The most powerful woman in media couldn’t do a thing for the hundreds of ticketless fans pressing their faces against the windows of the Colorado Convention Center on Saturday morning.
“Don’t make me cry! I can’t help you! Go away!” Oprah Winfrey shouted at the windows, where men and women hoping for a ticket miracle held up signs, fists full of cash and even their car keys.
Many of those who did make it into Winfrey’s Live Your Best Life Tour emerged nearly six hours later, saying they felt uplifted, inspired and focused, even though they endured long lines and a long period locked in a trade show that was masquerading as a “Personal Growth Center.”
“I found God again,” said Brown Palace Hotel employee Breda McCambridge as she left Winfrey’s talk. “Maybe (the trade show) needed a little better direction, but overall it was worth it … a fabulous, learning, soul-searching experience.”
But was it worth the money?
Even Winfrey herself wondered.
Acknowledging that most of the more than 5,000 people who attended the show aren’t nearly so well-heeled as she, Winfrey recalled her days as a salaried employee and wondered, “What in the name of Jesus would I have spent $185 on? Maybe if you told me Jesus Christ himself, with a couple of disciples as backup. So I appreciate the sacrifice you all have made to be here today.”
It’s that sort of folksy, never-forget- your-roots style that lets the Marc Jacobs-clad billionaire connect with women who work at Wal-Mart.
“I feel lucky to be here,” said Margaret Bagaala, an Arapahoe Community College student who bought one of the few tickets held at the convention center box office Saturday morning. “I just wanted to see Oprah and hear her encouragement.”
To get to that encouragement, ticket holders had to endure at least three hours locked inside the convention center to soak up self-improvement juju in the Personal Growth Center.
But as 1 p.m. rolled around, many had grown visibly agitated. They were annoyed by long lines to booths and the bathrooms and, worse, a box lunch loaded with exactly the carb-heavy foods Winfrey crusades against.
“This is not living my best life,” said Angela Gomez, whose friends said they were essentially a captive audience for O magazine advertisers, including Toyota, Diet Rite, Maybelline, New Balance, HGTV, State Farm, Dove, HoMedics and the drug company GlaxoSmithKline.
Kim Williams, her mother, Sylvia Hill, and their friend Diane Harvell gave up trying to visit every booth. The three women watched the lines stretching across the exhibition hall floor from a table on the edge of the crowd, sharing the assessment that the event was “too commercial.” The mostly white crowd confirmed their feeling that Winfrey’s show and magazine appeal to a predominately white crowd.
“My sister in Atlanta doesn’t think she does enough shows for black people and that she markets the show to white people,” said Williams, 49.
“She does have more fans in the white community than in the black community, but she’s a people person,” said Hill, 66, who would not have been able to afford the event had her daughter not purchased the ticket for her.
The irony: Winfrey’s top messages about “pursuing your passion” and “finding your own truth” stem largely from her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, raised by her grandmother, a housekeeper, and realizing in church that she was “a talkin’ child.”
But much of the crowd’s agitation melted away in the minutes before Winfrey came to the stage. Upbeat songs by the likes of India Arie, Stevie Wonder and the Staple Singers greeted those in the crowd as they finally filtered into the theater space, beneath screens flashing serene pictures of beaches and gardens, and words such as “encouragement,” “love,” “experience,” “life.”
And the kind of wisdom Winfrey passed on during three hours of face time before the audience?
Stop pretending. “If you are not speaking your own truth, you will never be able to be all you are meant to be. You cannot be pretending to be somebody else.”
And that includes celebrities. “The purpose of all fame and celebrity … is you look at somebody else’s life and say, ‘This is possible.”‘
Personal anecdotes, married with strings of faith-based inspirational pearls, sealed Winfrey’s status as the crowd’s darling.
It helped that Winfrey apologized for a couple of things, including bad weather that forced fresh pedicures into snow boots. She also was sorry about the ticketing fiasco that put large blocks of seats in the hands of scalpers.
Karla Krengel, a publicist who lives in Winter Park, bought four tickets and unloaded three on eBay for $1,200. The women who ended up filling the seats next to hers later purchased those tickets from sellers in Arizona, Chicago and Maryland.
Attendees got more than an empty wallet to remember Winfrey by, though. Included in periwinkle canvas goodie bags were a day planner and matching pen, a design book, a car-care kit, a silver jewelry box and powder brush, a HoMedics Sqush therapy pillow, and mascara and pink lipstick. The crowd also received a copy of Winfrey’s book “What I Know for Sure” on their way out.
Al Wedel of Ellsworth, Kan., was one of the few men in the crowd. He admitted feeling out of place but said he was inspired by Winfrey’s speech.
“She has a message,” he said. “If you sit and listen with an open mind, you can glean something from it.”
