Celebrated in the same ’hood for her ambition and love of luxury.
Have you been watching Oprah Winfrey lately? Ms. Winfrey and her friend Gayle King have been documenting a cross-country trip they took in early September. They drive themselves. They stop in grocery stores. They stay in cheesy motels.
In one segment, they marvel at how surprisingly annoying it is to check into a hotel without the usual V.I.P. treatment. In another, Ms. Winfrey suggests that travelers bring their own pillows and linens because who knows what kinds of cooties live in motel bedding. And as they cruise a local store Ms. King announces, sorrowfully, to Ms. Winfrey that it does not stock 1,000-count bed linens.
Let’s change the situation. What if this were Rachael Ray, Katie Couric or Rosie O’Donnell on a road trip with her best friend, laughing and snorting at how a small store in the middle of America doesn’t sell expensive sheets? Isn’t it strange that no one, as far as I know, has remarked on the luxury-adoring habits of America’s most down-home, up-by-her-bootstraps black woman as she communes with America and tries to be a regular person? Am I alone in thinking it odd that Ms. Winfrey’s road trip, while it at times hilariously and amiably earthy, can resemble a parody of “The Simple Life”? [...]
| Continue Alex Kuczynski's New York Times article "Standing at the Crossroad in Harlem"
posted in articles on October 5, 2006 4:26 AM | t (0)
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