12/11 Who Will Be Oprah’s Last Star?

Illustration by Stephen Kroninger; Evan Sing for The New York Times (Oprah Winfrey); Clockwise From Top Right: Reggie Casagrande, via Simon & Schuster; Matt Sayles, via Associated Press; Chester Higgins Jr., via The New York Times; Jeff Christensen, via Associated Press; Dimitrios Kambou- Ris, via Getty Images; Moshe Zusman Photography, via Associated Press; Chris Pizzello, via Associated Press; Thos Robinson, via Getty Images; Thor Swift for The New York Times; David M. Russell, via Harpo Inc., via Associated Press

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: November 12, 2010

EVERY time Stacy Igel concludes a meeting with her staff, she ends it roughly the same way: “O.K., I’ll see you on Oprah!”
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There’s just one hitch: Ms. Igel, the founder and creative director of Boy Meets Girl, a clothing company in Manhattan, has not been invited to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Not yet. But “I am always talking about Oprah,” she said the other day. “Over the years I saw her interviewing all of these designers, Tory Burch, Marc Jacobs.”
Ms. Igel, who has adopted the slogan “Passion. Drive. Oprah!” as a personal and professional mantra (you’ll find it on the Facebook page of her company), routinely pitches a producer at the show with whom she went to college. And she is considering having her brother-in-law, who she said lives in the same building as Ms. Winfrey’s close friend Gayle King, slip Ms. King some Boy Meets Girl merchandise — though the idea makes her uneasy.
“That’s a little aggressive for me,” she said.
Aggression, however, is probably warranted. The clock is ticking for those who envision themselves as the next Phil McGraw, Dr. Mehmet Oz, or Rachael Ray — all stars made significantly more luminous by Ms. Winfrey’s enthusiastic on-air endorsement. With the show’s finale at the end of May 2011 (some call it the Oprah-calypse), and only a limited number of guest appearances up for grabs, the would-be chosen have their work cut out for them.
“They’re scrambling,” said Susan Harrow, a California-based media coach who for decades has received so many “get me on Oprah” requests from writers, entrepreneurs, and even a Mafioso’s son, that she decided to write a handbook, “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah,” which she sells for $99 (you read that correctly).
Desire to be on the show, which will be in reruns from about June through Sept. 9, has intensified since Ms. Winfrey announced in November 2009 that it would end. Ms. Harrow said she hears a lot of “Can you get me on before Christmas?”
“The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which made its debut nationally in 1986, has become regarded as an express lane to the American dream. Sales climbed at once-little-known companies like Spanx, maker of the now-ubiquitous body-sucking undergarments, and at Philosophy, a skin care brand, after Ms. Winfrey mentioned their products on the show, which is watched by about 40 million people a week in the United States. For authors in particular she has been a fairy godmother. Publishers Weekly said last year that Ms. Winfrey “turned 63 books into best sellers” and that “one publishing insider estimated that Oprah’s selections alone generated $500 million in sales for the industry.”
Other beneficiaries include the fitness trainer Bob Greene; the designer Chris Madden; chefs like Art Smith and Rosie Daley; organizational experts, including Julie Morgenstern and Peter Walsh; and countless authors, like Eckhart Tolle. Regular guests of Ms. Winfrey’s show — Suze Orman, Mr. McGraw, Ms. Ray, Dr. Oz and, most recently, the interior designer Nate Berkus — became only more celebrated. They have also become the next generation of talk show hosts.
Ms. Winfrey, 56, is not vanishing. OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, a new cable channel she created with her production company and Discovery Communications, is scheduled to make its debut on Jan. 1. But when her stage goes dark after 25 seasons, so will a spotlight sharply focused on entrepreneurs, writers and self-help gurus, and with it, a method that generations used to calibrate career success.
“When Johnny Carson left, all the stand-up comedians in the world were lamenting because being on Carson was a dream for so many people,” said Cindy Ratzlaff, president of Brand New Brand You, a marketing and media strategy company. “And this is the same thing. Having your Oprah moment is the same as stand-ups wishing they had their Johnny Carson moment.”
And having an Oprah moment has never seemed more tantalizingly elusive.
Like most authors, Rebecca D. Costa — who wrote “The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction” (Vanguard Press, October 2010) — wants to get her book into Ms. Winfrey’s hands. So far Ms. Costa, a sociobiologist in San Francisco, has received testimonials from other bigwigs including Donald J. Trump; Trudie Styler, the actress and wife of Sting; Tina Brown, the founder of The Daily Beast and former editor of magazines including Vanity Fair and Talk; the former senator Bill Bradley; and Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group.
“It was easier for me to get a hold of Sir Richard Branson than it was for me to get my book in front of Oprah,” she said. “Now as I understand it, he’s floating on an island in the Caribbean somewhere!”
Ms. Costa (whose book explores why great civilizations fail and what can be done to stop it from happening again) is hoping Sir Branson will run into Ms. Winfrey and say, “By the way, Oprah, did you read this book?” But she is not overly optimistic.
“I’m standing in line next to a guy that has a cookbook and somebody that’s got an exercise video,” Ms. Costa said.
For Tina Marie Frawley, a novelist in Mount Pleasant, S.C., the wake-up call came in November 2009. “The news was out that Oprah was going off the air and total panic set in,” said Ms. Frawley, 29, who has been plodding along on a work of historical fiction for six years in between college and two waitressing jobs. “I said, ‘I need to get myself on the couch with Oprah,’ ” Ms. Frawley continued, “and I had at that point just over a year to do it.” She began chronicling her efforts to swiftly finish her novel, tentatively titled “The Princess of the Underground Railroad,” on a blog with a name that says it all: Oprahby2011.com.

