2 Days Of Living Hell, With Sally Jessy Raphael.
In 1993, I helped create, and acted in a play about events that happened in 1988. Now in 2026, it’s back in the news.
Working with friends and collaborators of our Chicago theatre company, Sliced Bread Productions, we created a play about Wes Baily and Tani Freiwald’s experience as guests on day-time talk shows and the fallout that followed. As this new Chicago Tribune article (9/6/26) lays out the story, they pretended to be people they weren't. They were actors having a laugh and seeing what they could get away with.
I co-wrote the play with Wes Baily, Wm. Bullion, and Tani Freiwald. Baily and I co-directed.
Fun to look back on something I haven’t thought about for thirty years.
………………………….
A very special episode
Geraldo and Sally Jessy outraged when actors pretended to be guests on daytime TV talk shows
By PAUL DAILING | For the Chicago Tribune
PUBLISHED: September 6, 2026 at 5:00 AM CDT
Actor Tani Freiwald, right, has an angry exchange of words with talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael in 1988 as Freiwald defends why she played the part of a sex surrogate and also as a woman bored with sex on several different TV talk shows. A part-time actor, Freiwald said she decided to play the part of a sex surrogate on Raphael’s show because it was an improvisational challenge. (AP)
Rebecca and George were the perfect guests for “Geraldo”: witty, candid and remarkably open about the details of George losing his virginity at age 35 to professional sexual surrogate Rebecca.
“I felt big, I felt tall, I felt strong,” George told daytime talk show host Geraldo Rivera in a segment that aired July 1988.
Rivera, now a conservative commentator for NewsNation, asked if it felt like the Olympics.
“Right, like crossing that finish line and busting the tape with your chest and, yeah. You see it in slow motion in the movies,” George responded.
“I don’t think I have ever worked with a client who was as interested in the process as George,” Rebecca would say later in the episode.
“Rebecca, Sexual Surrogate” bore a striking resemblance to “Barbara Hall, Sex-Hating Housewife” from an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” two years before. And, aside from the blond hair dye, “George, 35-Year-Old Virgin ‘Cured’ by Rebecca” was the spitting image of “Wes, Impotent Married Man” from an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael’s show just two weeks prior to the “Geraldo” appearance.
Chicago actor Tani Freiwald is interviewed on Aug. 30, 1988, about Freiwald and fellow actor Wes Bailey pretending to be talk show guests on several national TV programs. (George Thompson/Chicago Tribune)
That’s because Rebecca/Barbara and George/Wes were actually Chicago actors Tani Freiwald and Wes Bailey. Bailey and Freiwald, both of whom have since died, appeared as various personas on the daytime talk show circuit in the late 1980s, recruiting additional friends from Chicago’s theater community as needed.
“Back then, when this happened, people believed what they saw on television, and it was sacrilegious to lie on television,” Freiwald’s then-boyfriend Mike Scheitler, who appeared on the “Geraldo” episode as a virgin hoping for Rebecca’s services, said in an interview for this story. “This was the attitude, which seems kind of sweet and quaint by modern standards.”
In the late 1980s, talk shows filled the analog airwaves with chair-flinging Nazis, out-of-control teens, tearjerking stories of survival and other “trash TV” tucked between the soap operas and after-school cartoons. Precursors to the tawdrier ’90s days of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, Oprah, Geraldo, Phil Donahue and Sally fought for ratings and pushed the boundaries.
Freiwald was the office manager for former Catholic priest-turned-therapist Dean Dauw, who ran a River North practice where clients dealing with intimacy issues could work with both a talk therapist and a trained sex partner, then called a “sex surrogate.”
Bookers for various TV shows would call Dauw’s office with hyperspecific requests for upcoming guests — asexual wives, aging virgins, surrogates who helped men over 50, etc. When no one they knew fit the bill, Freiwald and her friends would play the part.
“Within our little actor circle it was such a big kick that they’re appearing on these shows and doing this. No one’s thinking of repercussions,” said Ben Ziola, a friend they asked to videotape the episodes. “Nobody’s thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to pull this big hoax’ or anything like that. (They thought) ‘We can go on this show, and all we have to do is pretend to be the patient and the therapist, and it’ll be a lark. We’ll have a good time doing this, and the producers are happy, Sally is happy, Dr. Dauw is happy. Everyone’s happy.’”
But Rivera was not happy, singling out Bailey on “Entertainment Tonight” after the guests’ real identities came to light.
“And my first reaction when I heard this was to take this lying wimp, who probably has all these sexual problems, I mean, if you ever saw the guy — and put his nose in something smelly and squishy,” said Rivera.
Chicago actor Wes Bailey is interviewed on Aug. 30, 1988, about Bailey and fellow actor Tani Freiwald pretending to be talk show guests on several national TV programs. (George Thompson/Chicago Tribune)
Winfrey, however, was “very professional,” recalled friend Wm. Bullion, now artistic director of the theater troupe The Conspirators.
“Oprah was like, ‘Oh they got me. Anyway, let’s move on,’” Bullion recalled. “And Geraldo, you know, shook his fist on TV and got all mad and then moved on.”
But Sally Jessy Raphael’s response surprised Freiwald and Bailey the most. She wanted them back on the show. We’ll get to that right after this break.
