Even blocks away from the Forum, you can feel Oprahs gravitational force. Traffic snarls around the venue as motorists with Orange County license frames honk at hapless traffic guards, desperate to get into the parking lot. Still, the mood is jubilant. Im at the Oprah Winfrey show! a parking lot assistant exclaims into his phone while passing a group of anti-vaxxers holding signs.
No, Oprah is not swooping in to save the Democratic Partyat least not yet. Instead, she is doing elaborate branded content for a company that produces small frozen meals and assigns points to edible goods. Oprahs 2020 Vision Tour is an all-day eventlike schoolmeant to transform the mind, body, and spirit of attendees, and is sponsored by WW (or Weight Watchers).
At the media sign-in, a woman hands me a low-cal cookbook wrapped in a pretty bow before looking down at her phone and twisting her face in horror. Oh my god, she says. Oprah just fell down.
Oprah had been talking about achieving balance when she fell, her flowy white pantsuit rippling in the wind. Thankfully, she regrouped quickly and by the time I enter the auditorium, the 66-year-old billionaire media mogul is already deep into delivering a lesson about achieving the highest version of yourself to a rapt audience of nearly 14,000.
What is holding you back? she asks the crowd, channeling a very 90s strain of self-help that is more concerned with banishing internalized doubts than addressing things like structural inequalities.
Still, its comforting to think that we could all achieve anything we put our minds to, were it not for our own inner critic. And I quickly remember that Oprah is also funny as hell: she talks about being scared of her grandmothers giant breasts (which she pronounces breast-esis) and says thats why she now hugs children from the side. Even when shes describing a recent pneumonia scare, she manages to turn it into a joke about how her doctor was scared to have her as a patient, lest she die on his watch. The folks around me seem to be laughing not out of shock or surprise but deep relief and identification, her honeyed voice distracting us from the Coronavirus alerts bombarding our phones.
As we fill out workbooks meant to gauge our satisfaction with life, Oprah walks through the audience, peeking at our answers. (According to mine, Im an emotional basket case.) Oh Jesus! someone screams when she pops up behind them. This being L.A., it seems like everyone she talks to has something to promote, but our host knows how to handle it: when one man who lost 160 pounds starts shilling his book, Oprah gives him a hug and succeeds in getting him to shut up.
In many ways, though, its a bizarre moment in time to be taking Oprahs advice seriously. The television host-turned-tycoon has long offered spiritual guidance and materialist solutions to middle-class anxieties, but they seem out of step with the plans proposed by nearly all of the Democratic presidential contestants. What good is a wellness intention, which her workbook encourages us to set, when so many people cant afford to see a doctor?
Likewise, when Oprah says Life is going to give you the experience you need for your own evolution, the mantra sounds similar to the idea that its god or the universes plan for bad things to befall certain peoplesay, being evicted or become homelessbecause it will help them grow. These ideas dont necessarily seem to reflect where Oprah is at politicallyin her Golden Globes speech, she linked her mothers struggles to those of abused women workers and called out systemic sexual harassment and gender discrimination in Hollywoodbut they make up the philosophy she is selling to tens of thousands across the country.
Her thinking on weight-loss seems a little more evolved. She treats her own journey as fodder for a standup set: [Longtime partner] Stedman and I went on a cleanse together, she says. Dont do it! You get evil without bread. She then does an impression of Stedman begging her to eat a biscuit. Shes quick to note that some people feel comfortable at any size, and thats OK! When a local teacher is trotted out on stage for losing over a hundred pounds, she tells the audience that we should love ourselves at every stage of our weight loss journey.
Our own travels involve a simple boxed meal from Panera. As we file out of the auditorium for our lunch break, we find a ring of selfie-stations where we can pose alongside Oprahs beaming face or hold vegetables in front of a backdrop of Oprahs farm. (To the surprise of no one, a representative tells me the veggies arent actually plucked from Oprah-owned soil.)
Im in the Oprah cult, says Beatrice Friedman, a retired speech therapist who drove from San Diego to attend the Vision 2020 tour for her birthday. This particular tour is different from anything shes done before, and Im just in that spot where Im ready to dive in for some more wellness.
A group of sorority sisters whod stayed in touch well into their professional lives told me they appreciated Oprahs take on FOMO (she says she has JOMO, or Joy of Missing Out) as well as answering questions like Whats your why? to figure out why they want to accomplish a certain goal.
I wondered about my own life goals as we filed back into the auditorium for a dancing class led by Julianne Hough, a meditation session from Jesse Israel, and an interview with Jennifer Lopez (elsewhere on the tour, O was joined by Dwayne Johnson, Tina Fey, Michelle Obama, and other huge names). Was my highest calling endlessly refreshing Twitter, desperate for the freshest memes? Was I living my lifes purpose by obsessively washing my hands?
Theres a Hallmark card quality to the kind of life advice Oprah is selling, but its potency stems from its deep familiarity. What kind of American isnt nostalgic for an afternoon spent sitting in the living room, enjoying a deeply satisfying parasocial relationship with a rich, empathetic woman who seems to have it all figured out?
Even when Oprah later bragged about the number of trees in her backyard (6,300; she hired a tree counter to tabulate), I didnt think much about how absurd it was that one person could own so much property. Exhausted and desperate for some kind of truce, the rational part of my brain had temporarily short-circuited. All I could think was, Wow, seems nice.
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Oprah Takes Her Brand of Self-Improvement on the Road - LA Magazine
