Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 2, 1993 TAG: 9310020365
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRAZIER MOORE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Here you are, hosting your new talk show, things right on track. Then one of your guests just won't shut her mouth. On she goes; time is passing. You don't want to be rude, but this is getting out of hand.
What to do? Well, you ease up beside her, and, just out of camera range . . . you pinch her on the leg!
"I didn't hurt her," says Ricki Lake, "but I definitely got her attention. That was a big breakthrough for me."
Just three weeks old, "Ricki Lake" (at 3 p.m. weekdays on WSLS-Channel 10) is something of a breakthrough for daily talk shows - and it is likely to get viewers' attention.
Skewed toward young adults and focusing on relationship issues, "Ricki" isn't afraid to be light-hearted, even playful, when it suits. Meanwhile, the show's vivacious young star serves as host in the pre-TV sense of the word: making sure everyone has a fine time.
During a commercial break, Lake apologizes to a woman whose question she didn't have time for.
A bit later, she laughs between takes of a scripted lead-in. "I'm new at this," she explains.
"They're doing ME the favor to come," she says of her studio audience, which adores her, and it shows on the air.
Despite her youth, Lake, who turned 25 last week, enters the talk-show arena as a veteran actress boasting a prime-time series, several TV films, and a dozen features (three of which will be released in the next few months).
But where she debuted in "Hairspray" as a roly-poly teen-ager who loves to dance, a much-slimmed-down Lake now might be found leading a discussion on interracial relationships.
Where she played Holly the Donut Dolly on TV's "China Beach," she today might be found playing ringleader to a rollicking segment on animal-crazy couples that encompassed not only human beings but a menagerie of pets, including cats, barking dogs, snakes, a monkey, an alligator, a pig and a llama.
Through all the mayhem, her eyes sparkled and her luminescent smile was seldom out of sight.
"I'm not really capable of getting nervous on camera," Lake says afterwards. "I've never been nervous - except taking my SATs.
"But this is the hardest job I've ever had," she readily concedes. Her weekly schedule calls for taping six shows in four days. "It takes so much more focus and commitment than any movie I've ever done.
Lake has come some distance since audiences met her in the 1988 comedy "Hairspray," where she played the daughter of similarly overweight female impersonator Divine.
She is candid in crediting the career "Hairspray" launched to one thing above all else: "My being fat. But the problem was, I let it go too far. Over the next four years, I gained another 50 pounds."
"I don't know if it was desperation, but finally I got to a point where I made the conscious decision to lose weight. I exercised, watched what I ate, and it started to pay off. People started to notice, and it motivated me even more, and it became my little conquest."
Little? In 2 1/2 years, she says, she lost 115 pounds.
by CNB