Comeback 2.0 (via Tumblr)

In both Sydney, Australia and London, two signs have appeared announcing that Lance Armstrong's titles have been moved to the fiction sections. Oh, it's like the Million Little Pieces problem all over again!

In Sydney's Manly Library:

A photo taken by British Tumblr user/library employee A Sad Man, My Friend who was inspired by the Manly prank to create his own:

You know, this is really all Oprah's fault. If she'd just stop having all these famous people admitting that their life/work was a complete lie, our lie-braries might go back to being the truth-braries we know them to be.

Colbert and Oprah: Deathmatch! (OWN)

Last night Stephen Colbert and his wife Evelyn "Evie" McGee-Colbert had Oprah over at Evie's parents' 150-year-old home in Charleston for the latest installment of Oprah's Next Chapter. (Which is really good! Have you guys watched the Rihanna one yet? Get on that!)

We learned so much about Mr. Colbert, who lately seems to be distancing himself from his Stephen Colbert "character" more and more (in case people were still confused); first by speaking at Fordham with Cardinal Dolan, and then going on the mother of all talk shows to discuss everything from his family's death in a terrible plane crash to his influence on the presidential elections.

Stephen on playing Colbert:
http://youtu.be/zL-RHWusyp4
Mr. Colbert on the White House Correspondents' Dinner ("He didn't cross the line!")
http://youtu.be/k0ah704v9Gc
See, this is all Jon Stewart's fault.

The real influence of a fictional character:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uep1yOoTV-s&feature=share&list=UUKBnlTTgEnhIXv_c4LvvyMQ

Stephen Colbert has a wife ... sorry, world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOmsvZZ3f10&feature=share&list=UUKBnlTTgEnhIXv_c4LvvyMQ
And on a serious note, how the death of his father and two brothers when he was 10 affected his outlook on life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqkOHxydOFc&feature=share&list=ULgqkOHxydOFc
Did anyone else start tearing up when Stephen Colbert started talking about his "secret name"? Yeah, us either. We just have terrible allergies.

Playing fairy godmother again (Story Accents, flickr)

Even when she's selling her sprawling Midtown penthouse for $7.75 million, Oprah Winfrey manages to spread hope and joy. She even made a little profit in the process, having bought the penthouse for $7.1 million in 2008. How does she do it?

When we heard that Ms. Winfrey's Place 57 condo on East 57th Street sold to hedge fund partner Mark Hillery (as reported by The Real Deal earlier this week), we thought that naturally Mr. Hillery would be happy. He got the high-ceilinged, big-windowed pad, listed with Corcoran broker Mark Schoenfeld, for a few hundred thousand under the $7.9 million ask.

But little did we expect that his broker, Nesrin Anjollie Feradov, from boutique firm SKNY Realty, would be bowled over with emotion by the sale.

Ms. Fedarov told her rags to riches tale—from working in finance to becoming a down-of-her-luck high-end real estate broker with only $5 in the bank—to The New York Times.

Although Ms. Fedarov's big stroke of luck was finding a client like Mr. Hillery (who looked at another $22 million apartment before Oprah's—think of the commission on that one!), she sees the whole experience as nothing short of magical.

“If Oprah only knew that because of her apartment a single mom who has always struggled to make ends meet can not only pay her rent but her child’s tuition,” Ms. Feradov told The Times. “She, and my client, created a miracle in my life.”

The scrappy Ms. Feradov recounted how she used her wit and wiles to impress Mr. Hillery and his wife when they flew in from London to view apartments. She "hired a big S.U.V. from a car service," and put on her "finest Gucci shoes" (we're sure she shined them up herself after she finished sweeping the cinders from the fireplace).

Mr. Hillery will get newly-laid walnut floors, a "barely used Viking state-of-the-art kitchen" (we guess Oprah didn't spend a lot of time in the three-bedroom pad) and a 750-square foot wraparound terrace. Ms. Feradov will get a commission of almost $200,000 (she can finally afford a decent pair of shoes).

kvelsey@gmail.com

Mr. Franzen probably would have hated that someone instagrammed this photo during his reading.

The first thing the Observer noticed about Jonathan Franzen was that he was wearing a name tag. It said "Jonathan Franzen."

We asked him if he usually wore name tags to his readings.

"Everyone is wearing one but you," Mr. Franzen pointed out. This was true. In what appeared to be an act of almost defiant social leveling, the organizers of last Thursday's Semiperm House's fifth anniversary celebration/Jonathan Franzen reading had given everyone a name tag.

