Opal has indeed found work with the BBC

It was about 5:30 this morning and I was listening to CBC radio (Canada). Now, before six, CBC tends to mooch material off of the BBC -- there aren't enough listeners to justify original programming, I suppose.

At any rate, you'll all be glad to hear that Opal has managed to carve out a journalistic niche for herself. This morning she presented a half-hour piece about the people on Grey Hound buses -- drivers, passengers, people who wistfully watch them pass by on the American landscape...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02dwbjf

I had to set down my razor I was laughing so hard. This journalist was so entranced by the sound of her own voice spouting shallow observations pining to be poetry (faces, destinations, destinies) that she immediately called to mind Opal roaming the school bus graveyard.

This lady did this completely without irony, peppering the documentary with snippets of conversation with passengers, and playing Paul Simon's "America" in the background on an endless loop.

Maybe I'm being too hard on her. But damn, Altman's satirical touch has got some legs, no? Here we are, forty years later, and it's still paying dividends -- particularly the notion that Americans and America itself are seen by the rest of the world as some kind of anthropological, romantic curiosity.