t have invented drugs good enough to describe why this is happening. Nor is there enough Sambuca, either.
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The Oprah hour is interrupted by a commercial for some “Broadway in Chicago Legends” show featuring Joan Collins and Linda Evans since Broadway has obviously gotten so bad that it needs to move here. Sure, Collins and Evans single-handedly got the word “bitch” accepted among network censors back when they were bitch-fighting on Dynasty 25 years ago, but now they’re dressed in red sequined gowns and hugging each each other. Which is pretty much what we get when the Drury Lane in Evergreen Park gets turned into a Wal-Mart.
The really scary part about this commercial is that we get treated to the sight of a very Skeletor-looking Joan Collins getting her makeup troweled on in her dressing room. How or why she’s stooped this low, I’ll never know, and neither will Robin Leach, probably. Maybe she’s going to die really soon and doesn’t care how she looks. Who am I to say? All I know is that she gets transformed into looking exactly as she did in her Dynasty days.
It’s truly a hopeful world we live in when the guy who embalmed Stalin is still able to find work.
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Says Dr. Oz, when asked to weigh in on the subject of douching in response to a question from an Oprah viewer in Russia: “The vagina is a self-cleaning oven.” I resist the temptation to ask Penny the bartender for her take on the topic. I figure if the good folks at E-Z Off or Amana haven’t run with that tag line in all these years, neither am I.
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I ignore the final 10 minutes of this show in a state of somewhat mild disbelief. Why? Because Oprah is the biggest bullshitter in the world. This is a woman who certainly knows – like every other bazillionairess knows (and if she doesn’t, Paris Hilton needs to stone her to death) – everything there is to know about The Brazilian wax job. Yet, when Dr. Oz brings it up as one of the topics at hand, she buries her head in her hands and says – as if she’s just put on a Pilgrim bonnet and there’s nothing more embarrassing in the world – it’s “about waxing . . . and not about eyebrows.” As if she’s never heard of such of a thing. Ever. Dr. Oz, to his credit, replies, “If you want to take off all your hair, that’s no problem.”
Hey, if your girlfriend or wife doesn’t believe America’s Doctor as the ultimate authority on why this is a mountain worth climbing, who’s left to believe?
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I close out my Tuesday night with one nagging queston about the promos I’ve been seeing the past week or so for ABC-TV’s Lost. Okay, Jeff Probst gets a group of people together once or twice a year for Survivor Wherever and sure as shit, within a week or three every single one of them has dropped 20 pounds. Yet the Lost cast has been stuck on the same godforsaken island since 2004 with nothing to eat except sand and Hugo Reyes has somehow managed to become fatter than the day the plane fell into the sea.
I’m beginning to think that maybe Lost simply refers to a pallet of Zagnut bars that disappeared from the belly of the plane, and Hugo knows exactly where they are.
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Visit the What I Watched Last Night vault.
Posted on February 14, 2007