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Serendipitous goodness

Hollywood sign

Well. If I had words to describe the awesome serendipitousness of this past weekend on our trip to Oprah's After-Oscar Show, I'd use them. But I'm still quite dumbstruck. So I have to use words like "serendipitousness" to try and communicate the magnitude of it.  It was already quite overwhelmingly amazing to have won these tickets to see Oprah's show taped in Hollywood the day after the Oscars.  But it got even better. After watching the Oscars on Sunday night right down the street from the Kodak Theatre at a pub called the "Pig & Whistle" (which was home of the very first after-Oscar party 82 years ago, as well as Judy Garland's 15th birthday), we woke up at the crack of stupid on Monday morning to make our way to the Hollywood Bowl, and outdoor concert stage and parking lot where we were to check in for the show before being taken by bus to the Kodak Theatre.  Instructions were to check in no later than 7am.  The parking lot opened at 5:30am.  We arrived just before 6am and lined up behind an estimated 1,000 people.  Some had been there since 4am.  (We heard, though don't know this for sure, that there were to be 3,200 people coming to see Oprah's show that day). The highly organized process meant that the line moved quickly; we got to the front of the line about 40 minutes after arriving.  I gave our names to the list-wielding woman, who found our names, checked them off and called out "two blues!" to the wristband-distributor woman standing behind her.  That blessed wristband-distributor woman replied with "no, I think two oranges!" and handed us two bright orange plastic wristbands printed with the beautiful words, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Me, still in a mental fog at this early-morning hour (especially after having had one too many cocktails the night before) blithely thanked the women and followed the queue of other Oprah fans heading toward the buses until Kel grabbed my arm and pronounced "I think something really good just happened!" "Wha?", I sleepily replied.  "I think it's really good to get an orange band," she replied, "I just have a feeling!" This is a girl whose gut instincts are 99% correct, failing only when she's travelling somewhere without her children and paranoia takes over causing her to worry unnecessarily about her safety and the certainty of her eventual return, so when she says she "has a feeling" about nearly anything else, I generally trust her on it. Little did we know how good it was until we arrived at the Kodak Theatre and were sent down to the Orchestra level.  Oh yeah, this was good alright.  Still standing in line behind around maybe a hundred others at this point, we knew it was gonna be REAL good when the crowd in front of us cheered as the staff opened the doors to the seating area:  we were headed for the very front section, the first group of seats directly in front of the stage.  And then it got better.  Our friend Serendipitousness stepped in once again as we followed the throng in an orderly fashion toward front and centre stage...one of the Oprah staff was casually pointing people to this seat and that seat, and just as casually she pointed to us and directed us to two seats just to the right of centre stage - IN THE VERY FRONT ROW. We were literally speechless as we took our seats, looking wordlessly at each other and at the staffer with bulging eyes that screamed "Really?!?!" while our mouths and voices failed completely at voicing any semblance of the magnitude of excitement that was coursing through our beings by that point.  We both managed to get a humble "thank you" out to the staffer before she scurried off to seat more people, and for the next five minutes or so we literally sat there, awestruck, looking around at the stage and at those seated around us and at each other, silently dumbfounded at the sheer supercalafrajalistickly incredibleness of our fortune that morning. And there we sat for the duration of the show, not fifteen feet away from Oprah Winfrey herself and her guests: Best Actress Sandra Bullock; Best Supporting Actress Mo'nique; Best Actor Jeff Bridges; Best Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz and later, fashion expert Carson Kressley.  I even got to shake Carson's hand after the show.  We were in the two seats right beside where Matt Damon and his wife had sat the night before, which was especially delightful since I'd been comically obsessed with "running into" Matt Damon the entire weekend, and had taken photos of myself beside no less than three different billboards advertising his next movie.  And in the seat next to Matt's sat Oprah's BFF, Gayle King.  A whole bunch of BFFs sitting together; there we all were. Oprah asked each of the Oscar winners how they felt the night before when their name was called for their award.  I'll tell you how we felt that morning:  like BFFs with Serendipitousness under our wings.  It's a feeling we won't soon forget. And of course we've dubbed Oprah our OBFF now: "Other Best Friend Forever".   Thanks for a day to remember forever, Oprah!

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©2023 by Kelly Wagner

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