“Please don’t give me a standing ovation. I appreciate your support, your forgiveness, and the opportunity to return to my job, but the fact is that giving me a 10-minute standing ovation simply because I returned to cooking after being outed for a ton of awful, racist shit, like the Dora Charles story if maybe you don’t remember, and also the slavery-themed wedding (do you remember that?), makes you guys look like AH-HUUUUUGE racists. Right? Like, applauding me for being so brave as to show my racist face in public (for people who paid up to $400 to see it)? Do you see what it looks like that says about you? It’s as if you’re standing with me as racists, or at the very least as people who do not think racism is that bad. Okay? I think you get it. Anyway, cooking!” she didn’t say. From People:

The Southern chef, 66, broke down in tears after receiving thunderous applause during a 10-minute standing ovation at the Metro Cooking & Entertaining show in Houston on Saturday.

“These are tears of joy, y’all,” she said. “This is my first time out in three months. … The one place I wanted to make my first step out was in Texas. You are forgiving folks with hearts as big as your state.”

“We all experience pain in some way but pain is also a good thing because it makes you grow,” Deen added before joining sons Bobby and Jamie for a cooking demo.

After her emotional outburst on Saturday, Deen quickly got back in touch with her sassy side. Near the end of her demo, she walked up to a cameraman, put her face up close to his camera and said with a giant smile, “I’m back!”

“We all experience pain in some way,” she said, reminding everyone of why she should not ever be allowed to talk without a carefully written script with tone warnings in the margins. Ugh. She’s back, baby. You thought she might have been forced to just enjoy her tremendous wealth quietly, but she’s back. [Applause] [Collapse]