My best friendship with Oprah began on September 30th, 2012 when I was watching The Next Chapter with Stephen Colbert (my other love) on OWN. It was unreal, my two favourite people, together. My head was about to explode in excitement. If you’ve ever read my About page, you’d know how big of a deal this was.
I was watching the episode with my iPad in hand and following along my stream on Twitter. There was a moment in the interview with Stephen talking about how cynicism masquerades as wisdom and that cynicism is self-imposed blindness. Feeling that his comment was a worthy comment she agreed with, Oprah put up her hand for a few seconds as if to give him a high five. She didn’t have an A-HA moment, so no she didn’t squeal in joy, but it was worthy enough of a comment to high five on. Stephen didn’t notice her hand up and kept talking so she just put it back down quickly, as if she was never ignored for that high five.
So after that moment, I randomly tweeted:
I think @oprah either just put her hand up to high five @stephenathome and wasn’t reciprocated or she just praised Jesus silently.
— Bev (@niftytastic) October 1, 2012
Seconds later, after I unfortunately deleted and reposted the same tweet above as I wanted to try to add a hashtag but there was no more space, she wrote back:
@niftytastic @stephenathome both are true. 🙂
— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) October 1, 2012
And then I almost died right there. You may remember that the last (only) time I was in the presence of Oprah, at TIFF, I was pretty much hyperventilating in excitement.
* The smilie face in her reply is actually code for: “you’re totes my new Asian BFF! And you get a car too!”. Oh the wacky adventures we’d go on, we could have a theme song like “Black and Yellow” or something.