Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Fame in Flames

Good, humble yucks in today's Richard Cohen column in the Washington Post. His 15 minutes came when he joined Oprah Winfrey as her co-bad cop when she eviscerated lying author James Frey.

An earlier column had called Oprah on her terrible bungling of the fiasco. As a result, "My cell phone started to pulse and then get warm and then overheat," as lackeys for talking heads and smiling hosts wanted him on their shows.

His experience was an order of magnitude above my pathetic BBC call. And he got his fame:
It was all too much, too heady. I got stopped on airplanes: Saw ya on Oprah. Old friends called, former girlfriends who I thought would never forgive me. Some people liked my tie. Others even remembered something I said...I had passed into a certain circle of fame. I had gone from news to entertainment and into the orbit of Oprah...She was like some sort of god who could just create you. She had created Dr. Phil. She had created Marianne Williamson. For a couple of days, I thought she had created me. Alas, she had not. Bit by bit, my fame has been receding. It's now been almost a day since anyone mentioned my incredible performance on Oprah and I now have a more realistic, and glummer, appreciation of where I -- and most of us print people -- stand in the scheme of things: pretty close to nowhere.
Funny dude. Read the whole piece.

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