The queen of talk referred to him as “Mr. Man” while others dubbed him “Oprah’s human hanky.” Two days after appearing on newscasts broadcast around the world the bespectacled man who gave Oprah Winfrey a shoulder to cry on in Grant Park on Election Day finally revealed his real name: Sam Perry.
Sam is the man… for now anyway.
Perry’s 15 minutes of fame kicked off Tuesday night during President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. The Silicon Valley, California businessman and Obama campaign worker gained instant fame after video crews caught a teary Winfrey draped over his shoulder during the politician’s address to the massive crowd.
Yesterday Winfrey took time to introduce Perry to her in-studio audience and millions of viewers watching her show from home. The talk show legend revealed that the crowd at Grant Park was so dense on Tuesday night that she didn’t even know who Perry was at the time.
“I never even saw his full face. I only saw him from the side,” Winfrey said. “So if I had to identify him from a lineup, I couldn’t.”
During her show Winfrey thanked Perry and apologized for not asking his name at the rally.
For his part Perry revealed that since Tuesday he had received nearly 1,000 phone calls, emails and text messages about his famous encounter with the media mogul.
“It’s very good, actually, that the cameras where there,” Perry told Winfrey. “Because it was a lot easier to go home to my wife and say ‘It really was Oprah.'”
OBAMA’S POET–NOT
Despite being one of the world’s most famous poets and composing original works for a former president, Maya Angelou says it’s not likely that she will be called on to write a new selection for Barack Obama.
“I’m sure Mr. Obama, president-elect, will have them bring his own poet,” the 80-year-old writer told reporters Friday.
In 1992 the famed African-American poet and author of such books as “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was asked by Bill Clinton to compose a poem and read it at his inauguration. But she says her fans shouldn’t expect another command performance.
According to Angelou, Obama has not approached her about the inauguration and she doesn’t expect he will. Regardless, that’s not stopping her from working on a poem about the election of the nation’s true first black president. Angelou says while she hasn’t started the prose yet, she is determined to mark the milestone in her own words.