screw five minutes, i want at least a half hour

The other night I'm lying in bed, watching Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, thinking about my school girl crush on Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers, who was chatting with Jimmy on that particular episode, when I started thinking about how much I'd like to sit and chat with Jimmy -- or Conan, or Jay -- and say funny anecdotal things and be sparkling and charming and loved and adored by many.

Naturally, this reminded me of the lifelong dream that I do believe I share with almost every single solitary woman in the United States, and perhaps large portions of the global community: to be a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show.

I think we have this dream for two primary reasons. The first one being our inexplicable but unquestionable love for all things Oprah, and the second one being that it's not that far-fetched to think you might, one day in your life, be asked to appear on the show. She's forever having some pretty real women on that couch with her, and by that I of course mean tramps who are not half as good looking and talented as we are who somehow wound up on national TV anyway. You don't necessarily have to be famous to be on Oprah, but you gotta do something worth talking about. Then Oprah makes you famous, and then you get to chat up late night talk show hosts.

And you know what y'all, let's be honest. I want to be famous. I'm tired of being one of those people who tries to act like all that stuff doesn't matter to them. Why lie? It's like the new ballad I'm working on, called "Buy Me Things (A Love Song)." You gotta say what you want if you want to get it, so here it is: I want to be famous. Don't even know what for, don't even care.

And y'all, I don't even need to be "rich and famous." Sure, it'd be nice to be rich, but consider this. Want to go to that expensive bar downtown with the $800 bottles of champagne and all the pretty people with fake hair? If you're rich, you can go because you're able to afford it. If you're famous? You don't ever see the bill! This sounds like a much better plan to me.

Now I just have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do to get myself famous. This is something I have dedicated a lot of thought to over the past several years, mostly due to that insatiable need to be on Oprah. One time back in high school I even sent a letter to Oprah's producers about one thing or another that I thought was pretty noteworthy, but they did not seem to agree with my perspective on this particular issue.

I've been known to do lots of things that have been known to make people famous -- writing, playing instruments, singing, acting -- but none of these have worked for me thus far. I was hoping this little blog might help me achieve this extremely important goal, but so far that is not working out as planned. I know the kind of stuff that would be sure-fires to get me there, but the thing is, I just do not have time to be adopting kids from Russia or starting a charity or miraculously surviving a near-death incident and finding Jesus. I just don't. All I really have time to do is make an ass of myself (repeatedly) and write about it on the internet. Frankly, I am not above that. But we already knew this.

But then the other morning I was watching a clip of one of my favorite writers, Jill Connor Browne, on the Today Show just-a-chattin' with Hoda and Kathie Lee. And it occurred to me that -- other than being a successful author, a role to which I've always had aspirations -- Jill is also an Ambassador Of The South. There were several times during the segment that Kathie Lee and Hoda, those yankee tramps, just looked at Jill like she had lost her marbles. It was so very clear that they just DID NOT GET HER, the way I often feel that people up here JUST DON'T GET ME.

What better way to be famous than as an Ambassdor of all that is good in the world? I am hearby proclaiming myself an unofficial Ambassador Of The South, mostly just unofficial for now because you never know when something you think you just made up might turn out to be a real thing, and I don't have time to be sued.

Unless, of course, it got me on TV.


cheers,
elizabeth