Oprah's $600,000-Grossing Yard Sale: The Most Ridiculous Purchases

Over the weekend, Oprah decluttered her Montecito mansion and three other properties in a Santa Barbara yard sale that brought in more than $600,000(!). (Proceeds will benefit her girls' leadership academy in South Africa, and not half of a Crate & Barrel chair, the traditional end goal of yard-sale proceeds.) The auction, which began Saturday morning at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club in Carpinteria, sold off hundreds of items, including, but not limited to, a set of antique library stairs that Oprah once impulse-purchased in London; 19th-century dolls from a collection that Oprah confessed was beginning to scare house guests; the gingham couch on which she lost countless Scrabble games; a fleet of Oprah-autographed scooters, which we imagine were used during Oprah's short-lived scooter-gang phase; and various mediums of artwork featuring Oprah's famous visage including, but not limited to, a five-foot-tall copy of her Vogue cover.

Fans were so thrilled to buy Oprah's castaways, reports the L.A. Times, that they dragged the auction pace by "a relentless stream of incremental bids on practically every item." Of all the Oprah sales, though, which were the strangest-sounding, and proof that fans would go crazy for anything once owned by the media maven?

    A nondescript teapot, valued at less than $100, and described with no mention of which world leaders and Oprah confidantes the teapot steeped tea for, sold for more than $1,000.
    A dog portrait that the Times cattily notes was "generously characterized in the catalog as 'folk art'" sold for $1,400 roughly three times its estimated value.
     A pair of otherwise unremarkable "simple crystal lamp bases (no shades)" sold for $2,500. We calculate that the highest bidder spent $1 for every time he/she will have to find inorganic ways of bringing up said lamps' origins in unrelated conversations with houseguests.
    A 16-by-20-inch copy of a TV Guide cover photo featuring Winfrey sold for $3,000 10 times its pre-auction estimate of $200 $400, and 3,000 times our estimate of how much it would cost to blow up the vintage TV Guide cover at a nearby Kinkos FedEx center.
    Impractical canvas banners teasing Winfrey's performance in The Color Purple, which sold for $4,100 and $6,000 each precisely the amount of money you would have to spend on a canvas banner that will likely spend its life in storage to make your friends and family begin to question your mental health.