My Point...And I Do Have One

I must answer, “Why not.” Miracles do happen.
    Icanarod, Iwillarod, Iwinarod, Iditarod.

J OURNAL E NTRY
    I won! I won! They say I didn’t. They say I cheated. They say I’ve been disqualified. All I know is I finished first. My team and I were the first ones to get from Anchorage to Nome.
    They can bitch and moan as much as they please. Nowhere in the rules does it say you can’t use a Winnebago. It was a stroke of genius and a bit of luck. Who would have guessed that there was an auto dealership across the street from the dog groomer? With the sled and dogs and cats in the back, we just took off down the freeway. We beat the nearest racer by two days and we rarely went over fifty-five miles an hour, mainly because Muffin gets nauseous if I drive any faster.
    As for the other Iditaroders, I have never seen such a group of sore losers in my life. But I pity them more than hate them. They’re just jealous.
    I can’t get rid of my posse (that’s what I’ve started calling my team). To hell with neighborhood rules, I’m keeping them all. Maybe I’ll return to defend my title next year. Back to back!

J OURNAL E NTRY
    Life has no meaning again. I gaze into the abysmal void that is my soul and all that is reflected back is my own emptiness. I am bored and restless. The high of being the Iditarod champion did not last long. I need a new challenge. But what?
    My posse, my team, my cats and dogs: They’re listless as well. I try to maintain a happy exterior for their sake, but they’re not fooled.
    Once again I’m watching
Regis and Kathie Lee
. Even Kathie Lee’s stories about Cody fail to cheer me up. Before I turn off the set and do God knows what, I see an image: a boat skating across the sea. A woman mentions the America’s Cup, the world’s premier yacht race. Yes!!!!
    I bet there are no rules about having pets as part of your crew. Me and my posse start training tomorrow. Until I get a yacht, we’ll just use an inflatable raft in my pool.
    The dream lives.

ellenvision

    I feel extremely lucky to have my own TV show. Every day I pinch myself because I’m sure I must be dreaming. Actually, I don’t pinch myself. It’s one of my manager’s jobs to pinch me and say, “You ain’t dreamin’, kid!” Then I pinch him, he pinches me back, and it usually ends up in a slap fight. Sometimes the slap fight lasts until midnight. Then we call it a day, go to sleep, and repeat it all again the next morning.
    I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m so happy that my show is as good, and as based in reality, as it is. You wouldn’t believe some of the shows that were offered me by network executives before I accepted
Ellen
(which, by the way, is named for Ellen Burstyn).
    In one show presented to me, I was going to be a single news producer for a small TV station in Minneapolis. I said, “That sounds an awful lot like
Mary Tyler Moore.
” They replied, “Who’s going to remember?”
    Other shows I was offered included
Hello Ellen
(with MacLean Stevenson),
Ellen the Chimp Lady
, and a sitcom version of
The Piano
—I was going to play the Holly Hunter part, and either Siegfried or Roy was going to play the Harvey Keitel role.
    I think the worst idea I was subjected to was a show called
Inky Dinky Do. “Inky Dinky Do,”
I said, “what’s it about?” The network executive said, “We don’t know yet. All we’ve come up with is the title.”
    I don’t mean to imply that I haven’t gotten weird notes from the network about my show now. They’d like me to develop some magic powers, like the ability to see through lead or bend spoons with my mind. But no matter how weird my show—
Ellen
—might get, nothing compares to how weird TV was during the sixties.
    Not that there aren’t bad shows on now, but at least they kind of have a base in reality. Well, okay,
Melrose Place
doesn’t.
    The sixties were when hallucinogenic drugs were becomingreally, really big. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we had the type of shows that we had then, like
The Flying Nun
.
    If you think about it, nuns were very popular in the sixties. They must have had a good publicist then. They had
The Sound of Music
, about a nun. They had
The Singing Nun
—remember her? “Dominique a nique a nique a Dominique …” So they figure, “Hey, the nuns are popular, let’s do a TV show.” But I think it was just about nuns until they got the Network Notes. “Nuns are good. People will watch. But, couldn’t