We admired the organizers for this gesture, just as we admired Mr. Franzen for the unassuming way that he shuffled along with the group on a brief tour of Semiperm, a low-income residence for single-parent families on 102nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The tour ended in the building's rec room, a cheerful, utilitarian space where housing advocates milled around a table of snacks decorated with balloons.

It was the kind of pleasant, unmemorable gathering that you would expect to mark the 5-year anniversary of an affordable housing project, or it would have been if not for the perplexing presence of a literary superstar in the middle of it all (well, not really in the middle, more off to the side, trying to look inconspicuous, an as-yet-unreleased book of essays tucked under his arm). At 7 p.m. the group would leave en masse for the hostel a block away where Mr. Franzen was scheduled to read.

Affordable-housing-celebration-plus-literary-reading may have been an unusual double bill, but then, Semiperm was a place of odd, high-low convergences: a house for the formerly homeless whose construction was financed by housing vouchers that the developers of 15 Central Park West—quite possibly the most luxurious, expensive condo building in the city—had purchased in exchange for building an additional floor atop their limestone tower.

Still, we were curious what Semiperm residents thought of the whole thing. They were scarce, but we finally managed to locate two women talking quietly in all the congratulatory hubbub.

Had they read Jonathan Franzen?

They hadn't. "I just know he's part of the Oprah book club," said 20-year-old Shareem Lloyd, who had evidently not heard of Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Franzen's falling out or subsequent reconciliation.

En route to the hostel, we asked Mr. Franzen about how he selected which readings to attend—and what we were really wondering—how he had ended up at this one.

It turned out, Tom Barbash, a novelist and friend of Mr. Franzen's, is the stepson of the Settlement Housing Fund's executive director Carol Lamberg, who arranged the reading after learning that Semiperm director Doreen Gibbs was a big fan of the Freedom author. “I actually liked that he turned down Oprah,” Ms. Gibbs told the Observer. "He writes things that show the ugly side of people, he puts it out there... he’s just badass. You can call him call him cocky, or arrogant, but you can’t call him bad."

It turned out that Mr. Franzen was also a big, if newly-minted fan of Semiperm, "When I heard about Semiperm, I thought this is exactly the kind of project we need," he said. "Also, it's ingeniously funded...although one could make the case that selling air rights, as the city did, is maybe not the best way to fund these things."

Still, Mr. Franzen confessed that he was hoping tonight's event could be converted to a short Q&A. "I usually love reading, but I feel that this is really Semiperm's event," he said.

We agreed that it was something of an odd match.

Upstairs, the spacious reading room was slowly filling to about two-thirds capacity. Having prepared ourselves for the kind of literary mob that makes it impossible to find a seat during MFA student readings at KGB bar, we sighed with relief as we dropped into a spot near the front.

After remarks from Ms. Lamberg, Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Mathew Wambua and city councilmember Melissa Mark-Viverito, Mr. Franzen reluctantly stepped up to the podium, commenting on the awkwardness of combining a literary reading and a celebration for long-term transitional housing.

"This seemed to me like the frivolous part of the evening,” he said. "Making up stories for a living can feel very airy-fairy."

He would be reading non-fiction, he announced, to assuage his Protestant discomfort with reading at all, unless "by spontaneous consensus we all decide to move straight to wine and dessert."

A grim silence followed, so Mr. Franzen launched into a long rant against technology, specifically cell phones, from his 2008 essay, "I Just Called to Say I Love You."

We tried to focus, but were hopelessly distracted by the woman next to us, who was compulsively Googling "Jonathan Franzen" on her iphone.

As Mr. Franzen described subway riders "quiet clutching their devices like a mother's hand," the woman scrutinized the photo she had just taken of Mr. Franzen. Apparently satisfied, she tweeted it out: "Rare reading by Jonathan Franzen."

Next she launched into a Telegraph article, looking up momentarily, much like a train passenger registering the scenery over a newspaper, as Mr. Franzen again suggested that we skip this whole reading thing.

Another tweet: "Jonathan Franzen would hate that I just tweeted about this." Indefatigable, she moved on to Mr. Franzen’s Wikipedia page, but The Observer had finally wearied of her browsing frenzy.

The Q&A portion began.

What desire had motivated Mr. Franzen to write Freedom?, queried a man in the audience.

