Oprah! (And Chicago)

Warning, this is a long, long post! SO much happened in Chicago, not only getting to meet Oprah but getting bumped from dozens of flights flying standby. I want to remember all the details, so just scan the pictures if you don’t have an eternity to sit and read.

This post has been in the works for a couple days, and as you can see is about a week late. We got home last Tuesday, and I’ve just now had time to document all the details of our trip.

As I mentioned below the other week, my good friend Jordan won tickets to the Oprah show for a taping last Thursday, Oct. 14th. The process for getting in Oprah’s audience is so complicated now that it’s her last season. We’d each been writing essays on various show topics to get selected. Apparently they want super-fans in each audience taping, for whatever subject they’re talking about on the show. We found out 6 days before the taping she’d been selected and she had 48 hours to confirm whether or not we could make it. We were so discouraged looking up flights and hotels—everything was so expensive, we were wondering if we could make it work.

We called friends, posted on Facebook, and asked everyone for advice or hook-ups on travel. A friend got us buddy passes to fly out to Chicago—meaning we had to fly standby but only had to pay taxes for the flight. Then a bunch of people recommended Priceline for hotels. I’d never used it before but it ended up being amazing. We got a hotel in downtown Chicago, right near Michigan Ave, for $160/night rather than their normal fee of $250/night. Jordan and I both have baby boys under the age of 1 (Hutch is 9 months old), so our next hurdle in planning the trip was deciding to bring the babies or find babysitting. At first we thought we’d find some friends to watch them here in Salt Lake, but then felt strongly that we needed to take them to keep our husbands from stressing out about babysitting with their hectic work schedules. Also, we were flying standby so we didn’t know exactly when we’d return. Jordan called her mom in Portland to discuss, and Tami offered to fly out to Chicago to watch the babies for us while we went to Oprah, and help us with the hotel! She is a saint. We are so glad Tami was able to come with us.

Jordan and I were beyond excited getting ready for the trip—dreaming of winning something on Oprah and getting to talk to her. They day before we left Jordan made awesome shirts to wear on the flight out there—OPRAH or BUST! Everyone we met cheered us on, hoping we’d get to meet her: the ticketing agents, flight attendants, taxi drivers, and our hotel staff. We learned later when we got stranded in Chicago that it really pays to be nice and talkative with everyone you meet. We got a lot of help later in the weekend.

Here we are early in the morning at the SLC Airport with the boys. Imagine us in the airport: two babies, two car seats, two strollers, and four suitcases! We were a comical sight. When you travel with a baby, you can never travel light.

We were so optimistic about making our flight that we didn’t realize how dicey standby flying can be. One minute there can be 5 open seats on a flight, and then a bunch of airline employees can show up and take those seats because they have first priority. (Buddy passes have lowest priority because we are only friends of employees.)

We hung out at the gate that morning waiting to see if we’d make it.

Just before the flight, the gate attendant told us we may have to split up. We decided not to at first, but then felt strongly that we should as the attendant was waiting for a couple to decide if they were going to split up. The hotel was in my name so we decided I’d go first. As I was walking into the ramp, a flight attendant came off the plane and announced they had room for one more. They pointed to Jordan and said, “You, come on, quickly!”. We rushed down to the plane and cheered a little that we’d both made it on.

We joked on the flight that our luck was really good so far—we’d lucked out on all the travel arrangements, made our first flight, and Emerson even fell asleep on my lap on the plane! That was a minor miracle. When we got to Chicago, the luck seemed to continue—our bags were the first off at baggage claim, in a line of car taxis a van pulled up just when we stepped onto the curb, and our hotel upgraded us to a bigger room. Here we are in the cab on our way to the city.

We spent the day exploring Chicago and getting food, but then had to get back early to get the kids to bed. We ended up at a crazy diner with a waiter who pulled up a chair and chatted with us for about 20 minutes. At first it was funny, but then it was a little awkward.

(I decided to bring our new Phil & Teds stroller to Chicago instead of the BOB, so we could put both boys in it if needed. It worked so well and squeezed through all the tiny doors and walkways in the city. Thank you Costco special!)

The boys loved it too.

Our hotel was a boutique hotel, so as they say it’s cozy. That is code for really, really small. We couldn’t sleep we were so excited for Oprah the next day.

