Now that her older kids have flown the nest and her youngest is entering Ridgefield's new full-day kindergarten in the fall, longtime stay-at-home mom Caroline Chanin wants to win a talk show.
"What am I going to do when Jeremy's in his full day?" she said.
Enter Oprah.
The talk-show guru is launching a television network, OWN, and she's holding a contest to pick contestants for a series that will end with one person winning a show. "Your OWN Show: Oprah's Search for the Next TV Star" will premier on OWN in 2011.
One way to enter the running is to submit a video and then try and collect as many votes as possible before the contest closes on July 3. And of the nearly 3,000 hopefuls who have entered so far, Chanin is one of them.
Watch and vote for her video here. There is no limit on the number of times each person can vote.
Chanin first mused about the possibility of entering the contest on Sunday. The next day, she picked her nine-year-old daughter up at the bus stop and announced that they were going to New Jersey, almost two hours away, where her identical twin had access to decent video equipment.
"She said, 'Mom, you always say you're going to do something, but I didn't know you were going to follow through,'" Chanin recounted.
The result is a peppy two-and-a-half minute clip based on the notion that "50 is the new 30." In the video, Chanin said that her talk show would be about parenting, health and wellness "with a musical number thrown in at the very end" to showcase her operatic training.
"We're still young and vibrant," Chanin said in an interview. "People 20 years ago at 50 weren't physically active ... we can do so much more for ourselves," she said.
OWN, with its talk show contest, is launching shortly before Winfrey's own long-running show comes to an end in fall 2011.
"I'll miss her less if I'm the new Oprah," Chanin said, laughing.