“That’s a very personal question,” said Mr. Franzen. He tried to offer up "the least charged" example of a character in the book being hired for a bizillionaire. But it wasn’t working. “Oh gosh, oh gosh,” Mr. Franzen said. “Now I said that thing about desire, I invited the question.” He hemmed and hawed. He couldn't talk about Freedom or The Corrections, he said. He'd have to go back to the early 1990s to be safe, when he was starting his second novel Strong Motion.

He sighed. “I think I didn’t want to be married anymore and the inkling of things I might want if I wasn’t married anymore."

That was personal! And oddly winning, maybe even winning enough to outweigh Mr.Franzen's repeated pleas to leave the event. There was something about the his mixture of guilt and duty, sincerity and awkwardness, reserve and weird candor that seemed straight out of, well, a Jonathan Franzen novel.

Mr. Franzen took "one of the last questions."

"So, desire...?" began the asker, a woman.

"Oh God!" cried Mr. Franzen. He gave the audience a beseeching look, but they were immune to his entreaties by that point, and shifted attentively as the woman pressed on.

kvelsey@observer.com

Andy Cohen, newly-minted author (Getty Images)

Over the course of an intimate, two hour lunch with Andy Cohen at the Palm West  End Steakhouse, the Bravo celebrity and producer (not to mention celebrity producer) added a new notch in his grey, dapper Hugo Boss suit. Mr. Cohen, whose talk show Watch What Happens Live just moved into its five night a week spot--"You should come tomorrow, we're having a Ralph Fiennes Pajama Party...with Ralph Fiennes!" he had gushed over a meal of Atlantic salmon and Southwest steak salad--was now officially an author, giving us his first reading of his upcoming memoir Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture.

Mr. Cohen is already a natural at line readings, and as engaging to watch as any celebrity hopping from foot to foot mere inches away. Most Talkative is expected for a May 8th release date from Henry Holt and Company, and is sure to be filled with juicy star-studded details. (We're not just saying that because we've just come from hearing one of three--three!--disastrous run-ins the suit-cum-celeb had with Oprah while working at CBS).

"The last time I had the pleasure of working with a celebrity like Mr. Cohen was Rob Lowe," said Henry Holt's Editor in Chief, Gillian Blake, seated at our table and looking not unlike a smaller Mariel Hemingway. "And there was a huge bidding war for Andy's book." Henry Holt bought the book in August; it was just sent to the publisher earlier this month.

"But Andy gets it...he hasn't lost touch with what it's like behind-the-scenes, which makes it really wonderful to work with him, because he's so accommodating and really wanted to write this book. We'd be on the phone all the time."

Mr. Cohen, always one of the more delightful New York celebrities to run into, grinned happily as he began his reading. "I had to get over this block that no one would be interested in the childhood of a closeted gay kid that sat this close to the TV set all the time," he laughed. "That was almost harder than writing the book itself."

Too much "help"?

Three days after we picked up The Secret, we won the lottery. It was a Friday night in Williamsburg, and we were drunkenly blinking into the fluorescent lights of a local bodega, waiting for our dinner—also, technically, a late lunch and tomorrow's early breakfast—of a beef patty with cheese, when we decided to feed two dollars into a machine to purchase an Instant Take 5 ticket, which enticed us with a promise that we could "Win Up To $5,555!"

We used a quarter to scratch the ticket, revealing our win of $5, not five grand, but more than double the amount we had paid for the privilege of entering. It didn't matter that we would have to wait until the next day to retrieve our winnings, or that we would inevitably forget to do so and continue to hold the prize-winning piece of paper in our wallet for the rest of the week before we remembered that we had hit it big in an alcoholic stupor. At the time it was a sign: that if we could win money just from reading The Secret, than one week of piling on the self-help books would lead to bigger and better things (and hopefully give us the tools to keep track of our earnings).

We were so wrong.

By Friday afternoon, we had speed-read (or at least skimmed through) Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, the aforementioned Oprah-certified The Secret, the celebrity-smattered Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, Marina Spence's Make Every Day a Friday, and Russell Simmons’ Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success. Every day, we took one more "self-help" suggestion from each of the books and added it on to our daily schedule.

At least we know we're in good company: in the year 2008 alone, according to Forbes, Americans spent more than $11 billion improving themselves through classes, seminars, CDs, and books. (Ironically, the majority of the self-help books you'll find in a Barnes & Noble will have a chapter on managing your finances. The other half will involve a Real Housewife telling you how to lose weight.) Because we are cynical non-believers, we decided to start with The Secret, which didn't cost us a penny since we already owned it as a gag gift we were planning to give a friend for a birthday.

