CHICAGO -- Talk show host Oprah Winfrey celebrated the premiere of her 19th season Monday by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.
"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said.
Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage.
She gave each of them a car — a Pontiac G6.
She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.
"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.
The audience members screamed, cried and hugged each other — then followed Winfrey out to the parking lot of her Harpo Studios to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.
One woman stepped up onto the frame of a driver's side door, put her head on the roof and hugged the vehicle.
Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written to the show about their need for a new car. One woman's young son said she drove a car that "looks like she got into a gunfight"; another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.
In other segments on the show, Winfrey surprised a 20-year-old girl who had spent years in foster care and homeless shelters with a four-year college scholarship, a makeover and $10,000 in clothes. And a family with eight foster children who were going to be kicked out of the house they were renting were given $130,000 to buy and repair the home.
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