STEVEN IVORY: Things Oprah Does when She's Through with You

     *On those days, she'll briskly quiet her adoring, manicured studio audience and read from a TelePrompTer the show's intro with all the warmth of an annoyed, stone-faced grade school principal. It's your first clue there's gonna be hell up in Harpo.
       
     If you've really paid attention while watching Oprah's show during its more than two decade run, you know what particularly gets her goat: child molestation, cheaters, womanizers feigning repentance, plastic surgery addicts, perpetual "victims" and generally anyone considered morally unaware.
       
     And you can tell when Miss O is less than enthused with what she is hearing. There are flags.
       
     For instance, after respectfully listening to a guest's questionable soliloquy, she'll cross a leg and then respond with the dreaded, "Uh Huh."  The pronouncement is impatient, clipped and short. Distinctively,  there's no space between "Uh" and "Huh."   It's one word: "Uhhuh."   
       
     Since Winfrey is never rude to her guests, if you're not equipped to  discern oblique skepticism, you'll miss it. However, in Oprahspeak, the translation of a certain "Uh Huh" is "Yeah, right."
  
     You could have slipped and fallen onstage on the icy "Uh Huhs" during Oprah's 2005 interview with one Ashley Smith, held hostage in her apartment that year by Atlanta courthouse murderer Brian Nichols.  Oprah didn't like that woman. There was something disingenuous about Smith, and Oprah's refrigerated calm spoke volumes.
       
     Another indication that Oprah is a bit nettled: when she counters a guest's  explanation with, "Well, what I don't understand is..." She'll complete  the sentence with whatever words apply,  fiddle with her watch or bracelet and turn  to look to her loyal wingman--her enraptured studio audience--for solidarity.
       
     The guest will reply, desperately hoping to make  their case, only to have Oprah offer a curt, "Uh Huh."  That's when you know this isn't going to end well.
     
     I know this stuff  from watching my share of Oprah off and on ever since she ceremoniously took the talk show format  Phil Donahue popularized in the '70s to the next level, creating, to the chagrin of her early critics,  life-altering television that is at once compelling, educational and entertaining.   

     Despite her  phenomenal, unprecedented success,   Oprah, one of our only cultural icons who hasn't publicly  imploded,  appears as unaffected as a person can be  while living as the universe's first black billionaire goddess.
  
     Indeed, her overwhelming normalcy--her acknowledged weight issues, her ambivalence toward getting married, a teenager's giddiness regarding celebrities whom she is way more famous and richer than--only render her extraordinary circumstance all the more intriguing.
       
      Quite simply, Oprah  appears to be a regular ol' person who, despite her compassionate ambitions, can, like the rest of us, lose equanimity with the dumb shit.
       
     Thus, if you're ever Oprah's guest,  beware the pre-show interview with Winfrey's tenacious army of producers. What you inadvertently confess could end up a mini version of karma.
       
     Only, instead of taking a lifetime to come back around,  your verbal diarrhea could haunt you in a matter of days, before an estimated 14 million viewers, when Oprah calmly administers the death blow,  beginning with her ominous, "Now, one of my producers told me that you said...."
       
     Falling through an onstage trap door would be more humane than Oprah's subsequent, understated but systematic reprimand of your trifling  ass,  during which shards of your fifteen minutes and dignity pass  before your very eyes and those of  family and friends gaping in horror at home.        
       
     When it's over, during the commercial break, the program's stage manager leads you limping away.   You try to  hang around backstage--you know, to make things right with O.  Alas, in no time Her People have you out the building and off Harpo property, jettisoned forever out of Oprahland. When Oprah is through with you, you're through with Oprah.         
  
     There are people in the world who think they know what Oprah should be doing with her  program,  would-be guests who'd like to enter her fabled coliseum to take her on.  Rapper 50 Cent  once  grumbled to the media that Oprah hasn't had many rappers on her show.  She needed to  show them some love,  asserted Mr. Cent.
       
     Myself, I'd pay-per-view to see Fity on Oprah's  couch.  Dude--you don't want none of that. You just don't.  I don't care how many times you been shot.

Steven Ivory's book, FOOL IN LOVE (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster) is available at Amazon.com (www.Amazon.com).  Respond to him via STEVRIVORY@AOL.COM