Sunday

We begin with the positive thinking exercises outlined in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (Atria Books/Beyond Worlds, 2006). We get a kick out of reading passages out loud to our siblings like an over-eager guidance counselor, or zealous Tony Robbins-esque figure. Stuff like: "If you see it in your mind, you're going to hold it in your hand!" and "In fact, parts of our body are literally replaced every day!" For those out there who have never read The Secret—which has sold more than 21 million copies by promoting "the laws of attraction"—the idea is simple. You want something, you think hard enough about it (while keeping the rest of your thoughts positive), and you will get it.

This is so shammy and hokey that we can't believe Oprah promoted it, until we remember that Oprah promoted James Frey as well. Two for two, Oprah.

As an experiment, waiting for coffee in Starbucks, we decide to will a cupcake into our possession. We focus on the idea of a cupcake; how we will come to own and then enjoy it. While we're thinking about how stupid this whole process is, we notice a Starbucks employee replacing the breakfast items in the counter with afternoon snacks. Including...yes! Cupcakes! We buy one while pondering the miracle of The Secret, which we had finished in a record two days—What? It's a small book—and attracting positivity into our lives, which lasts approximately four minutes until we remember that we are supposed to be on diet anyway and discard the entirety of our tasty, magical treat. Money down the drain! This is probably why we need financial self-improvement books.

Monday

Time to plunge into Mr. Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown Publishing Group, 2009). We avoided Mr. Ferriss' other tome, The 4-Hour Body, because we didn't want to exercise, and also because we didn't want to think about Mr. Ferriss giving women extended orgasms, which we know from a New York Times' article is in there somewhere. Plus, we were excited about the suggestion in Workweek that we completely ignore email except for two short windows per day: one at noon, and one at 4 p.m. But this immediately presents a problem for our editors, who were not aware of the "stay offline" portion of Mr. Ferriss' program when they suggested we look into it. Oh well! By 10 p.m., editors have found a loophole in our system and are now texting us notes about work whenever we're out of the office.

The problem with Ferriss' book, which promotes (among other things) the "80-20 principle"—i.e., that 80 percent of our benefits come from 20 percent of our work—is that the 4-Hour logic doesn’t hold water when you are doing field reporting. The concepts the author outlined in his D-E-A-L program (Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation) might work for would-be entrepreneurs or office slackers, but try "eliminating" your reading of the news to just two hours a week (which Mr. Ferriss claims to do) when your job is to be on top of the news cycle. Being fired can’t possibly be part of the game plan, right? Automation—which involves a sort of out-processing of most of your work so one can spend as little time as possible actually doing one's job—is also not an option if you work in a creative field, though we did appreciate Mr. Ferriss' sound financial advice and persuasive arguments for taking "mini-retirements" now, instead of saving it up until we are too old to travel.

As for the whole Definition part...we have trouble with that too. The "D"  is for defining in very specific terms what you want from your career and life. We begin to notice a disturbing trend in self-help literature, asking us to formulate a concrete example of our ideal lifestyle—the very thing we have been avoiding having to think about since we picked a major in college.

Tuesday

"Go Where the Action Is" is one of the crucial components laid out by Russell Simmons in Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power In You to Achieve Happiness and Success (Gotham, 2007). Though it has all of the literary heft of a fortune cookie, we assume that this book will have the most helpful, down-to-earth advice in our new library, something we belatedly acknowledge is due to our love of Def Comedy Jam.

Mr. Simmons gives a lot of lip service to moving to New York, L.A., or Atlanta, because, as he says: "...You ain't going to become a rapper or an actor living in Idaho...You can't wait for the action to come to you. You must go to the action."

We already live in New York, but as it stands, the "action" on Tuesday night seems to be in Zuccotti Park, where we park ourselves for the night in an attempt to sleep among the protesters. We've written enough about the movement, it's time to dive headfirst into the grimy late-night underbelly in order to live up to our full potential as an in-the-field reporter. Mr. Simmons, himself an Occupy-advocate—and a member in good standing of the 1%—spends most of his book talking about the lessons of Kanye, Jay-Z, and his own clothing brand, Phat Farms. Unfortunately the rules governing rapping and entrepreneurship are still far from those of journalism, and we spend half the night shivering, climbing in to share sleeping bags with drunk Canadians who make us recite lines from Good Will Hunting in a Boston accent. We're operating under the misguided premise that being close to the epicenter of "action" will somehow make our lives better. Instead, we get a sinus infection, and are two hours late for work the next day.

