OPRAH'S LAST SHOW - A LOVE LETTER

Oprah says goodbye after 25 years

“There are no words to match this moment,” Oprah 4,561st (last) show.

“Today, there will be no guest,” Oprah told Wednesday’s gaily dressed studio-audience members, who’d been instructed to wear bright colors, according to news reports. Opra herself dressed in an elegant peach sheath, diamonds bobbing brilliantly off her wrist and ears.

“This last hour is about me saying thank you. It is my love letter to you. I want to leave you all with the lessons that have been the anchor for my life and the ones that I hold most precious,”
“You will not be getting a car or a treat,” she told her very last studio crowd pretty much right off the bat.

The final show was a “master class on life,” wrote  Washington Post reporter Moraes, while Sally Quinn called it a “sermon.” Quinn says Oprah finally came out as a true religious leader in the show, an image she has skirted around for these last 25 years. Quinn writes:She is America’s high priestess.

Standing for the entire show, in a simple pink dress and hair soft around her shoulders, she spoke openly and unashamedly of God.

Why has her show been so successful? she asked. ”Because of my team and Jesus.” She said. “Because nothing but the hand of God has made this possible for me.” And she described what she thought of as God, “the one and only G-O-D. That’s what I’m talking about. “ And she added, “I know I have never been alone.”

She smiled. “How do I know this?” I have felt the presence of God my whole life.”

It would be hard for even the most hardened atheist to watch Oprah’s final show and not have moments of asking how it could be anything but what she calls a “miracle,” for a poor, black, abandoned, sexually abused, overweight woman to become one of the richest, most powerful and famous people in the world.

It wasn’t just her own conviction about her faith which was so compelling, it was her manner in delivering her testimonial.
Oprah Winfrey has discovered one of the most effective ways of imparting her beliefs to others. Not by telling them what to do, but by getting them to decide what to do for themselves. She is the master of “free will,” an often controversial subject in contemporary religion.

In recent years, religious behavior have changed dramatically. More people have left traditional religions to join congregations which are self validating. Gone were the fire and brimstone, you’re-all-going-to-hell-unless-you-accept-Jesus-Christ-as-your-personal-savior, the judgment, the fear, the punishment. Many religious and spiritual leaders have taken the lead on this, realizing people don’t want to be lectured to and made to feel guilty for common human failings. People want to feel hopeful, as though they matter. They want to feel empowered.

Oprah led the way. It may be a reach to say that she has changed the direction of modern religion, but people who have tuned into her show for 25 years have come to realize they are not perfect, that nobody is perfect and that she is not perfect. Oprah did not demand perfection. She helped people understand that they were human and that their humanity was to be celebrated. And she helped show them that the problems we all have can be overcome.

“The adversity of her childhood somehow gave her a sense of confidence, a sense of empowerment and a desire to help, and that’s part of her basic persona,” says Barbara Walters, who has interviewed Winfrey, 57, on multiple occasions. “I think Oprah is a superb performer. . . . She has this amazing capacity to relate to an audience, which made her a star almost from the day she started to broadcast. It’s in her magazine and it’s in everything she does. She talks about herself, she touches the audience and they become almost one with her.”



OPRAH LEGACY and EMPIRE:

That oneness has fueled Winfrey’s show for 25 seasons, through 30,000 guests, a million studio audience members, legions of viewers in 150 countries, 48 Emmys and the Kennedy Center Honors. Her personal net worth is $2.7 billion, according to Forbes, making her the only female African American billionaire at present. She’s used her daytime platform to establish a production company (with projects in film, TV and XM satellite radio), a glossy national magazine (with 2 million subscribers - 88% female) and a now-shuttered charity wing (which raised more than $80 million and constructed schools in South Africa).

Winfrey’s journey to the center of American consciousness started on Sept. 8, 1986. The first national episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was titled “How to Marry the Man/Woman of Your Choice.”

“Speaking for those of us who were deeply involved in civil rights, she did more for African Americans than all of us put togther,” says Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who witnessed Winfrey’s efforts to raise funds for the National Council of Negro Women in the District. “A black woman becoming an icon of educated, working-class white women is beyond anything any of us could’ve hoped to do. You can’t love Oprah and hate black people. And when you consider how much drudgery is on television, to see this woman who stands for reading books, for making women think better of themselves, for making people feel guilty if they hated other people — she’s a phenomenon the likes of which this society has never seen.”

“Oprah” told us there is no shame in being the victim of sex­ual abuse. “Oprah” told us how to find our correct bra size.
Without “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” some of us would never have picked up Tolstoy or dropped 15 pounds (and then gained them back again). Without “Oprah,” we, as a country, would not be talking about so many issues so candidly, according to CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves.

Oprah positioned her show at the vanguard of national discourse. Oprah was talking about AIDS on national television in 1987. Oprah, newly svelte in 1988, wheeled out 67 pounds of fat on a Radio Flyer wagon, launching the national pastime of battling lard in a public forum (see: “The Biggest Loser”). Oprah was moved to tears by non-famous guests such as her fourth-grade teacher, the woman with 92 personalities and the 12-year-old with muscular dystrophy. Oprah gleefully bellowed the names of celebrity friends who’d stop by for a safe-zone chat (“JOHN TRAVOLTAAA!”), and showered audiences with expensive gifts donated by major corporations (“You get a car! You get a car!”).

America, though, has been slowly turning away from Oprah, or at least Oprah’s time slot. An average of 12.6 million people watched each episode during her peak season, 1991-92. This past season the number was just over 6 million.

Over the past 10 years Oprah’s Book Club — which restored classics to the bestseller lists and plucked new talent from obscurity — generated 22 million sales of specially branded editions of her selections.

She’d vote for Barack Obama. Her May 2007 endorsement delivered Obama an “instrumental” 1 million votes over the competitive Democratic primary season, according to Northwestern University marketing professor Craig Garthwaite, who co-wrote a 2008 study on celebrity endorsements in politics.

Oprah’s own sense of destiny — “I have always known that I was born for greatness in my life,” she told Walters in 1988 — has made her the subject of adoration as well as derision and skepticism.
“She believes more in inspiration and enlightenment, when the science shows people need specific behavior change — her legacy is what I would call conscious-raising and awareness-inducing, but not behavior-changing,” says John Norcross, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Scranton.

In a final act of Oprahness, it seems as though Oprah was her own last guest, according to audience members interviewed by the Chicago Tribune after the finale’s taping Tuesday.
But with the Oprah Winfrey Network barely six months old, “final” and “last” aren’t in Winfrey’s vocabulary. In the mind-over-matter physics of her universe — which is our universe — “the end” is always just “the beginning.”
 (Washington Post)



The last installment of Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show averages a 13.3 household rating, capping a three-day farewell

Oprah Winfrey’s final broadcast delivered the talker’s highest household ratings in 17 years.
It was the highest household average since the February 21, 1994 installment “People Shed their Disguises,” during which Winfrey convinced guests to stop hiding behind questionable style and grooming choices.