Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

steve

With "LOD" Since 1997
Updated: 04:33 PM EDT
Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

CHICAGO (Sept. 13) - Talk show host Oprah Winfrey celebrated the premiere of her 19th season Monday by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.

AP
Winfrey poses outside Harpo Studios with audience members after giving each of them a new Pontiac G6.

"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said.

Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage. She gave each of them a car - a Pontiac G6.

She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.

"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.

The audience members screamed, cried and hugged each other - then followed Winfrey out to the parking lot of her Harpo Studios to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.

One woman stepped up onto the frame of a driver's side door, put her head on the roof and hugged the vehicle.

Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written to the show about their need for a new car. One woman's young son said she drove a car that "looks like she got into a gunfight"; another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.

In other segments on the show, Winfrey surprised a 20-year-old girl who had spent years in foster care and homeless shelters with a four-year college scholarship, a makeover and $10,000 in clothes. And a family with eight foster children who were going to be kicked out of the house they were renting were given $130,000 to buy and repair the home.

"The Oprah Winfrey Show," which debuted in 1986, is syndicated to 212 domestic markets and 109 countries.

On the Net:

http://www.oprah.com

09/13/04 12:36 EDT

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
 
RE: Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

I haven't watched Oprah in years, but that's cool.
 
RE: Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

[div class="dcquote"][strong]Quote[/strong]
I haven't watched Oprah in years, but that's cool.
[/div]

You use to watch Oprah? :p
 
RE: Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience

[div class="dcquote"][strong]Quote[/strong]
[div class="dcquote"][strong]Quote[/strong]I haven't watched Oprah in years, but that's cool. [/div]You use to watch Oprah? :p
[/div]

Yeah, when the kid was a baby, before I went back to work.
 
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