THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 14, 1994 TAG: 9412140021
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Larry Bonko
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
WHEN NORFOLK STATE student Ayana McAbee recently appeared on a nationally syndicated talk show, she did not expect to be greeted by a hostile studio audience out for blood.
But from the moment the 19-year-old sophomore from Fort Wayne, Ind., was introduced as a gold digger by host Gordon Elliott, the people attending the taping in a Manhattan studio let her have it.
They booed her. And worse.
``Why do you need a man to take care of you?''
``Go out and get a job.''
``Where is your self-esteem?''
Back home in her dorm room on the NSU campus, McAbee said she was sorry she ever heard of Gordon Elliott, whose show is seen here on WAVY.
``I was verbally attacked by the audience both on and off camera. I felt terrorized,'' she said. ``I regret the experience.''
It would be news if she didn't.
When the producers launched the show as a gold digger's special, it was the same as painting a target on McAbee's back.
Elliott brought the coed on camera with another woman, who confessed that she had spent $50,000 of her boyfriend's trust fund. Another panelist said that in the past, men have left her holding the bag, and if it happened again, there would be something in the bag.
Listening to that, McAbee wondered what kind of mess she had gotten into.
McAbee; her sister, Tina; brother, Diallo; and mother, Juanita, thought they would be part of a show that was a hoot - fun. They expected the topic to be a mother's advice to her children about selecting the best people to date.
Instead, Elliott set up McAbee as a cold, calculating woman who checked a man's credit rating before she got involved. Her sister said Ayana liked men who drove 1994 Cadillacs and looked sharp, right down to a manicure.
After that, the studio audience was all over Ayana.
The point she was trying to make, McAbee told me, was that her mother advised her to date men of substance, men who had a plan and vision, men with careers instead of men slugging away at a 9-to-5 job.
What's wrong with that advice, she said, adding, ``My mom raised me to only go out with men who have made something of themselves,''
Elliott's studio audience saw her as an opportunist. They didn't let up even after her boyfriend was introduced and said it was cool with him if she preferred men with money.
A spokeswoman for the Elliott show said the New York audiences are often tough. She also said McAbee was fully briefed about the show's content.
Ayana was frustrated because the studio audience didn't buy the fact that she is a hard-working college student not interested in having a man support her for the rest of her life - that she's just choosy about whom she dates.
With her blood pressure rising, she turned to the audience and gave the people in the seats a piece of her mind.
``Nobody in this audience can change the way I feel,'' she said. ``I will not be with a man who's broke. That's it. Money is happiness, and one of the reasons I have a strong relationship with my man is because he has money.''
As the show signed off, the audience was still snapping.
As a mass communications major at NSU, McAbee saw her appearance on ``The Gordon Elliott Show'' as a great opportunity to expand her knowledge in her field of study. She was going to see the TV business from the inside.
The producers paid all her expenses on the trip. There was $50 for meal money. Everything was going just swell until Ayana came on camera.
Come on, Gordon. Just because this young woman prefers men who drive 1994 Cadillacs is no reason to call her a gold digger. Is it?
There's another local woman, Patricia Elam of Chesapeake, who is telling a similar story. She's due to appear with host Montel Williams on WAVY Friday at 4 p.m. in a show about unusual Christmas gifts.
Elam answered a call for guests who wanted to talk about spicing up their love life. What she would not do, said Elam back home in Chesapeake, was to say what the producers urged her to say - that her love life was in trouble and needed rejuvenating with a striptease.
That just isn't so, said the newlywed.
Williams' producers told me they do not prompt the guests - who call and volunteer to be on TV, they pointed out.
Caution: If you're ever on with Montel, Phil, Oprah or Ricki, make sure you get straight with the producers before the cameras start to roll. by CNB