MY TURN 'I Could Never Host The Ricki Lake Show Now'

The star of the original Hairspray says the world is too divisive for the kind of content her talk show used to tackle

- RICKI LAKE

THIS YEAR IS THE 30TH ANNIVERsary of the pilot of The Ricki Lake Show. Looking back, it was unbelievably presumptuous for me to think I could host a show at the age of 24. I didn't have a sense of who I was or what I believed in at that time.

I had a very sheltered upbringing and grew up in a small town outside of New York City, where I went to public school until 11th grade. My dad was a pharmacist, my mom was a homemaker and I had one sister. Very generic. I wasn't around openly gay people and my town wasn't that diverse. I was very young and innocent in a lot of ways. But meeting [director] John Waters, and working on the movie Hairspray (1988) at the age of 20 with the most outrageous people of all walks of life, blew my world wide open.

I think playing Tracy Turnblad in that movie and being the fat girl that overcomes adversity, gets the guy and wins the contest, made me more relatable and "girl next door." I'm someone who struggled with my weight openly, and came from out of nowhere and became a star overnight. I think my story was appealing to a lot of people; I was very non-threatening, which made me palatable to an audience as a talk-show host.

Hosting My Own Talk Show I was 100 percent myself while hosting Ricki Lake. One of the things I'm most proud of is that I refused to wear an IFB-a device you wear in your ear, so the control room has access to you and can tell you, "Don't forget to say this." I didn't want someone telling me what to say, and I didn't want to be distracted, so I kind of produced myself on the fly, along with my co-executive producer, Gail Steinberg, who would be on the sidelines.