On Monday afternoon I invited friends over to watch Oprah interview our former governor. Only a couple of us had ever seen Oprah, and for most, this was a first. Women around here are pretty busy, but about a dozen came and none were fans. I know few women who are. Except for being Alaskans, we don't have anything else in common with her. We are more retrievers with Chapstick than pit bulls with lipstick. We wear fishing boots, not high heels. Our world is more gray than black and white.

Since the former governor had been here in person in April, we had a preview of some of the weirdness, madness and high-beam glow of her. That visit was supposed to be a secret; an e-mail to school staff went out along the lines of: Don't tell anyone, but the most famous woman in the world is coming to Haines tomorrow and will address students at an assembly at 11 a.m.

Maybe she learned the word was out, since she canceled the assembly, but she toured the school quickly, signing autographs for students. Afterward, she read a short speech at a waterfront park, praising veterans, to a hastily invited crowd from the American Legion and others who got wind of it. The preschool children had been invited to sing the national anthem, so their parent paparazzi were there in force. She was backed by flags and bunting that I think she brought with her, along with a personal film crew. She didn't take any questions from the local paper or radio, but did pose with the little children for their mothers' cameras and signed more autographs. The mayor, who drove her around town, said she was personable, charismatic and talked just like she did on TV but was smaller.

At least we could say we had met her.

A friend who traveled to Turkey last summer said as soon as anyone learned she was Alaskan, the former governor was all they talked about.

"In Budapest they love her," she told me.

You know, it was easier to explain why Alaskans don't all live in igloos than why we don't all say "you betcha."

Which may be why more Haines women braved the first big snowfall to get to the Wise Woman exercise class in the lobby of the Chilkat Center for the Arts before dawn the next morning than watched Oprah at my house.

Waiting in line for weights and mats we didn't say much. It was barely six in the morning and no one wanted to call attention to unbrushed hair or mismatched socks. There were murmurs about the TV show, and how it went, and why Oprah didn't ask that reading question, and then one woman asked what we were talking about, and another explained the former governor had been on Oprah, and the first woman asked why, and the second said because she wrote a book. The first woman said she didn't know that.

Really.

I had a friend who used to take what she called media fasts. She also did yoga and grew all her own organic vegetables. She died a few years ago, a young 60, of cancer. It was so sad I still can't stand it.

She was wise enough to be taking breaks from the news back when most of it was important, not spinoffs from People magazine. It was also a time when we had so much less of it. A media fast then meant not listening to the local radio station or reading Friday's Juneau Empire on Sunday (when a hard copy actually made it the 90 miles north by boat or plane) or if you had a TV, not watching campaign ads a week after the presidential election was over on the time-delayed broadcasts from the Rural Alaska Television Network.

She also told me to be wary of "Sesame Street"; she was an early child educator, and warned that that even watching "good" shows on a screen sort of sedated children, and was as addicting as a drug. She said if my children were going to watch TV or educational videos, I should be sure they interacted with them.

I remembered that as my women friends and I were shouting back to the TV on Monday. When the show was over we quickly abandoned Oprah and her guest entirely and debated the recently overturned local election and shared the history of past Haines public blowups, failures and successes and the people involved.