They only had space for one Pack n Play, so Hutch had to sleep in the bathtub! Emerson can climb out of the tub, so that wasn’t an option, but he had to sleep in the curtains to fit. It was seriously hilarious to see us all crammed in this room; at night we had to brush our teeth and wash our faces in the lobby bathroom because Hutch was sleeping. It made for a good story when we went to Oprah.

Hutch’s bed

E’s bed

Tami came in that night and helped watch the kids the next morning while we got ready for the show. We heard that wearing bright colors, looking stylish, and having an energetic personality gets you selected to sit in the front, so that was our goal.

We made a mental list of our goals for the show:

- Get selected to sit in the front seating (there are about 6 rows in the front by the stage that 30 people are selected to sit in, and then a huge stadium seating arrangement behind that where several hundred are packed in)

- Meet Oprah

- Talk to Oprah

- And WIN something

Here we are in the cab on the way to Harpo Studios:

We got there about an hour earlier than they said to, and found the line was already pretty long. We chatted with other women and discussed what the show topic might be—my friend had written an essay about Susan Boyle and Jackie Evancho (the 10 year-old opera singer) to get on the show, but in our final email confirmations they didn’t mention the show topic at all. Other women said they weren’t told a show topic, and some said they’d applied to be on the Tyler Perry or Debby Boone shows. Also, they switched us to the B show taping just a couple days before (Oprah usually tapes two shows a day when she’s in Chicago), so we were dying with curiosity.

Here we are in line; we speculated with the other women as to what kind of car Oprah was going to give each of us.

The rest of our Oprah experience has no photo documentation because they took our bags and checked them for the show, but here are the details. We waited in line for about a half hour, and were then transferred to a holding room for about 45 minutes. When we were in line we made sure to be chatty with the line attendants, talkative, and high energy. Basically, we were trying to get noticed. We talked to every person we could that worked for Harpo.

They then came on the microphone and announced they were going to let us into the studio, but first were going to call some names to go ahead of everyone else. We listened hoping they called us. Finally, the second to last name called was “Jordan Page Party” and we cheered! The women we’d met cheered for us also. They directed us into the studio and we saw we’d been selected to sit in the front. The energy of the studio was unbelievable, with music playing and women dancing and cheering. The Harpo producers color code the front section of the audience and placed each of us in certain seats. Jordan and I were placed in the fourth row. We were a little bummed so we joked with the producer woman, “Hey how do we get in the front row?” She said, “Trust me, you’re good where you are.” We didn’t know what that meant, but we were stoked to have great seats and be so close to the stage.

As all the seats started filling in, we noticed that one was empty in front of us and a reserved sign was placed on it. A producer then brought an audience member up and whispered, “This is going to be Oprah’s seat; because this is a concert show she will be sitting in the audience for the singing. When she goes up on stage, I’ll motion for you to come fill this seat.” Because Jordan and I were sitting right next to that seat we heard the whole conversation and basically started screaming. Oprah was sitting right next to us. That’s why the supervisor said we’d be good where we were… of course, right next to Oprah.

Here’s a picture of me and Oprah (kind of!)

The next half hour was spent pumping up the crowd. Harpo Studios has several audience supervisors that not only place audience members in a color coordinated fashion, but they talk to the crowd for a while to get us excited for the show. They started by saying things like, “Welcome to Oprah’s FAREWELL season!!" The audience of course cheered like crazy to this. Really, anything they said made us cheer because it was so exciting to be there. After telling us about the show (it was Susan Boyle, Jackie Evancho, and Debby Boone) and giving us a pep talk on how to be a good audience member (sway to the music, clap a lot, cheer, etc.), they asked for some people to raise their hands and tell us where they came from to be here. One couple was from Jamaica, another from Hawaii and the woman was crying she was so happy to be there, some guys from D.C., and more. Then Jordan raised her hand. She explained how the following:

1) How we’d won last minute reservations to the show

2) How we had to bring our babies to Chicago with us and flew standby, armed with two strollers, two carseats, four suitcases (and of course two babies)

3) How she accidentally dropped her baby on the plane and then because they didn’t have room for two cribs at the hotel, her boy had to sleep in the bathtub. Every time he rolled over at night we heard him bonk his head and cringed because of the big bruise he got on the plane!

