I Think About This a Lot: Kirstie Alley’s Bikini Reveal on Oprah

I Think About This a Lot is a series dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.

In November 2006, I was a second-year student at the Paramus Catholic High School in northern New Jersey. Almost every day after school, I will take the NJ Transit bus to my grandparents’ home, where I will eat snacks, practice piano, and go out to play with my grandmother. Sometimes we watch Oprah.

We are not loyal fans, we are usually just in the background at dinner. By 2006, Oprah was “good at living the best, embracing the law of attraction” Oprah. Most of the time I remember the episodes of family dramas that were at stake near the supermarket tabloids – episodes about “being fascinated with 28-year-old plastic surgery” or “extreme miracle captured on videotapes.” But this time I returned to my mind, usually in the bikini, Kirstie Alley’s big road.

The strange thing is that everything that should be burned into my mind is Kirstie Alley in a red lace bikini. At the time, I recognized Alley from Cheers and Star Trek II: Khan’s Wrath, but I was not very interested in her personal weight loss battle. I remember the propaganda film of the episode a few days before the broadcast, and I heard Oprah’s voice telling us to listen to BIG REVEAL. The guidance of the actual event is so excessive, you will think that she is doing something for us to do something more groundbreaking than a woman wearing a swimsuit on TV.

Obviously I am not the only one who thinks this episode is an unforgettable episode, because at that time “Kirstie Alley Donned a Bikini” was the first part of the Orpah.com column, and the moment called “Remember When?” Kirstie followed After the time “Mel Gibson Smoked on stage,” Lindsay Lohan solved the tabloid rumor “and” Oprah danced with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “President Barack Obama starred in 2005” He is just a new ginseng Members of the House “also appeared in Lindsay Lohan and the younger Jerry Seinfeld on the list above.

According to Oprah’s show, Kirstie Alley had an epiphany after realizing that his weight was a vicious tabloid and paparazzi goal in 2004. “She quit smoking the next day and decided to change her life,” it said. “Deciding to put down some size of the clothes, she became a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig Weight Loss Program.” In this way, she was endorsed by Jenny Craig, and it was reported that Alley lost 75 pounds in two years. Is there any better way to commemorate such an achievement, rather than winning the Oprah Winfrey show in a small dress like the daytime talk show TV standard?

When this moment finally came, the sliding doors behind the stage were separated – outside the darkness and fog – and Alley strode off a runway built for this purpose. I looked – sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen, maybe drinking chocolate milk, eating a small cake than a snack cake – I thought, “Wait, she really doesn’t wear a bikini, is it?” When Kirstie Alley unlocked her The big chiffon scarf on her body was noticeable at the waist, and her belly was covered with a flesh-colored mosquito net – she later called it a “striped hose” in a strange interview with Larry King in 2009. The Commodores’ 1977 hit “Brick House” has been played in the background, the camera aimed at the female face in the audience, looks as confused as I am.

Although it is ridiculous, when I try on clothes in the Mandee and H&M locker rooms, that moment will return to my high school. When I was 16 years old, I was awkward; I didn’t have much interest in makeup, and I didn’t find the joy of hair mousse. I looked at my soft, pale lower abdomen, under the flesh-colored body stockings, it would never be calm. I will never have the courage to wear a bikini on the Jersey coast, let alone in front of the live studio audience, and there is a funk soundtrack in the background.

We feel very comfortable with the premise that bikinis present: a woman gains weight, is humiliated by others, hates herself, loses weight, and becomes a new, better person. I think my 16-year-old self-expectation is more from Oprah. At the end of the day, it feels like another daytime talk show that sells suspicious products and becomes the carrier of the new era master James Ray and the former memoirs James Frey.

In the end, the Kirstie Alley segment embodies the pseudo-authorization of pop culture – from Dove’s “True Beauty” ad to the latest Sports Illustrated Swimwear Edition, the #MeToo campaign has been added in a delightful and transparent way. Maybe that’s why I still think of Alley’s bikini. As many “before and after” reveal, it is done in the best interests of man. This is a spectacle, a looping scene that can be seen everywhere from Nutrisystem commercials to Instagram influencers. But for me, it always looks like a forcible catwalk, wrapped in nude socks.