Not about Oprah
03 June 2011 05:26 AM Categories: Writing prompts
She was on long enough that I associate her with high school and early college, with that stretch where my boyfriend D and I played house during breaks at his brother’s place while his brother was away (me with the pork loin and the cocktails and the afternoon television, him with the construction job and the dirty laundry, the laundry that I washed). In fact, I associate her with another show that is disappearing, All My Children, my soap along with that stalwart, General Hospital. She is part of this faraway world where there was cable, yes, but not so much of it, and no Internet, and cell phones were these monstrosities that you only used in your car, and didn’t we have horses and buggies then, too?
There I am in the living room with the shades drawn. I’m nineteen years old. I’ve cracked open a beer (some habits die hard) and dinner is cooking in the oven. I’ve set myself up for the waiting game again, trapped in this house because I don’t drive and it’s near nothing convenient. Oprah is on, she comes on after GH, and there is a row of transvestites or sad broken women on their way out of the gutter. She hasn’t yet gotten to the decades of largesse, where she gifts her audience members new cars, vacations, makeovers, husband swaps. D comes home a little late, musky, he smells like sweat and pot, and I don’t want to talk to him because of the pot. Maybe I’m a little drunk, too, from the half beer, and I’m tired of waiting, always waiting for him.
The passivity of it! My ass on the floor or on the sofa, the feeling of the waiting inevitable, waiting for someone else to take over the narrative. I’ve never thought of it as passive before, but now I see it. Oprah tells me I can do it, that it will be ok, that little abused girls with moxie and ambition can go anywhere, can roll out wagonfuls of fat in front of a studio audience. They can act, they can interview, they know what the people want. So I watch and I wait and when D emerges from the shower we fight some more.
From the prompt "Oprah."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm getting to the point in the RR where it's harder to write about things that interest me.
Image from the blog Dave's Lunch. I'm sure Dave got it from somewhere else, but if you want to see a blog with lots of pictures of a man putting food into his mouth, this is the place to go.
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