Guilty Pleasure

Nothing more feels like a comfy sweater on a chilly Sunday afternoon than a Suzanne Somers sell-a-thon on the Home Shopping Network. I literally have my TiVo trained to find whenever she is on with these weekend marathons and record them.

Back in the early 80s, after her husband/manager/dunderhead Alan Hamel negotiated Suzanne off "Three's Company" and into oblivion, she must have had this great epiphany. Certainly not the dumb blonde she always portrayed, Suzanne apparently realized that she would never be confused with Uta Hagen. (I bet you thought you'd never see those two names in the same sentence). She was not destined to play Blanche DuBois on Broadway. So, for a while, she stumbled around the backwoods of television, doing a Lifetime movie here and a Patrick Duffy sitcom there. But, her destiny...and dollar value lay elsewhere.

The woman is a genius. Why? Because she figured out how stupid the territory between New York and Los Angeles really is. So, she goes out to Van Nuys, buys herself a warehouse of junk, and then sells it on television.

And they buy it up like fried pork rinds.

Every three months or so, Suzanne commandeers the HSN Network for whole weekends at a time. And she sells. And sells. And sells. Sweaters. Pants suits. Jewelry made with the finest of Cubic Zirconium. Exercise machines. Make-up. Pajamas. She has these little electronic devices that help you remove wrinkles around your eyes. They look like jumper cables for a Matchbox car. Along with her co-host Colleen, who is absolutely giddy with delight, Suzanne hawks with the passion of Elmer Gantry and the street sense of Robert Preston in the Music Man. Seventy-six trombones, feh! Suzanne would have gotten River City to ante up for twice as many...with bedroom slippers to match.

All Suzanne Somers products (also available on the Suzanne Somers website) come validated with the official Suzanne Somers seal of approval. It's her own personal Hirschfeld. But, probably, drawn by Lou, Abe's second cousin.

If John Kerry and Al Gore want to know why they lost their respective elections, all they need to do is listen to some of the phone calls that come in while Suzanne is on the air. Every one of the women have a Southern accent and proceed to thank Suzanne profusely because that gold-studded bathroom robe they bought prompted some life-altering experience. And Suzanne gushes with pride as she sells some more. And more. And more. You get to watch the number of items sold on the screen. When you do the simple math and realize that Suzanne's total production cost consists of about 6 Filipino ten-year-olds living in Oxnard, the profit margin for one such weekend goes into the millions.

And she doesn't stop with the clothes closet. While she's always quick to point out she stocks sizes up to XXXL, she's also got the solution for you if you truly want to lose those tricky seventy or eighty pounds. Suzanne will teach you how to diet. Namely, Somersize. She's concocted her own dietary sweetener that you mix into smoothies made in your Suzanne Somers blender. Mix it into her pudding mix, her ice cream sauces, and anything else that is available in the Suzanne Somers pantry. The pounds will melt faster than the lab rats who tested this stuff will drop dead. It's all within your grasp, Suzanne says. Just reach for your goals. And that will be $59.50, thank you very much.

This is a sociology lesson like no other. And it is, by far, the most hilarious and addictive program on television. My God, she's even a dentist.

And, just to show you that Suzanne is not greedy, she will be very happy to tell you how to become part of her amazing empire.

Call now. You won't be sorry. And, if you're one of the first fifty to respond, Suzanne will be happy to send you her new pain killing medicine, approved by several doctors in Argentina.

Dinner last night: grilled bratwurst.