Another author, Tchicaya Missamou, a former Congolese child soldier who found asylum in the United States in 1998 and became a United States Marine in 2000, is hoping to get on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with his memoir, “In the Shadow of Freedom: A Heroic Journey to Liberation, Manhood, and America” (Atria, August 2010). Recently, Mr. Missamou, who lives in Santa Clarita, Calif., with his wife and three children, mentioned Ms. Winfrey on CNN.
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He owns a gym called the Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, Calif., and he says is working to bring attention to the need for education in Africa.
“I need Oprah to help me help the people of the Congo,” Mr. Missamou said. “Women in Africa look at her like an idol. She is person from America, from a different continent, and she is investing a lot of time and passion in Africa. And here I am, a son of Africa, fighting for this country called America because I believe freedom is not a privilege. Freedom is a right.”
Many slots on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” alas, are already booked. And with recent guests like the former president George W. Bush, Ricky Martin, and Michael Jackson’s parents and children, it might appear that boldface names receive priority over unknowns.
But Angela DePaul, a spokeswoman for Harpo, Ms. Winfrey’s production company, said there is still hope. The show will be taping episodes in the studio from January through May.
Those who are overlooked might reassure themselves that while Ms. Winfrey has the Midas touch, not all of her guests strike gold.
“I’ve had a frequent number of authors and books on her show and some of them have gone on to have become enormous best sellers and some have not,” said Ms. Ratzlaff, the media strategist, who worked in publicity for Simon & Schuster and Rodale. It’s not necessarily as helpful to sales, for example, if an author is merely part of a panel. “She really has to hold your book up and say, ‘This book changed my life, I highly recommend this book,’ ” she said.
Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, co-founders of KIPP, the network of free college-preparatory public charter schools, did not become household names when they were interviewed by Oprah in April 2006. But the effect on KIPP was nonetheless dramatic. About 36,000 people visited KIPP’s Web site in the 36 hours after the episode was shown. The typical number of visitors to the Web site in a 36-hour period? Two thousand.
“It was unbelievable, the impact,” Mr. Levin said. “People knew about KIPP in a way that hadn’t ever happened before.”
In April 2005, the year after Ms. Burch, the fashion designer cited by Ms. Igel, founded her company, she was invited onto “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Immediately afterward, her Web site received eight million hits. “From one day to the next it was a very different story,” Ms. Burch said. “That can give you the magnitude of how she really helped us launch our business.”
There is no heir apparent to Ms. Winfrey; while Ellen DeGeneres is beloved, her tone is wrier. And industry professionals say “the Oprah effect” is matchless.
“I have spoken to some women who cried telling me about the show ending,” said Robyn Okrant, an actress and yoga teacher whose blog about living by Ms. Winfrey’s lifestyle suggestions led to a book, called “Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk” (Center Street, 2010). In March Ms. Okrant told readers of LivingOprah.com that she was taking yet another page from Ms. Winfrey’s book.
“She’s moving on because her show has run its course,” Ms. Okrant wrote, “and I think I should, too.”
But Emmanuel Lopez, 47, of Toronto who writes a film blog, Movies That Motivate, and leads seminars teaching people to follow their passion, has not given up on his dream of appearing on Ms. Winfrey’s show. For years, Mr. Lopez has been practicing the “law of attraction:” a belief that one must visualize goals to manifest them, put forth in the 2006 movie “The Secret” (yet another Oprah show topic).
This explains why he has captured screen grabs of guests on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” then pasted a photograph of his head on their bodies. In 2006 he pasted his face atop the comedian Jim Carrey. Last year, he stuck it on Brad Pitt.
“For me the biggest gift would be sitting in front of Oprah,” said Mr. Lopez, who likes to go by the moniker Motivatorman, “sharing my story, and having my mom in the front row.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2010, on page ST1 of the New York edition.

