A mere television screen may not be big enough to contain the egos in play when Madonna appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show today. This, truly, is a pop-culture Moment, something worth setting your DVRs for. Madonna probably won't jump up and down on a couch while proclaiming her love for her adopted son - couch-jumping love proclamations are so over - but you can bet she'll go out of her way to make headlines.
Because getting attention is what Madonna does. Or at least what she does best. In her remarkably long stint in the public eye, Madonna has gone from - no one seems to remember this - a Britney Spears-with-bite-type pop star to a sort of cultural barometer, not inventing trends but adopting them and helping boost their popularity before hopping off at just the right moment and jumping onto another one as it's on the ascent.
And Oprah, of course, is Oprah. She is the most powerful person in television, maybe in all of entertainment.
She is a modern fairy godmother who can bestow bestselling status on authors of her choosing; cars on her enraptured, delirious audience; and safe harbor on celebrity pals looking for a place to share their side of whatever story has them in the news. She doesn't host a talk show. She hosts a cult revival, a weekday meeting of the Church of Oprah, where the overwhelmingly female audience can shriek with delight at her musings, break into lusty applause when so moved and sob when finally overcome by the power of her presence.
(Come on, come on, we want cars, too!) Seriously, this thing might melt the screen. The visit is timely.
Madonna has a lot to talk about. The scheduled subject is her planned adoption of a 13-month-old boy from Malawi, in southeastern Africa. The adoption has been dogged by controversy, with Malawian officials saying Madonna skirted the country's adoption laws.
Madonna says she believes she and husband Guy Ritchie acted in accordance with all laws. I'm guessing she'll find a sympathetic audience today. Just a hunch.
(If not a car, maybe an autographed CD!) If the adoption story doesn't take up the full hour, Madonna can fall back on talking about NBC's deciding to edit out footage of her hanging on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns from her upcoming concert special, scheduled to air Nov. 22.
After a slew of protests from the usual suspects, NBC has opted to include her performance of the song, Live to Tell, but to show other camera shots until she gets off the cross. Bingo! A clunky solution that should satisfy no one.
Censorship in any form is heading down a dangerous path. Show the thing or don't. Watch the concert or don't.
But don't mistake the bottom-line intent: to attract attention. Hard to sell CDs and concert tickets if nobody's talking about you. Madonna has said the performance is "a plea to the audience to encourage mankind to help one another and to see the world as a unified whole.
" But this is her specialty. Part of the Madonna genius is getting people to talk about Madonna. And if you can get Madonna talking about Madonna on Oprah, that's an alignment of stars that doesn't occur often.
The only danger is that Madonna's and Oprah's immense attractions will cancel each other out, creating an ego collision heard the world over. In other words, how can you miss this? Goodykoontz will be live-blogging Madonna's appearance beginning at 3 p.
m. at goodyblog. azcentral.
com.
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