As any avid subscriber to Field & Stream could tell you, it’s important to know exactly what you’re hunting before heading out into the wild. So if the object of your desire is a ticket to The Oprah Winfrey Show, be aware that in the world of Ms. O there are no tickets, only reservations.

Saying these reservations are hard to come by is an understatement on par with describing Winfrey as simply “well-off.” Unless you have some serious connections inside Oprah’s orbit, you can’t just lumber over to the West Loop studios, where she tapes August through May, expecting to waltz right in and cop a squat. This kind of delicate operation takes planning and a certain amount of perverse persistence.

To grasp what kind of endangered species you’re gunning for, consider this: Oprah tapes 140 episodes per season to an audience of only 300 people per show. Which means merely 42,000 lucky souls a year are allowed to bask in her live glow. This for a media demigod and cultural tastemaker whose estimated daily TV audience is more than 7 million viewers.

A fair warning on Oprah’s official website, Oprah.com, states the free reservations are “available almost exclusively by phone. Demand far exceeds supply, so you may receive a lot of busy signals before getting through.” Ain’t it the truth. Harpo opens and closes the lines erratically, notifying the public with just a small message on the site. In response, frustrated fans have filled Internet message boards with sob stories of dialing the audience-department phone number, 312-591-9222, until their fingers bleed. Wrote a harried woman from Idaho on the Oprah.com community board: “I have been re-dialing since the lines were open this morning, ran out of battery twice on my phone, worried all day that I may have a bunch of long distant [sic] charges on my phone, ignored my kids a little and I’m still trying to get through. Help!”

There is an easier, albeit pricier, way: Let other people do the dial-mad dirty work for you. Two organizations in the suburbs offer phone-dialing services specializing in nabbing Oprah reservations. For $999, Mark Avignone, a ticket broker in Mokena, and his staff of 20 employees will bomb Harpo’s phone lines to grab four tickets per client. Avignone says he’s helped more than 100 groups secure seats since he started Oprah TV Show Tickets about two years ago. His competition is a network of family and friends in the Northwest suburbs that, for a $699 bid on eBay, will bear the busy signals to secure a pair of reservations.

Prefer a strategy that’s easier on your bank account? Vigilantly check Oprah’s website for links to last-minute audience calls. “Sometimes we book shows based on the audience’s particular interest or if they’re a longtime fan of a certain person,” says Harpo Productions spokeswoman Angela DePaul. That’s how Jan Santarelli (who’s the mother of Time Out Chicago office assistant Christina Santarelli ) gained entry to the Oprahverse last spring after years of unsuccessfully ringing the reservation line. “I went to the website and saw they were looking for an audience for a ‘moms around the world’ show,” she says. “So I clicked on the link and was asked to write about being a mother and raising kids.” A half-hour later, success! A Harpo rep called back to tell Santarelli she’d qualified for four seats.

Out-of-towners (or people pretending to be) can hit up the concierge at their hotel. The 40 member hotels of the Chicago Hotel Concierge Association have daily contact with Harpo about ticket availability. “It’s a crapshoot,” admits CHCA president Kathy McClanathan, who works at the Palmer House Hilton. “One week no one gets in, and the next week everyone gets in.”

As a last-ditch effort, you can always try landing on Oprah as a guest by telling your story on the show’s website. Producers are currently scouring the country for a disorganized mom, a sexually dissatisfied married woman and a former beauty queen who lost her looks. Good luck! And remember, keep those tears flowing.