4) How my baby had to sleep under the curtains because there was no room for the Pack N Play elsewhere

5) And how her mom had to fly in to watch our babies

Jordan was really funny in front of the audience and her little story made us minor celebrities in Chicago for the weekend. In the Oprah store after the show people kept coming up to us saying, “Are you the ones with the babies?? Sleeping in the bathtub?!” Then, at dinner 3 different groups of people recognized us and stopped to ask about our story and how we got to sit so close to Oprah. Then, at the hotel a huge group of women stopped us to ask about our story, and how we were able to sit up front. So we weren’t really celebrities, but in our own little way we were.

When they were done pumping up the audience, music played for a bit. Then, the lights went low and Oprah came out from the back and shouted, “Helllloooo Everyooone!" in her saucy voice that she does. We all started cheering wildly and dancing to the music. Everyone was reaching out to touch her, but Jordan and I tried played it cool and just clapped along. Then, Oprah came right up to Jordan and touched her shirt (!) and said, “I love your shirt!” “Is this from J.Crew?” Jordan responded a little late because all she could get out was, “Oprah’s touching me!” When she responded that it was from J. Crew, Oprah said, “I have this same one! Don’t you guys just love J. Crew??” Yes, Oprah we do. We like anything you do. Good thing we didn’t respond with that. Because she was right in front of us she talked to us during every commercial break and between performances. She was definitely more cool and down to earth than I thought she’d be. She talked about her big feet, how if she ever gets nervous in front of a big star she reminds herself that they pee too, shoes, and more. In the end though, Jordan and I couldn’t get over that Oprah has her shirt.

I also should mention that Oprah came in wearing a swanky black dress (below), and instead of wearing her amazing Christian Louboutin heels she was carrying in her hands, she was wearing comfy black flats. After talking to us she asked her stage manager if she had to put the heels on before the first shot, or if she could just hold them behind her back. It was awesome. Even Oprah can’t stand heels.

I also need to note that Oprah is so much smaller in person than she looks on TV. Yes she’s a little busty, but Oprah looks good! Her legs were teeny as well.

The show consisted of concerts and interviews back and forth. We sang and cheered during the music and watched in awe during the interviews as Oprah did everything in one take—no re-dos. She is unreal on camera. She is articulate, personable, just emotional enough, and has a great TV voice. During each break her team lint-rolled her dress, brushed her hair, and straightened her clothes. Life is good for Oprah.

As the show wrapped up, Jordan and I were bummed that we didn’t win anything, but happy that we’d at least crossed of all our other goals. Then, just after Oprah closed the concert segment of the show, she said we were going to do something a little non-traditional. She was filming a supposedly live clip to be aired on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show that night. She was going to say a joke that apparently none of us would understand (something about pranking Jon Stewart’s audience), and then we were told by the crew to laugh like it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. (So much for live TV, right?). A clip rolled and then Oprah said, “Thank you to XBox for helping me play that prank on Jon Stewart’s audience.” She then started describing XBox’s new product, the Kinect, which uses full body movement and sensors to control video games. Then Oprah screamed, “And you’re ALL going home with a new XBox and KINECT!” Even though the audience was 90% women and not of the gaming sort, we all jumped up and down screaming, “We won something on Oprah!” Everyone talked about how their son or husband would love this gift… Jordan and I thought it was the perfect gift for our husbands, for sending us on this wild adventure. Below is a link to a clip of our giveaway:

http://gizmodo.com/5668115/oprah-audience-explodes-into-hysterics-over-free-xbox-kinects

We left the show full of energy—the whole experience was definitely more fun than I thought it would be . We were surprised how well Harpo carried out every detail, from seating the audience, to setting the stage meticulously, to getting the audience excited, and of course Oprah’s stage presence. Jordan and I kept talking about how so many great things had happened on this trip—wow, we thought, we are lucky. Looking back this is so laughable because the journey home was so miserable it sure made up for our good luck on Oprah.

After the show we went to the Oprah store then rushed home to our boys. So glad I could do this with you Jord! We always have the best time together. Thank you, Thank you!

Tami was amazing with them all day—taking them on walks, watching Baby Einstein, and playing in the hotel room. Like I said, she is a saint. No one we met at the show could believe she flew from Portland just to watch them for us.

That night we dined at Giordano’s thick buttery deep dish pizza. Hey, we were hungry after being out with no food for 8 hours. Man, that stuff is good!