12/11 The Price 20-Somethings Pay to Live in the City

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Abe Cavin Quezada pays $500 for his 6-by-10 bedroom in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and Sarah Walsh pays $800 for her 6 1/2-by-8 1/2 bedroom on the Lower East Side.

By CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM
Published: November 12, 2010

ABE CAVIN QUEZADA, a 22-year-old aspiring music producer, lives with two roommates in a three-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Mr. Cavin Quezada, who works as an unpaid intern at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, has kind words for his building, a renovated tenement near Marcus Garvey Boulevard, and for his apartment, for which he pays $500 a month and has a 10-by-6-foot bedroom. But as for the neighborhood, he is less enthusiastic.
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“Before this I was living in a loft in Bushwick,” said Mr. Cavin Quezada, who grew up outside Washington. “This apartment is nicer, and has more amenities, but the neighborhood is noticeably fishier. In Bushwick, I never really felt threatened. Now, the sounds around are more aggressive. I’ll see 20 guys ride by on motorcycles, or hear gunshots outside my window.
“And one day,” he said, “in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, I saw a guy on a motorcycle with a handgun. It was not a reassuring sight.”
Mr. Cavin Quezada often works until 2 a.m. or later, and the first few nights after moving here, he considered asking one of his roommates to meet him at the subway after work and walk him back to the apartment.
Does his mother, who’s paying his rent, worry about him? “I don’t think I’ve given her enough details for her to worry,” Mr. Cavin Quezada said.
New York City was home to nearly 1.28 million people in their 20s last year, up from 1.21 million in 1980. In many respects, Mr. Cavin Quezada’s situation mirrors the way large numbers in that age group are living, three years after the Great Recession began.
To be sure, earlier generations had their share of hard-luck housing stories. But statistical evidence suggests that today’s new arrivals have a tougher struggle to live well, or even adequately, compared with their counterparts of just a decade ago. Battered by the one-two punch of persistent unemployment and the city’s high housing costs, they are squeezing into ever smaller spaces and living in neighborhoods once considered dicey and remote.
They are doubling, tripling, quadrupling and even quintupling up. According to the New York City Planning Department, 46 percent of New Yorkers in their 20s who moved to the city from out of state between 2006 and 2008 lived with people to whom they were not related, up from 36 percent in 2000.
Moving back in with parents is fast becoming the new normal. Those who do fly the family nest are paying an ever larger percentage of their often meager income for rent. Between 2006 and 2008, according to the Planning Department, the portion of New Yorkers in their 20s who moved to the city from other states and who paid at least 35 percent of their income for rent was 42 percent, up from 39 percent in 2000.
Even young people in high-paying fields like finance have to make sacrifices. There’s the investment banker who can afford only a 450-square-foot studio, and the financial analyst who lives in a third-floor walk-up studio illegally divided into two rooms.
In the words of Allison Gumbel, a 28-year-old photographer who lives in a third-floor walk-up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn: “There’s always a compromise. And when I say compromise, I don’t just mean that you don’t have nice floors or good light.”
Still young adults swarm to the city, especially those eager to pursue careers in finance, the arts, media and other fields for which New York has long served as the nation’s heart. They come to find work, to find one another and to hang out in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and the Lower East Side that have become almost geographic extensions of college dorm life. Here are some tales from the front lines.
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Stefan Rurak, 26, a furniture maker, has lived for two years in a former furniture store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. His roommate has the front room; Mr. Rurak has the 9-by-12-foot windowless space in the rear, for which he pays $325 a month. The arrangement isn’t legal, but it allows Mr. Rurak, an Oberlin graduate who moved to New York five years ago, to pursue work he loves.
“I really lucked out,” he said. “Without a doubt, I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing now without this space.”