Wednesday

Humpday! We feel like the inside of a dirty hippie's sock (and probably smell just as bad) after trying to overnight it in Zuccotti the night before.There's nothing more we rather do than go home and shower, so what better book to read than Marina Spence's slight little number, Make Every Day a Friday! (Morgan James Publishing, 2009). The book touts itself as a "stress-free" system to "gently guide" you to change either your work, or your attitude towards your current job. Unfortunately, it doesn't take more than 10 pages to realize that Friday! is one those books: the ones that work under the presumption that your dream job is out there for you somewhere, or that you have the perfect job but you need to make some other life-shifts in order to appreciate it fully. Because our mood is so dark, we decide to embrace Ms. Spence's tip/sub-chapter that "Hating Your Job is a Gift!" from the "Taking Steps to Clarity" chapter. We make a list of all the things we don't like about our work.

We hate:

• Having to do assignments that involve trying to "better ourselves" in any way
• Getting up early in the mornings
• Long commute
• No good food places in Times Square

Now, Make Every Day a Friday tells us to look at our list and imagine the opposite of what we wrote in our "career hate" list. And we can imagine this life perfectly: working from home all day (when the "work day" starts at noon); eating MSG-laden Chinese food from the place on the corner; never taking any steps to get ourselves into a healthier, more social lifestyle. The thing is, we've already had that career before...it's called freelancing, and after a year and a half of it we went so stir-crazy we were begging friends to let us just come in and hang out in their offices, just to give us an excuse to brush our teeth and get dressed in the morning.

So, the opposite of our current "career dislikes" is an even worse scenario. Great. Why can't any book just tell us what we want to hear...that things are perfect the way they are and maybe we should just take a nap?

Thursday

We do some of the time-traveling exercises encouraged by Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self (Simon & Schuster, 2009). Joseph Galliano’s book has a wide range of celebrities writing letters to their awkward, adolescent selves, which technically isn't "self-help" as much as "inspirational" and/or "somewhat terrifying." After all, who isn’t better off now than when they were 16? Certainly not Stephen King, though he does council his younger incarnation to "Stay away from recreational drugs." Hugh Jackman keeps it vague with "You've had many blessings in your life and will have many more...don't forget where those blessings came from." (Australia?)

Still, if James Franco and the guy who plays Fred on YouTube are qualified to give life advice to younger versions of themselves, certainly we must have some wisdom to impart as well. After many false starts, we eventually wind up with a piece of paper that sounds more like an evil twin's of King's:

Dear Us at 16,

You might think that all those psychedelic drugs you are currently taking will eventually have long-term consequences. To the best of our knowledge…you’re good. Ecstasy stops working when you are around 21, so do as much as possible now. Oh, and you’re not imagining things: mom and dad are getting a divorce.

Keep on truckin’,

Us at 27

The problem with writing a letter to ourselves after reading this book is that everyone in "Dear Me" is famous and living the dream, so their advice is applicable not only to their former selves, but to anyone who also wants to be Alice Cooper/William Shatner/J.K Rowling. Their advice (for the most part) is of the "It Gets Better" variety...because for them, it did. We can't offer that kind of solace to our former selves. Life is better in some ways...other ways, it's worse. (At 16, we probably would have loved to spend a night sleeping in a concrete park in New York, who are we dash our young dreams by whining about it now?)

We stared at the piece of paper for awhile, feeling depressed. Sort of wish we had eaten that cupcake when we had the chance; binge on carrots and hummus instead. Never have we felt so stressed out, overworked, underpaid, and unlovable as when we started taking the advice of other people on how to make our lives better.

Friday

During our last day of formal self-improvement, we go to Williamsburg to meet Anna Goldstein, a New York life coach who specializes in helping women in their 20s and 30s (she can be found online at Self In The City). Running late to the meeting, we quickly scarf down a(nother) beef patty while smoking a cigarette simultaneously, which we assume means that these programs have not been working the way they should.

Ms. Goldstein’s process revolves around the Model of Behavioral Function, a sort of thought-to-action guide to getting our shit together. As we sit in her home office, a huge, brightly lit studio space with a large-screen TV and wacky furniture that actually looks more like a well-funded tech start-up than a therapist’s office, we jot in a notebook as she instructs:

Think

Feel

Behavior

Results

Of course, Ms. Goldstein is not our therapist, but as we go over the events that immediately preceded our encounter—the rushed and greasy lunch when we really wanted sushi—we find ourselves venting a week’s worth of pent-up frustration. Ms. Goldstein prompts us occasionally on how we could alter our first line of thinking to create a different belief system about work, health, interpersonal relationships, and the rest. It’s harder than it seems, which we're beginning to realize is why the the self-help books haven’t done us much good. While books can encourage you to act differently, Ms. Goldstein helps us isolate those early negative thought patterns that feed into our pre-existing (but somewhat unconscious) belief system. For example: "We never exercise because our bike is in the shop and we can't find time to pick it up," which leads to the belief of "We never exercise." And if we take it as a given that we never exercise, why bother being proactive about picking up our bike?