Omaha to Oprah
Freiwald and Bailey met doing theater in Omaha, Nebraska. Offstage, they were very different. Scheitler recalled Freiwald as a vivacious “Auntie Mame” type, while Bullion described Bailey as a “raging introvert.” But together, they and Ziola committed wild acts of experimental theater through their troupe Park Avenue Produce and their cabaret show The PAP-Tarts.
A few weeks after Freiwald moved to Chicago in 1986, she answered an ad in the Chicago Reader looking for women to serve as sexual surrogates for Dauw’s patients.
After meeting Dauw, she decided the job “was not for me,” she told the Tribune, but she did become his office manager. They soon got a call from the newly syndicated “Oprah Winfrey Show” (formerly “A.M. Chicago”) asking for women who hated sex.
Dauw “asked me if I could be a woman who hated sex,” Freiwald later told the Tribune. “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’” Dauw denied this, saying he assumed Freiwald was speaking on the show from her own experience.
In November 1986, “Barbara Hall” went on Oprah’s show, talking about how she didn’t mind if her husband of 14 years sought sex elsewhere. A year and a half later, Dauw’s phone rang again. “The Sally Jessy Raphael Show” wanted surrogates who had helped men over 50 stay virile. “Rebecca” was born.
A publicity photo for The PAP-Tarts show's actors Ben Ziola, from left, Tani Freiwald and Wes Bailey in 1990. The cabaret show was produced by Park Avenue Produce, an experimental theater troupe. (Michael Scheitler)
The April 1988 episode was so popular, Raphael had Rebecca back the next month, this time with a formerly impotent client — played by Bailey, who had just moved to Chicago — and his appreciative wife.
Speaking anonymously to the Tribune in 1988, the actor playing the wife said the show’s producer seemed not to believe their story but also not to care, giving tips such as: “You know, if you’re married, you’ll interrupt each other.”
Soon, producers for “Geraldo” called, and Bailey dyed his hair to play a man Rebecca had professionally deflowered. Scheitler joined as a hopeful client, in large part for the free trip to New York, he said. The segment aired in July.
“I played two different men with two entirely different sexual dysfunctions within the space of two weeks,” Bailey told the Tribune in 1988.
That August, Bailey got another call, this time from a reporter friend from the Omaha World-Herald. A mutual friend had spotted the pair on TV.
Now, back to the show.
‘Isn’t that Wes?’
Time, Newsweek, People, “Entertainment Tonight,” “CBS This Morning,” radio shows, newspapers and other outlets covered the tale of the televised tricksters.
Bullion, who first met Bailey as a neighbor, picked up his morning Tribune and thought, “Isn’t that Wes who lives downstairs?” The trash TV exploiters had become the exploited.
“They were like jesters, and they were making fun of the king,” friend Noel Olken recently said of the actors. “I think that’s what I loved most about what they did.”
“Mad respect for this wacky piece of performance art you guys created,” Bullion said.
The play "2 Days of Living HELL With Sally Jessy Raphael" was performed at Centro Cultural Ruiz Belvis in Bucktown in 1993. The play was written by Tani Freiwald and Wes Bailey about their experience as fake talk show guests during the 1980s. (Noel Olken)
Oprah moved on. Geraldo fumed. But Sally Jessy wanted them back. Her producers said there were no hard feelings and offered them a forum to talk about the wavering line between entertainment and news, their friends recalled.
Instead, Sally ambushed them.
“You have made me and, much more important, the audience, a laughingstock,” Raphael, steely with anger, told the pair.
“The audience is screaming for our vital organs,” Bailey told The New York Times. “Sally is accusing us of having harmed her personally. Mostly it was yelling and trying to humiliate and discredit us.”
News coverage made light of tabloid TV scandalmongers playing victim — the Sun-Times’ editorial on the matter was headlined “Lighten up, Geraldo” — but being publicly shamed and threatened left a mark.
The actors channeled their anger into art, working with Olken and Bullion to create the play “2 Days of Living HELL with Sally Jessy Raphael” in 1993. Bailey and Olken co-directed. Ziola played Bailey. Bullion played Geraldo. Freiwald did not appear in the play, having moved to Las Vegas to start a miniature golf course.
Noel Olken, from left, as talk show writer and producer Bert Dubrow, Beka as Sally Jessy Raphael and Wm. Bullion as Geraldo for the play "2 Days of Living HELL With Sally Jessy Raphael," performed at Centro Cultural Ruiz Belvis in Bucktown in 1993. The play was written by Tani Freiwald and Wes Bailey about their experience as fake talk show guests during the 1980s. (Noel Olken)
“(T)he intense anger Bailey and Freiwald clearly feel about the whole affair — in the end they were dumped on by the talk-show hosts and by the sex therapist who recruited them to appear with him on TV — makes this play far more interesting than an objective recitation of the facts could ever be,” the Chicago Reader wrote in a review.
In 1989, Dauw pleaded guilty in a billing scheme to defraud NutriSweet. Continuing his therapy practice in Chicago and later Florida, Dauw dabbled in theater himself, writing and starring in the play “Penis’ Responses to The Vagina Monologues” in 2001, according to the Miami New Times. Efforts to locate him for this story were unsuccessful.
Over the years, trash TV got trashier and a more virulent strain — reality TV — developed. The jesters’ legacy, Olken said, was revealing that trust in the telly had always been misplaced.
“Now we’re in a world where we have no idea what’s true anymore,” Olken said. “And I think maybe for better or for worse, they might have gotten that going.”
Paul Dailing is a freelance writer. Find out more at www.pauldailing.com.
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