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March 31, 2005 -The following is an excerpt from the April, 2005 edition of The Journal of Midwestern American Folklore. Oprah Urban Legendsby Lamont Foldimore, Professor of Contemporary Studies, University of Western Indiana Oprah Winfrey is an enduring and compelling figure in American popular culture. Over the past fifteen years, the Department of Contemporary Studies as the University of Western Indiana has compiled over five hundred urban legend stories about Oprah Winfrey. Here is a review of the three most common Oprah urban legends told in their most frequently catalogued forms. "The Spawn" A friend of mine's college roommate Sally told me that Oprah has a special "Oprah" show every year on June 6th. For the past six years, she has invited six hundred and sixty-six women who can't have babies from all over the country to come to Chicago for this special program. In the studio, it looks like just a regular episode with a bunch of expert guests talking about infertility and adoption. Then at the end of the show Oprah goes through the audience and gives out six hundred and sixty-six brand new, adorable baby boys, one to each woman in the audience. They are free to make their dreams come true and adopt these happy, healthy babies but only on the condition that they never tell anyone where the babies came from or how they got them. Sally took the baby home and was so happy. It didn't surprise her that the show never aired on TV. She was just so glad to have her beautiful, baby boy. Everything went great for the first five years, but then when he turned six, little Benjy started growing really fast out of all his clothes. He started to act strange. He began to get really angry and violent, and he started to bully all the other kids at school bragging about how smart he was and bossing all of his classmates around. When he had grown a foot in three months, Sally took him to the doctor and they took x-rays and told her that they had never seen anything like it before. Benjy was maturing hyper-fast, and in three years he would be fully grown. Sally went home and cried that night as she put Benjy to bed. As she tucked him by the light of the moon, she suddenly noticed that Benjy looked weirdly familiar. He had begun to grow a little mustache and his hair was thinning and he was going bald already at age six. As he stirred for a moment, she looked into his sad brown eyes and realized he looked exactly like Dr. Phil from TV. The next day when he was at school, Sally got on the internet, and she managed to get access to a top secret web site. It turns out that the same thing was happening to hundreds of other moms all over the country. A few had called Oprah's company, Harpo Productions, and gotten the runaround. It became clear that Oprah has been secretly over the past six years breeding an army of thousands of genetically engineered Dr. Phil clones. Some day soon if they are not stopped who knows what these preternaturally scary and obnoxious children will do if they mobilize and band together. Sally didn't blame Oprah. She thought that evil Dr. Phil must have her hypnotized. It wasn't long after she found that web site that Sally had a terrible car accident. She is still in a coma, and little Benjy who was in the car with her when it ran off the road hasn't been seen since. "The Fork" My cousin Harriet from Indianapolis was driving west through the country to visit her Uncle Bill in Harrisville and bring him a big batch of her famous homemade BBQ sausage links. She was driving late at night in her convertible on old highway 81. All of a sudden a radio announcement came on. The announcer said that Oprah Winfrey had just escaped from a maximum security weight loss clinic in Pugh just twenty miles from Harrisville. Apparently Oprah had hidden a salad fork in her uniform and when no one was watching she used it to pick the lock on her cell door. She sneaked into the the cafeteria freezer and when two guards surprised her as she was wolfing down a stack of frozen veal cutlets she used the fork to stab the guards. She locked them in the freezer, and by the time they sounded the alarm, she had already jumped the fence and got away. The announcer said that Oprah was crazed from having lost forty pounds over three days and that the authorities considered her armed and extremely dangerous. Wouldn't you know it but right then Harriet's car ran out of gas, and she was just able to cruise into one of those little self-service gas stations out in the middle of nowhere. It was real dark and spooky so Harriet hurried and just pumped five dollars of gas. She leaned into her car to get her purse to get the five dollars to give to the lady attendant in the glassed in booth. Suddenly she heard this loud tearing sound and then all hell broke loose. Alarms started going off and lights started flashing. She looked up at the booth and the attendant was screaming and pointing, but Harriet couldn't make out what she was saying through the bullet-proof glass. Harriet was really scared so she dived into the car, started it up, stomped on the gas, and roared off throwing the five dollar bill out the window. She was really rattled, and she didn't calm down until she got to her uncle's house half an hour later. When she got out of the car, she saw that a hole had been slashed through the roof of her convertible, and all twenty-five pounds of that BBQ sausage that had been sitting on the backseat were gone. Then she looked closer and saw a bent and bloody fork dangling from the shredded roof of her car. It must have been that food crazed Oprah on the loose who did it. "The Cursed Videotape" My sister-in-law Faye went to college at University of Eastern Indiana in Stumpyville four years ago, and she told me about this cursed videotape that was going around during her freshman year. No one knows where it came from, but it was really creepy. She had heard about it from a friend. She and her roommate Mary loved scary movies so one night she borrowed it, and they watched it. It was really weird. At first, there was just this creepy music and a lot of static and then you could see what looked like some kind of scratchy home video and it is Oprah. She's in a Pancho's Mexican Buffet, and she's eating this big plate full of burritos. The restaurant is all dark, and she's the only one there and the tape speeds up and slows down as she eats plate after plate after plate of Mexican food. There is no talking at all, just the creepy music and the sounds of Oprah wolfing down big piles of tacos, tamales, enchiladas and whole plates of beans. It was really weird, and then it stopped right in the middle as Oprah was eating a couple of dozen sopapillas. Faye and Mary were a little creeped out because it was so strange. Anyway, the next day they gave the tape to another girl down the hall in their freshman dorm. Then exactly seven days after they watched the tape the next morning they woke up and they had both gained fifty pounds overnight. They were both completely freaked out. They were both pretty, petite girls and then that morning they got out of the shower and their butts were huge! None of their clothes even fit anymore. Next thing you know by the end of the week the tape had spread like wildfire. Every freshman girl in English Lit 101 had an ass as huge as Oprah's. Faye told me no one could figure out how the tape worked but there must be some kind of curse on it. One girl watched it a second time and gained another fifty pounds seven days later. I'll tell you what, I'm never going to watch that Oprah videotape. In fact, I'm too scared to even watch the "Oprah" show on TV anymore. Other Oprah pages you might enjoy: |
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