“Like every artist,” he added, “I came to New York after college. I never planned on staying this long, but I did various things. I worked in construction, I worked as an art handler. Opportunities came up.
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“It’s not that I like New York so much. But things happen here that wouldn’t happen in other places.”
And he has only good things to say about his neighborhood. “It’s not like Williamsburg, at least not yet,” he said. “You don’t see all those college kids in tight pants. It’s not quote unquote hot.”
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Sam Tolman, a 21-year-old with a passion for cinema, lives with his brother, Henry, 23, in a two-story house on 246th Street in Riverdale, in the far northwestern Bronx. The house is owned by the grandmother of a family friend, who still lives there, and the brothers split the $500 rent for their first-floor space.
“We’re very lucky,” said Sam Tolman, who earned enough working as a waiter last summer to cover three months of his share of the rent. “We have a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom.” Each brother has his own bedroom. Visiting friends from Providence, R.I., where the Tolmans grew up, marvel at how much space they have.
Sam Tolman has two internships. He edits video for the Web site of the magazine published by Frank151, and he is part of the video team of BreakThru Radio, an Internet radio station. The first job is unpaid; the second provides a weekly stipend of $50.
But the commute is punishing. To get to his Frank151 job, which starts at 11 a.m., Mr. Tolman leaves the house at 9:30 and walks 15 minutes to catch the No. 7 bus. That takes him to the No. 1 train, from which he switches to the 2, the L and the R before arriving at his office.
The commute also crimps his social life.
“I’m really grateful to have a nice place for such a low cost,” Mr. Tolman said. “But I don’t feel as if I’m part of the city. Most of my friends are in Manhattan, and going out is a pain.”
Still, he added cheerfully, the arrangement suits him for now. “I love my jobs,” he said. “This is the price you pay to live in New York. To have what I want, you have to suffer a bit.”
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Sarah Walsh, a 24-year-old from Rye, N.Y., lives in what she describes as a “crummy little apartment,” a third-floor walk-up on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. She has two roommates, and her share of the rent is $800.
“I was extraordinarily lucky to find it,” said Ms. Walsh, who earns about $40,000 a year as a fund-raiser for Birthright Israel Foundation, a nonprofit organization. “I felt like I looked at a thousand apartments.”
The downside is that her room is just 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 feet. Because there’s no closet, she keeps her clothes in an armoire in the living room.
“I could have lived at home, in a giant room with a closet,” Ms. Walsh said. “But it’s so much fun to live in the city, to buy your own groceries. You make sacrifices to live here. If you want to be in Manhattan, it means a smaller apartment.”
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For Andrea Fisher, who is one of Ms. Walsh’s roommates and also grew up in Rye, it means an even tinier room, one with space for no more than a twin bed, a foot-square night table, a bookshelf and a laundry hamper. She has a small closet, but puts most of her clothes in the drawers under the bed, which she calls “a lifesaver.” Her rent, because she has the smallest bedroom, is $700 a month.
“It is small,” admitted Ms. Fisher, who is 24 and works for the Artists Rights Society, a group that represents artists dealing with copyright issues. But the appeal of the neighborhood compensates for the tight quarters.
“Besides,” she said, “you’re not looking to just hang out in your room.”
Ms. Fisher, who has outfitted her space with posters from art fairs and a rug she made when she worked for a textile designer, is completing work for a graduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Writing a thesis in a cubbyhole, she has discovered, can be a challenge.
“If you don’t have a desk,” she said, “it’s not as conducive to working. There’s no room to work in the living room, so I work and eat at the kitchen table.
“But I’m so proud I can support myself, and have an apartment on the Lower East Side that I can afford,” she said. Again and again she returned to the appeal of living in this part of the city.

“The neighborhood is definitely the best part,” she said. “There are tons of bars and restaurants, and the F train is right there, so it’s easy to get anywhere. Plus, as a girl, you never feel like you’re not safe. You can come home at 4 in the morning and the streets are filled with people.
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“We had a mouse,” she acknowledged. “But if you live on the Lower East Side, you’ll always have a mouse.”
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Ms. Gumbel, the 28-year-old photographer, pays $1,200 a month for her one-bedroom apartment in a renovated brownstone in Clinton Hill.
“It’s a nice apartment,” said Ms. Gumbel, who works as an office manager at Meyer Davis Studio, an interior design firm. But her subway trains, the G and the C, are routinely rated as among the city’s worst, and her commute to her office in SoHo, “which should be easy,” she said, takes 45 minutes. Still, she has no desire to leave New York.
“I studied fine arts,” said Ms. Gumbel, who graduated from Pratt Institute and has held many photo-related jobs. “I’m here for the art scene.”
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Ben Craw, a friend of Ms. Gumbel’s, lives with two friends in a four-story walk-up on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Mr. Craw, who is also 28, earns about $40,000 a year as a video editor for The Huffington Post. He chose the smallest of the three bedrooms, just 6 by 8 feet, because at just $534 a month it was the cheapest.
“I have a bed, a desk wedged between the bed and the wall, a folding chair, a window with a great view of the skyline,” he said. “That’s really all I need. I don’t have a lot of worldly possessions.”
For three young men with strong legs and simple needs, the apartment suffices. Mr. Craw uses his quarters mostly for sleeping and working on his laptop. And he can’t imagine being anyplace but the city.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” said Mr. Craw, who grew up in Fairfield County in Connecticut, “I always loved New York. I couldn’t wait to get out of my house. In terms of the jobs I wanted, the social life I wanted, I didn’t care where I lived as long as it was in the city. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that whatever it was, it would be most possible here.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2010, on page RE1 of the New York edition.