• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

When she is finished and you deliver a long sarcastic stare back at her nose ring and a quick gander at her neck-where the red tendrils of a dragon or a flower or a dragon EATING a flower tattoo are peeking out of her Obama '08 T-shirt-she makes a mental note to blog on her blog later on during her blog break about how she was sexually harassed by a middle-aged celebrity who she's pretty sure was the bad guy in the first Spiderman movie.

Her blog is called Rebel Notes From The New Millennium, by the way.

And is read on a daily basis by her, the Fall Out guy and her boyfriend Seth-who's in a band called DysFunktion (they sound like a cross between Pearl Jam and Audioslave, if Pearl Jam sucked and the guys in Audioslave somehow had their hands lopped off) and he actually thinks that drinking any Starbucks beverage with the word "chai" attached to it leads to good karma (plus, like-I'm pretty sure some of the money goes to help improve the environment, dude).

After a decade or so of blighting stares and angry grimaces and trying to set an example to the others by storming out of Starbucks with nothing in hand and the echoes of my brilliantly abusive tirades ringing in everyone's ears-I have come to realize the one weapon we all have just waiting in the wings:

Oprah.

Because Oprah can shame anyone into admitting the truth.

There was an author named James Frey who wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces. No one was going to buy the book, besides Frey and the various people in it he blamed for making him a giant, alcohol- and 1 drug-ingesting mess and-of course-the chosen special few who had helped him climb out of that very very dark hole.

Then he appeared on Oprah and voilа-the book became an international best-seller.

After many sales and almost as many months, it became known that most of what Frey claimed to be true in the book was, in fact-lies. Blatant, made-up, totally untrue and fiction-dressed-up-as-factual crap.

So Oprah invited him back onto the show and asked a million little questions about A Million Little Pieces and the next thing you know, Frey had crawled away cringing and crying and spewing I'm sorries.

Oprah had used her secret weapon: shame.

Shame shame shame, shame on you.

I wanna drag a barista onto Oprah and have her cross-examine him or her and I know that within minutes she will have an open admittance that Chai and Vente and Breve and all that shiny sugary Starbuck smack is just an excuse to charge mo money mo money for what is-in the end-just another good cup of joe.

Oprah, my friends, is the cure for what ails America.

Too fat, too thin, too out, too in, too dumb, too smart, your skin, your teeth, your ankles, your ass, pregnant man, pregnant man's wife, pregnant man's penis-you name it and Oprah has asked about it, investigated it, researched it, been funny around it, bitten into the middle of it, digested it and spun it out into silken rivulets of golden information that helps to mollify us all.

When I saw the headlines and a front-page picture on the New York Post about a woman who became a man but retained his/her womb just in case and then got pregnant I had many many many questions-a million little questions-but the one that bubbled up to the front of my head every time I read about it was "Does this guy have a dick or what?" As expected, no newspaper-not even the Post-addressed the issue. And if the Post ain't gonna do it-you know it just ain't gonna happen.

But God Bless Oprah.

If the story ran the first time on a Tuesday? Oprah had the guy and his girlfriend on her show that Friday-she found them and flew them in and sat them down and you bet your Oprah-loving fan site she said-about four minutes into the interview-"Let's get to the penis question." Turns out the guy has enough of a clitoris going on that it actually forms a small penis and him and his gal pal can have intercourse. I don't think it's any kind of Sting and Trudy marathon event but it qualifies and obviously satisfies them both. But that's not the point.

The point is Oprah.

Asking