Oprah Show Finale Part 2

Oprah Show Finale Part 2

"I’m still feeling all that love from the last two days where my team put on the surprise of a lifetime for me. I still can’t get over how they did it. You know they rehearsed in only one day? Yeah, they are amazing. Everybody keeps asking me if I was surprised. (CLIPS of Oprah at her farewell celebration.) Did you see my face? Good gosh am I surprised? The only thing I kind of suspected was Maya Angelou because I called her the day before and I said “Where are you?” and she said (Oprah in Maya Angelou’s voice) “Somewhere,(audience laughter) but I will be home tomorrow.” so that kind of tipped me off. Maya Angelou, wisdom keeper, doesn’t know where she is? I have to tell you that United Center experience was a love intervention on steroids for me. It is uh the same love I felt reading your messages on Oprah.com over the last weeks. The same love I felt from you all for 25 years. I read this post a few days ago. It was really like a love note to me. It said (from lapau123) “Sweet sweet Oprah, I didn’t know I had a light in me until you told me it was there.” So lapau123 posted May 13^th, 10:40pm.  This last show is my thank you. It’s a love-letter to you and to all of you viewers who have posted messages, who wrote letters back in the day when we still used stamps, remember? Uh, that’s how long we’ve been together. To all you tweeters, to all you facebookers, and especially to those of you who never owned a computer but you turned on your tv set everyday and watched. There isn’t a surprise left to do. I was saying earlier, “not a thing we could think of to put under your seat.” So I wanted to spend this last hour telling you what you have meant in my life, what we’ve learned together in this classroom called the Oprah Winfrey Show. It has been the greatest gift you all could have given me. Each show teaching me, growing me forward, helping me understand the common connection in our human experience. Time and again the theme that kept showing itself in our early years on the show was people making bad choices. I look back at those tapes I can’t believe that I did it. People were making bad choices and then blaming everybody but themselves for the state of their lives. We started to learn by watching learn by watching others, how self-destructive that really was. the beginning of reality tv folks. Glad we grew out of that. When you know better you do better, right? And here’s what I learned from all of that, besides not to do that anymore. Nobody but you is responsible for your own life. It doesn’t matter what your momma did, doesn’t matter what your daddy didn’t do. You are responsible for your life. And what is your life? What is all life? What is every flower, every rock, every tree, every human being? Energy; and you are responsible for the energy that you create for yourself and you are responsible for the energy that you bring to others.  One of the best examples of this Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who was on the show talking about her book, My stroke of insight. She was a 37-year-old Harvard educated brain scientist who suffered a massive stroke in the left part of her brain. She couldn’t speak or remember her own mother, but when doctors and nurses walked into her room she knew from the right brain who was on her side. She could feel their energy.

(Cut to: interview with Dr. Taylor, 2008)

Oprah: Okay so this was the thing that changed me. You said in the book that, “I’m in here come get me.”

Dr. Taylor: I’m in here come find me. 

Oprah: I’m in here come find me. And you were more perceptive than you had ever been in your life cause you could feel the energy that everybody brought you, brought to you. And one of the things that you said that really changed me was “I wanted people to be responsible for the energy they brought to me.”

Dr. Taylor: That’s right. Take responsibility for the energy you bring.

Oprah: Energy they brought to me.

Dr. Taylor: Yes absolutely because that’s all I could perceive. I was in the present moment and that’s all I could perceive and if I had a doctor come in and just kind of talk to my mother or talk to my friends or just go about without me, not even bother to make eye contact or try to connect to me and show me that they value me and that they value the connection then I’m not going to show up.

Oprah: Right.

Dr. Taylor: So I needed that.

BACK TO SHOW

“Dr. Taylor sent me a sign that I have hanging in my make-up room today. It says “Please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space.”  And I ask for the same thing in my home and at my companies. Thank you Dr. Taylor for that simple, but powerful lesson. All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment. We are all little beaming little signals like radio frequencies and the world is responding in kind. Remember physics class? Remember physics class? Did you pay attention, (Audience laughter) to Newton’s third law of motion? Let me tell you, that thing is real. Says For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is the abiding law that I live by, articulated by perfection by Ms. Ceile in The Color Purple when she finally gets the courage to leave her abusive husband Mister.

(Cut to scene from the Color Purple)

Albert (Mister): I shoulda locked you up and just let you out for work.

Celie Johnson: The jail you planned for me is the one you gonna rot in.

Shug Avery: Celie get in the car. Get in the car.

Albert: knock you out

Celie Johnson: Everything you done to me, already done to you.

BACK TO SHOW

 “That is it. Everything you done to me, already done to you. It is the golden rule to the tenth power. Do unto others as you would have them do unto to you. It’s already done. All the energy that you spend trying to hurt someone else, that energy will turn around and slap you in the face. The same thing is true of love. What I know is, is that the energy that I’ve put out everyday, with the best of intention, that it would reach you where you really live, in the heart of yourself, has come back to me from all of you in full force. So that’s what we’ve learned on this show. You are responsible for your life and when you get that, everything changes my friends. So don’t wait for somebody else to fix you, to save you or complete you; Jerry Maguire was just a movie. No one completes you. We have seen it with guest after guest. When you get that, you are responsible for your life, you, get, free. When I started this show, it was a revelation to all of us how much dysfunction there was in people’s lives. I grew up with Leave it to Beaver and Andy Griffith and I thought everybody’s family life was like that even though I knew mine was not. Well this show, and our guests, began to paint a different picture, allowed us to drop the veil on all the pretense and do exactly what we envisioned, in that first show. To let people know that you are not alone.

(OPRAH TALKS OVER CLIP OF a mother lying across the bed crying with her young daughter.)  

"One of the most poignant moments I remember was in one of the first shows we did about alcoholism. We moved in with a family for a week. The mother felt her husband had a drinking problem and it was destroying the family. What moved me the most was this moment right here, in that show, where the mother is being consoled by her three-year-old daughter. That to me was the real picture of what alcoholism does to a family. And that was just the beginning. People started coming on this show saying things they couldn’t say to their own family members.

(CUT TO: Montage of flashbacks)

Woman 1993: I’m proud to say that I am a recovering alcoholic and I, I had to swallow a lot of false pride about even saying that…

Woman 1988: My name is Wanita and I want to tell my friends and family that I’m gay…

Woman 1995: Here I am over weight. I do not feel comfortable about my body…

Woman 1997: I have advanced AIDS so I probably will die from this disease…

Woman 1991:…Raped me lots of times between the ages of 6 and 9 and….

Woman 1991: I decided to come forward at the risk of my life.

Man 2009: I hit her more than once. You know there was a second occasion. There was a third. I didn’t know how to verbally converse with my wife without putting her down and beating her up verbally. Do I think it’s a cycle that can be stopped? Yeah.

Oprah: Yeah

Woman 2004: I saw  that show and I um, called my doctor, and I said I am a drug addict. I am addicted to, this is what I’m taking, and  um I need help.

BACK TO SHOW

 “Little by little we started to release the shame.”