A Regatta With Your Name On It

One afternoon this week I wandered into the TV room at the Tillercottage to see what Tillerwoman was watching. There was a vaguely familiar looking, somewhat overweight, middle-aged woman on the screen, standing with a crowd of people somewhere sunny. She was highly emotional, misty-eyed and in between sobs was saying something like...

I had a moment when the sails went up... gulp... I am a girl who couldn't find my name on a key chain or a lunch box... sniff sniff... if only I knew that God was saying... sob... "Baby, you don't have to worry about no lunch box.... there's a regatta in Sydney with your name on a sailboat," ... sob sob... so I say to you, "Wherever you are in your life, wherever you come from in your life... gulp... there's a regatta somewhere with your name on it!"

WTF?

And then I realized what this was all about. The sobbing lady was the famous American TV personality Oprah Winfrey who is famous for... umm... being Oprah Winfrey I guess. She was recently given 2.3 million bucks by the Australian Tourist Board so that she could pretend to be extremely generous and take 300 viewers of her TV show on an all-expenses-paid trip from the US to Australia where they would make some tourism commercials for Australia which would pretend to be episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show starring the famous Oprah Winfrey.

You have to understand that as well as being famous for pretending to be generously giving away gifts paid for by her sponsors, the famous Oprah Winfrey is also famous for inspiring her (mainly female) TV viewers to "live your best life"(i.e. be more like the famous Oprah Winfrey) as part of her global mission to "evolve the consciousness of people everywhere." Yes, she really does talk like that.

I had just stumbled into the middle of the tourism commercial/ Oprah show episode about Sydney, which apparently had included a sail on Sydney Harbour for Oprah and friends in a bunch of yachts with Oprah's name on all the sails. Hence the sob-talk about "a regatta with your name on it."



Well sure, if you are one of the richest women in America and you have just made a deal to promote a whole freaking country then I imagine it's merely a minor detail to include a clause in the contract that says you have to have your name on a dozen sails (if you are so egocentric that that's important to you.) For the average Jane Doe watching the show the message that somewhere God is planning a regatta with her name on it is.... ..... well, words fail me. I guess she didn't mean it literally? Or did she?

But look on the bright side. There was some sailing involved. And I would guess that the global TV audience for this little "regatta" on Sydney Harbour probably exceeded the global TV audience for sailing at the last Olympics and America's Cup combined.

There's a message there somewhere.

Russell Coutts are you listening?