I’m sitting by the pool of my hotel, having a Starbucks’ coffee and enjoying the sun while writing this article on Ellen DeGeneres – how much better can it get? Oh right, I’m going to see Ellen’s show tomorrow!

I already had my first “Ellen dose” yesterday, when she was a guest on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Luckily, we got tickets for that as well, so by noon, we lined up to be there in time for the show to start. And of course, we started to talk to the other people in line, and one thing became very clear – everybody loves Ellen.

On my way over to the U.S., I had the chance to talk to strangers, a lot of them. My flight to London was delayed, in London I had to line up again at the American Airlines counter to make sure I was checked in properly, and then I had to sit in the waiting area for four hours because – of course – my flight to Los Angeles was delayed as well. And – maybe inspired by Katina’s column – I made good use of the time and started to talk to people.

One of the main differences between Europeans and Americans I noticed is that it’s much easier to start a conversation with a stranger from the U.S. So, naturally, most people I talked to were Americans. And all of them – the business man from Denver, the elderly couple from Dallas and the IT guy who was on his way to Raleigh – had the same reactions when I told them that I was going to see a taping of Ellen’s show:

1. Ellen, she’s great, we love her show!

2. How did you manage to get tickets?

It’s amazing to see just how popular Ellen is in the U.S. Tickets to her show are usually gone within about an hour, even though she is in a new, bigger studio now with seats for 300 guests as opposed to only 200 audience members in her old studio. I’ve heard from people who have been trying to get tickets for the show for three years, without being successful. If you try to get tickets from outside the U.S., it’s even more difficult, even if since this season, the form for online requests now provides the possibility to say that you’re from a country outside the U.S. (up until then, you had to pretend you were from somewhere in the U.S. in order to be able to send the form).

And what is maybe the most noteworthy about it: Ellen, who only a few years ago was mostly a gay icon and used to joke about that in her stand-up routine (“Seriously though, if you’re here, you’re probably gay”), now attracts all groups of people. Soccer moms and business women, high school students and seniors, men, women, gay, straight, young, old – everybody loves Ellen.

So what is it about her, who is so unlike every other Hollywood celebrity, a 50 year-old, openly gay woman, who only wears pants and barely wears makeup? What makes her so likeable that she repeatedly comes in first in popularity polls, that people prefer her even to the queen of all talk show queens, Oprah Winfrey?

The answer is simple: Ellen is genuinely nice. She loves her job, she connects to her audience, she makes them feel comfortable and at ease. And she’s just like them. In her monologues, she talks about things that people can relate to, everyday situations that a lot of people have gone through. Her fear of flying, her pets, her family, and since last season even her relationship with new wife Portia de Rossi. In one of the best, most genuine monologues that she did in 2007 she talked about how she missed to congratulate Portia, who was in Australia at the time, for her birthday, because she wasn’t aware of the time change. It was this monologue, at the latest, that showed people that her relationship was just like anybody elses.

And Ellen makes good use of her popularity. In the first few seasons since her show started in 2003, a lot of people complained that Ellen wasn’t more open about her homosexuality, that she wasn’t gay enough. Back then, she almost never mentioned her then-partner Alexandra Hedison and only barely made gay references or gay jokes. Whether it was the producers’ decision or her own, it doesn’t matter anymore, because times have changed. Ellen regularly mentions Portia on her show, she announced their upcoming wedding to her studio audience and even showed wedding pictures and a video of the wedding on the air. And she gets political. On her website, she urges her fans to vote “No” on proposition 8 in the upcoming election, a proposition which aims to amend the Californian constitution in order to ban gay marriage again, and she addressed this issue on the Tonight Show as well.

Only 10 years ago, when her show “Ellen” was cancelled after her historic coming out a year before, some people predicted the end of Ellen’s career. So much has changed in only a decade. Today, it seems like not only me, but everybody loves Ellen.

Ellen during the taping of the Tonight Show, looking at my friends and me applauding her!

Stay tuned for more on Ellen’s appearance on the Tonight Show, the taping of her show and being out and about in Los Angeles – only on eurOut!

(Posted on eurOut on October 2nd, 2008)