The next day, Friday, we spent exploring the city. I’d been to Chicago twice before but hadn’t seen all the sights, and it was Jordan’s first time. We walked and shopped Michigan Ave., went to Cloud Gate (the bean!), and spent several hours in the Chicago Art Institute, which really made me miss museums. During Study Abroad we’d go to museums every day for several hours… and we were taking classes about art history and art symbology, so we felt very educated about the art we were looking at. Now, I feel like I’ve lost it all (and almost everything else from college).

Playing in Millennium Park

Sleeping in the museum

That evening I met one of my good friends Jessica for dinner. Jessica and I grew up together and then took French together at BYU. She and her husband live downtown right off Michigan Ave. I cannot believe how great their location is. We loved catching up at wrestling Emerson at the great Thai place we chose. I couldn’t believe it was 8pm and Emerson had been out all day with only one short nap in his stroller—what a trooper. Thanks Jess for hanging out with us!

That night we returned to the hotel exhausted. Hauling myself around a big city is tiring enough, but with a baby? Yes, we were tired. We had planned to leave Sunday but our friend that works for Delta (who hooked us up with buddy passes) said the flights looked really booked Sunday, so we should try to fly out Saturday. We decided to skip our last day to try to get home early. We woke up Saturday, packed up and pleaded with our hotel to refund our last night (through Priceline, so it was a bit complicated). After I sweet-talked the front desk they obliged. We caught a cab to the airport and planned to make our first flight. We even checked our bags and suitcases we were so optimistic. HAH!

Not only did we get bumped from the first flight, but the second, third, and fourth. At this point we had two hungry and tired babies (luckily we had their strollers, so they napped in those at the airport), two tired adults, and no clothes, food, car seats, or formula! Laugh out loud. Really. That’s what we did. We started laughing at our pathetic situation. With no more flights for the day we were officially stranded in Chicago.

We called Mitch and he quickly booked us a hotel near the airport for $50 bucks a night on Priceline (3 stars!). Mitch is awesome in stressful situations. The hotel was actually really nice and luckily had a big shuttle bus to drive us there (no small shuttle vans could take us because we didn’t have car seats). We made friends with our Pakistani driver, Sayid, and he took pity on us. Because we couldn’t take a cab to go buy essential needs like underwear, baby food, and clean clothes without car seats, Sayid offered to drive us in the huge hotel shuttle bus, to Target and then pick us up! It was hilarious. Have you ever been dropped off at a Target in a hotel shuttle bus? We picked over the sale rack for ourselves and our babies to buy some pajamas, underwear, diapers, formula, etc. Luckily we’d felt strongly to take a carryon with baby supplies so we had some things with us.

Here we are at Target with the mega cart

At this point these babies weren’t phased by anything—airports all day, getting shuttled around, hanging out at Target. They even look somewhat happy here. We kept joking that it’s a good thing they aren’t older, or they’d officially think their mothers are crazy. We had no clue what we were doing with standby flying (clearly), but luckily I was with such a fun and positive person like Jordan. We laughed at every terrible mishap for the next three days. More to come on that.

When we got back to the hotel we called our Delta friend and she again told us the flights for Sunday looked terrible. Not only over-booked but multiple people in front of us on standby, for every flight to SLC. In all my life I’ve never thought of Salt Lake as a hot-spot destination, but clearly it was last weekend! Even the Delta employees said they’d never seen so much travel into SLC. Great timing. She advised us to skip the airport Sunday, have fun in Chicago and go back Monday. Well there was a boat tour we wanted to do, and even though we were outside the city we were right next to an L stop, so we decided to make Sunday another fun day downtown. We were convinced it would be our last day in Chicago. Seems so funny now.

Here are the boys in their new matching PJs. We could not believe they were even happy at this point.

And of course we were starving, so a large pizza for two made sense at the time.

Are you sick of this post yet? I sure am.

On Sunday we took the train downtown. It was a pretty day and with a pretty clear schedule we felt somewhat relaxed (though we were wearing Target underwear and had no hairbrushes).

Here we are at the L stop by our hotel. Too bad there was a Bears game that day—the train was packed! Some nice men gave us seats. (ps, do you like our clothes? They are all from Target ;)

We had a blast on the architecture boat tour. Between feeding our babies and changing diapers, we learned a lot about Chicago’s awesome buildings. Wish Mitch could have been there to hear it with me—he loves anything construction and architecture.