Eventually, we cycle (so to speak) to the problem that's been plaguing us all week:

“What do you want to do?” asked Ms. Goldstein.

“We want to write comedy,” we tell her. And when we say it out loud, it sounds just as stupid as all the times we've thought about it while reading self-help books.

“And what would that look like?”

After we're done pragmatically laying out the details of our eventual “Shouts and Murmurs” piece, the hypothetical book we will write, and how to deal with obligations of fame and fortune, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea after all. It also seems like we've put a lot of subconscious thought into our Goal Lifestyle, despite floundering for weeks over the absurdity of answering the world’s vaguest question: “What do we want?”

Feeling better, we treat ourselves to sushi after meeting with Ms. Goldstein, and then break our “no e-mail” rule to send our boss a message: we'll be taking the rest of the day off.

Heather Thompson, Aviva Drescher, and Carole Radziwill

Now that Bravo has officially given the axe to Real Housewives of New York Alex McCord, Jill Zarin, Kelly Bensimon, and Cindy Barshop , the rumor treadmill is already up and burning its morning calories over who the new school of classy ladies will be. New York Daily News has already fingered Kennedy-by-association Carole Radziwill, along with Yummie Tummie designer Heather Thomson and philanthropist Aviva Drescher.

The Observer was also been tipped off about Ms. Radziwill joining the cast, so that means the ABC producer and widow of Anthony Radziwill is definitely in, right?

For a little background info on these other two ladies: Ms. Drescher has a current Fame Game ranking of 18651 and is a philanthropist of some sort. (She lists her job as CEO of the Drescher Family, ostensibly because her husband, Reid Drescher, is busy being the founder of Spencer Clarke Securities & Investment Banking.) She will be playing the role, according to the Daily News' source, of the "Wall Street wife." She is also the only one of the three women who has not been featured on Oprah.

Ms. Thompson, according to Yummie Tummie's website, was the founding Design Director of "Sean 'Diddy' Combs" clothing line, but after working with some of the biggest names in entertainment for several years, decided to strike out on her home to create "3 section system" to sexify post-baby bodies. As late as August she was going by Heather Thompson-Schindler, but has dropped that last name somewhere in the last couple months. And she's already camera-ready!

But let's not jump the gun here: A Bravo spokesperson we talked to says they haven't made an announcement about the new women, and the Internet has been known to be fallible, even when it comes to the very important news of who will be crying to Andy Cohen on upcoming reunion episodes. Good luck ladies!

The Oprah Effect, which was the subject of its own CNBC special, can be credited with the rise of many media stars, like Drs. Phil, Oz and Laura, but not before the lucky few are vetted on Wifnrey's couch and groomed by her in-house production company, Harpo Productions. What Winfrey calls "friends" most of us would probably call colleagues and associates.

With so many pals to give talk shows, so many reruns to syndicate, and so much proprietary b-reel to reheat for behind-the-scenes documentaries, filling up OWN's programming must have been a cinch. Perhaps she didn't even need Terry Wood after all?

Click through for a look at The Spoils of Oprah's Friendship. >>

At one point Winfrey awkwardly reminisced with the group about how none of them were ever able to beat her ratings.

"One of the things that we are all proud of, our team, is that we've been on for 25 years, we've been the number one talk show for 25 years … but there were a few days when some of you actually beat us in the ratings and i hear you guys remember those days?" Winfrey asked. 

"I remember one of them," Rivera said. 

Raphael said she "never once" managed to top Oprah's ratings. 

"We just wanted to be you, have your money, live your life," joked Raphael.

Winfrey mostly just laughed and laughed.  

Tomorrow's episode of the "Oprah Winfrey Show" will feature appearances from Ricki Lake, Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Montel Williams. This much nineties nostalgia and daytime talk power has never before been assembled in the same place, at the same time. Sadly, Maury Povich will not be coming to give paternity tests to his fellow daytime hosts.

In November, Oprah announced that she would be leaving daytime after 25 years to focus on her cable television network. The Oprah Winfrey Network launches January 1, 2011.