DARE TREAT YOURSELF To LAUGHS with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb!
Kathie Lee and Hoda: Today Show
We are focusing this month on DARE-ING you to TREAT yourself!
In between all your duties as chef or chaperon or casserole baker or CEO (or maybe you’re all four), “The Today Show’s” fourth hour – from 10 A.M. to 11 A.M. – should be on your TREAT list. That’s the point in the program when the NBC airwaves give way and give in to the hilarity and totally uninhibited display of middle-aged DARE-ING. This transpires courtesy (or lack thereof, which is even better!) of two sometimes maligned and often unsung DARE-ESS role models: the completely irreverent veteran talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford; and veteran serious journalist Hoda Kotb, who obviously has had a hell-raising party-girl twin lurking in the background all these years.
Leave all the grave news about earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters behind, unless those three calamities involve sex, drinking and husbands (or boyfriends we’d all like to see drawn and quartered). TREAT yourself to Gifford and Kotb, and you’ll spend the rest of your day wondering how you can join their party!
Even if you tune in as I do, working in my office and half-listening, half-watching the show, you will find yourself laughing at the frenzied frivolity and fluff. The 40-plus woman needs this as a TREAT. Gifford and Kotb have emerged as two of the funniest women (of ANY age) to DARE strut their stuff into our living rooms since Lucy and Ethel. Since the show gears itself to more mature audiences, I know I don’t need to clarify who Lucy and Ethel are. In fact, for Halloween this year, loyal viewers of “KLG & Hoda†as the show is known, received a special TREAT: the two dressed up as Lucy and Ethel and reenacted the infamous grape-stomping episode of “I Love Lucy.† There’s almost nothing these two won’t do for a LAUGH.
Whether it’s Fun-Day Monday, Booze-day Tuesday, Wines-day Wednesday,  Thirst-day Thursday, or Try-Day Friday, these two ladies know how to LAUGH. They drink, dish, kvetch, cavort and otherwise completely misbehave in ways their mothers completely endorse. In fact, their mothers have appeared on the show several times with their daughters, raising the comedy quotient even higher.
However, one of the greatest TREATS behind Kathie Lee and Hoda is that they also know how to get serious. The show routinely features stories, experts and celebrities who have special appeal to over-40 women, on a number of serious topics: breast cancer, infidelity, divorce, financial security, health and fitness, fashion trends for mature women, etc. On occasion, a “civilian†viewer receives a salute from the show for having faced some kind of hardship. This individual is featured in a segment called “Everyone has a story.†Kathie Lee sings to them and tells their story, with prizes and other fringe benefits for the focal honoree.
In my opinion, however, the biggest TREAT for me is, arguably, one of the show’s most popular segments called, “Ambush Makeover.â€Â Two DARE-ING over-40 women are chosen during the first hour of “The Today Show” for a complete hair, makeup and fashion upgrade, which takes place during the Show’s first three hours, courtesy of hair expert Louis Licari and fashion maven, Jill Martin. Licari and Martin make their choice by scanning the dozens of women gathered outside the studio. Friends and family are almost always in tow, lobbying for their candidate to be chosen for “Ambush Makeover.”
The women who want most to be chosen are usually the ones yelping, screaming, cajoling, and hoisting posters and other means of getting attention, in hopes of becoming The Chosen Ones. We love that! How DARE-ING it is to be free and uninhibited in expressing what you want!!! In fact, for this morning’s segment, Martin said she chose the winner because she was wearing a sign with an arrow pointing to her face and reading “Pick Me.â€Â It also helped, Martin said, that the Chosen One and her two friends were jumping up and down incessantly, chanting “Pick me! Pick me!â€
Inevitably the women chosen for “Ambush Makeover” have back stories that speak to challenges they have faced in their love life, family or careers.  The show has a special soft spot – as well it should – for women who have selflessly always taken care of others in their lives. Many of them claim to have had the same (now outdated) hairstyle for more than 20 years because they almost never think about TREATING themselves.
Over a three-hour time span Licari and Martin work their magic on these women.  When the “reveal†happens during the 10:00-11:00 segment, the “Ambushed†woman’s family and friends are blindfolded until such time as Kathie Lee and Hoda permit them to view their new and improved loved one as she sashays onto the set. In fact, the “Ambushed” women themselves don’t get to see their made-over image until they’re actually on the air, which makes for wonderfully candid and heart-rending scenes. Almost always, everyone screams in excitement and vicarious joy for the newly glam women, and I DARE say that watching the faces of some of their husbands or boyfriends light up makes me cry every time.
Corny? Not to them, and definitely not to me. Think the whole makeover concept is hackneyed?  Don’t bet on it. Makeovers are sure winners as audience draws, whether they are on TV, or any other media. When makeovers involve over-40 women who DARE to take a chance on something new that will be a TREAT just for them (maybe for the first time in their lives) they become the quintessential manifestation of the truism, “LAUGH and the world LAUGHS with you.â€Â Agreeing wholeheartedly are the millions of viewers who tune in most days to Kathie Lee and Hoda, two of the nicest, most talented, and funny women on TV.
