Oprah, Orangutans and Tom Cruise

Ok, I won’t argue with ya, as a cultural observer, well, I’m not out there on the cutting edge, there’s nothing fast track about my views; but damn, I do take a look now and again, tardy though it may be. This past Wednesday, for reasons that are not important here, I ended up in a stall in Chicago, waiting at my son Pablo’s place for a flight bound up in Miami by weather. The NBA championship game (I’m told that it was good) came & went, and there I was, tired, exhausted, sitting on the couch, suffering the ravages of a 90 degree plus summer heat wave in Chicago. I sat, my tired old eyes staring at the tv, hoping one of those good lookin’ news babes I’d seen earlier in the day on the Cta transit posters advertising channel 7's news team, would pop up on the screen, such was not the case.

Around midnight (Pablo and his wife Christina had long since retired for the night) I kinda noticed, or thought I did, a big brown couch on the tv screen, as I sat in a tired stupor staring at channel 7. Furniture ad I thought. Slowly, I realized it wasn’t a couch; it was Oprah! I could tell when she flashed a big smile revealing those pearly whites. Damn! I thought, should be a sin to have ivory white teeth like that; made my own grimy, yellowish complement look like sh. . . .well . . . . something of an embarrassment. Anyway, clasping her hands tightly together and bouncing a bit on a big over stuffed chair, Oprah gleefully announced what we’re supposed to perceive as one of the viewing highlights of the year. America’s heart throb, none other than Mr. Right Stuff himself, Tom Cruise, would be her special guest for the full hour; and, she teased, he just might have some thing special to say about somebody special. I don’t know about most folks but that little hook snared me.

Perked up, I actually sat up, rubbed a little of the sleep from my eyes and leaned toward the tv just a bit. Didn’t want to miss something so special. Wouldn’t you know, just at about the time I’m about to be overcome by pants wetting excitement, Oprah breaks for a Popalene ad. You know, one of those miracle diet pill kinda products that’s supposed to just blast the fat right off your ass, even better than Cortaslim, so the ad claimed. And, you can’t beat this, all the while the blastin’s goin’ on, you can keep sittin’ on it, right there in front of the TV, eatin’ your munchies, suckin’ on a cold beer, watchin’ Oprah. Market research would probably give ya a variety of reasons they run ads like that on the Oprah show.

But anyway back to Tom, after a gushy little intro, Tom emerges from the darkness at the back of the set to the sounds of a studio filled with screaming, jumping women. Sporting a modish uncombed hair style and dressed in black, a pull over shirt and jeans. Oprah wrapped her arms around his small frame in an embrace that momentarily hid him from view. She then backed away a tad and patted him on the head and then ruffled his uncombed hair much as you would in greeting a favorite dog. Mind you now, the studio women continued jumping and screaming, in what seemed to be a spontaneous outpouring of raw, savage emotion. Now I’ve got to admit that I’ve never really paid a lot of attention to Tom, but this visceral, screaming display of raw savagery gave me some pause. Was it sexual I wondered, looking him over more carefully than I ever had. It seemed to me that there really wasn’t much to him, in a manly sense that is. I mean he’s not a brawny, beefy muscular kinda guy. And then, his face strikes me as rather mouse like, or ratish in appearance. The nose protrudes a bit too far in front of the more receded chin and forehead. . .you know, rat like. But anyway, amid the tumult coming from these unsettled studio women, Tom suddenly, inexplicably, dropped to his knees right there in front of Oprah and started pounding the floor with a clinched fist. Caught by surprise, Oprah, clasp her hands over her open mouth and nervously laughed as Tom continued to pound on the floor. She then bent over kinda gathering him up, guiding him to a seat there beside her on an adjoining couch. Tom sat giggling kidishly, and then suddenly, inexplicably, he jumped nimbly atop the couch, standing on the cushion, legs spread apart, pumping his clinched fist into the air in a victory gesture of some sort. Just as suddenly he dropped back on to the sofa in a seated position. “Yeah!” he ejaculated pumping both fists into the air and extending his legs forward as he did so.

Seeming to have some sense of what this just might be about, Oprah said, with her hands still up near her disbelieving mouth, “You’re in love!”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!" Tom gushed, "I ‘ve never felt like this before in my life.!” At which point he again initiated a deft little jump, putting himself atop the cushion once more, this time in a kneeling position, extending his hands to the cushion just to his front for balance; he then preceded to jump up and down in the fashion of an orangutan putting on a show at the zoo. All the while Oprah sat nervously laughing with her hand variously covering her open mouth and then slapping his knee as she ejaculated, “Yes, Yes!”

At the risk of being considered a mendacious soul, because it so strains credulity, let it be noted for the record: Tom’s orangutan like jumping on the couch, alternating with stints of him on the floor pounding his clinched fist, continued for a good ten to fifteen minutes; at least until I’d finally had enough to rescue myself with the clicker. I never did quite figure out what brought out the primate side of Cruise, but I did hear a day or two later that it was just his strange way of declaring his love for some kid half his age. I also heard that he’d had another media encounter on NBC’s Today Show with Matt Lauer that featured Tom's attempts to disabuse people of their misconceptions about the value of psychiatry, particularly actress Brooke Shields who, according to Tom, has been takin’ drugs to cope with her postpartum blues. Now, as a self-avowed member of the church of Scientology, I guess old Tom’s a scientist. . .I don’t really know; I’m just not up on that crap, but I will say this, if you’ve got a friend who just happened to tape Tom on the Oprah Show, you might want to take a look at it.

Ever on the watch for ya,
Davy Crockett