We finished the day walking to some more sites, shopping, and dining. By this point we were really, really exhausted.

We made it back to the hotel, put the boys in their second pair of new PJs and got rested up for travel, again. Throughout the trip Jordan and I kept joking that we didn’t miss our husbands because our boys look just.like.them. Look how Hutch and E are clones of Mitch and Bubba.

Here we are on the way to O’Hare, again. (I should also note that Mitch went to pick up our bags in SLC the day before. Delta reported to him that they’d accidentally switched my bag tags with someone else’s, so my bags were somewhere in the country!). Fun, huh?

4am in Chicago. No shower, more Target clothes. Luckily Emerson is a morning person. The second I woke him up he rolled over, smiled and stood up as if to say, I’m ready to go! Check out his hair!

When we got to the airport at 4:30am Monday morning, we saw the guy who had originally checked my bags (and lost them). He came up to us and said, “Hey didn’t I see you guys here on Saturday?” To which I replied, “Yeah and you lost my bags. They’re somewhere in the US. But don’t worry, worse stuff has happened so I’m not mad about it.” Really, at that point I just wanted to get home. I didn’t care what I had with me.

O’Hare was packed. Who knew Monday is the #1 business travel day? We do now. We proceeded to wait in our favorite Delta terminal all morning while we got bumped from flight after flight. We were almost at the top of the standby list for one flight when a Delta employee came. With her family. Of six! These people were clearly from Utah. After they rudely bumped us out of line, we had a bunch of drunk guys show up who missed the morning flight because they were “too drunk to find the boarding pass” as they told us. So they of course were placed in front of us too. Can you imagine? Our kiddos (and us) were reaching the breaking point here. We started scrambling—we borrowed a nice man’s laptop to look up Amtrak tickets to SLC from Chicago, looked up cost for plane tickets out of O’Hare or Midway (in case you’re wondering, day-of travel one-way tickets are about $900). Amtrak was going to be a 36 hour journey with one-seat for each of us. That really wasn’t going to work with infants. Sigh. I’m getting stressed just reliving this day.

And here we are playing on the airport floor. Yes, our kids were dirty. Deal with it.

We called our friend at Delta again and she said the flights for Tuesday morning looked awesome—meaning 18 open seats with only 5 on standby. We decided to risk it and stay one more day. We called Mitch again, he booked us another hotel for a great deal. As we admitted defeat leaving the airport, we could not believe our eyes when we found out our old shuttle driver Sayid—from the Holiday Inn—was working a shift for the Sheraton that day.

We checked into our third hotel in 3 days. At this point, we needed some help from above so we decided to wash our garments in the sink so we could wear them the next day. Who knew bar hand soap could clean clothes so well?

We started to panic when we opened our bags and evaluated our formula supply. Very very low. We had no transportation, a cab was going to be a ridiculous amount, and we had no car seats. When we went down to the lobby we found Sayid there. He offered to drive one of us to the drugstore for some formula. Part of our minds thought this could be scary, creepy, etc. to accept a ride alone with a 45 year-old man that we’d just met 2 days earlier. The motherly side said get your babies some formula! So Jordan stayed in the room with the babes while I fearfully set out with Sayid to get some formula. Luckily he was the nicest man alive. Luckily he didn’t even accept money for the ride. And luckily, I got the formula! Bless Sayid. He was the kindest person.

After one more night in a hotel, we were so ready to be home. We woke up at 3am again (!) to get to the airport for the 6am flight. Here we are on Tuesday morning. This time we decided to shower in case it was a long day.

When we got to the airport we learned that instead of 18 open seats there were now only 5… with 7 people on standby. Up until this point we’d been pretty positive about our pathetic situation, but finding out we might not make this flight made us want to cry. We stood by the gate praying somebody would sleep in. After everyone had boarded two people still hadn’t shown up—hallelujah! They hurried us onto the plane. We kept thinking they might kick us off if someone showed up, so we didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until the plane doors were shut. Oh my, I have never been so grateful to be on a plane in my life. I will never fly standby with a baby again.

Whew. That is it. We made it home Tuesday morning. Emerson and I came home and both took 2½ hour naps. The best and worst trip of our lives.

That day we watched the show with our husbands; Jordan had kept the XBox giveaway a secret from Bubba, so we documented his reaction while watching. Classic surprise!