One Degree from Kevin Bacon

A Kevin Bacon flick outside Paul's office

"Most people live their lives 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon," Paul wrote on his Facebook page in late August, "but today I was just 1 degree from Kevin Bacon as he was filming a movie outside my office."

Coming across TV and movie filmings happens rarely enough to still be exciting. Or at least it is if you know who or what is being filmed. A scene from "The Good Wife" being shot outside my own office a year or two ago, for example, was interesting. But I don't watch the show, so it wasn't that exciting.

I'm sure that if I wanted to go out of my way to see some stars, I could follow a website dedicated to tracking filming locations in New York City. Los Angeles may be the country's capital when it comes to that kind of thing, but plenty of shows film here as well. "30 Rock" is an obvious example that comes quickly to mind.

Still, I think it's more fun to come across the film shootings randomly as Paul recently did. And not nearly as exhausting.

NBC Studio Tour: The Good, Bad & Annoying

By the time the NBC Studio Tour was over, I felt like NBC should have paid me instead of me forking over $20 to them. After all, I had basically just paid for the privilege of listening to a 70-minute commercial.

But even before Mom, Dad and I went on the tour when they visited several weekends back, we knew it was going to be a crapshoot. We'd all heard from people who recommended the tour. But then we'd all read reviews warning us what a letdown it was.

We took a chance and booked our tickets. Truth be told, I was looking forward to it -- especially seeing the studio for Saturday Night Live, a notoriously difficult show to get tickets for.

The tour started with a 10-minute video on the history of NBC. It was vaguely interesting, but if the same thing would have been on TV at home, I would have flipped to a new channel. At least the stadium-style seats were comfy.

Then our two tour guides led our group of about 30 to a bank of elevators. What happened next left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the tour. One of the guides ushered Mom, Dad, me and about three other people into an elevator and then accidentally let the door shut before cramming another 10 people inside. The elevator went up, the doors opened, and, unsure of what to do, we piled out into the lobby. After waiting patiently for several minutes, an NBC staffer -- not one of our guides -- appeared and snippily asked how we got there without a page.

At nearly that precise moment, two elevator doors opened and the rest of our group and our two guides appeared. Then we got a tongue-lashing from not only the staffer, but also one of the guides, who chastised us for not holding the elevator doors open. I had plenty of things I wanted to say -- Did I just spend $20 to be sent back to afternoon preschool? -- but I bit my tongue and moved on.

The rest of the NBC Studio Tour was fine. We stood inside Brian Williams' Nightly News studio, got a peak at where Jimmy Fallon tapes Late Night and -- yes -- saw the Saturday Night Live set. It was smaller than what I imagined, but if I've learned anything from the handful of TV tapings I've seen, I shouldn't have been so surprised.

Unfortunately, no photos were allowed on the tour.

I can think of about a million better ways to spend an hour and $20 in New York City (mostly involving food), but the NBC Studio Tour was OK. When push comes to shove, I guess I'm glad I did it once. Nevertheless, when I left Rockefeller Center, I couldn't help thinking that NBC has quite a racket going.

Comedy Central Taping #2: Wyatt Cenac

I'm not sure if Wyatt Cenac is Paul's favorite Daily Show correspondent, but Paul does think that he is the correspondent with the best name.


We hadn't even entered the lobby at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night before Paul whipped out his iPhone and posted this Facebook status update:

"In line for Wyatt Cenac, wish I had some Wyatt Cnacks."

Yes, it's funny. But less so when you hear it every time he appears on TV.

Needless to say, Paul was delighted to see a taping of the comedian's Comedy Central stand-up show. Truth be told, I was pretty happy, too.

Yes, for the second weekend in a row, we were at New York University for a free Comedy Central taping. No VIP tickets like we had for John Oliver's show, so instead of sneaking straight into the warm lobby we had to wait outside in the biting cold for about 20 minutes.

But the momentary discomfort was well worth it. The show was funny, even if there were no Michael Steele impressions. Or Cnacks.

The cameras never came close to where we were sitting during the hour or so Cenac was on stage, and so much the better. Actually, there are no guarantees the show we saw will even be shown on air. We were told before the taping that Cenac was performing his show in front of two audiences that night -- the second show was directly after ours -- and the show with the better audience would be on TV.

Even if I see the show on TV, I probably wouldn't know if it was the one we actually saw.

Now that we've gone to two of these tapings in two weeks, I feel like I've gotten my live comedy fix for awhile. But if John Hodgman is taping something next week, I'll be there. Or Jason Jones. Or Samantha Bee ...

John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show

It started a couple of Mondays ago, when I came across a solicitation online to request tickets for a free taping of John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show.

The Daily Show correspondent was filming episodes of his Comedy Central show over the weekend at a theater at New York University, and Paul and I both thought it sounded like fun. I requested tickets and almost immediately received an email confirming two passes for last Friday's evening taping.

Then, a couple of days later, I received an email from a coworker. A friend of hers works for the show's production company and could get us VIP tickets. Were we in? Yup.

VIP tickets meant very little other than a purple wristband and the ability to wait for the show's seating to begin inside the lobby rather than in an outside line with the huddled masses. And I do mean huddled. It was a bitterly cold night, snow still on the ground.

Taping two shows took roughly three hours, and no one was allowed to leave the theater the entire time, bathroom breaks not excepted. John Oliver's jokes were spot on, as expected, but the eight comedians he introduced were hit-or-miss. Bashing bankers in business suits for our economy's crash, for example, didn't strike me as funny for two reasons:

1. The jokes were too easy.
2. My husband is a banker in a business suit.

I'm not sure when the shows will air, and the website for John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show didn't help me out on that front. And don't bother asking me what comedians I saw; I'm not really sure of that either. Overall, however, it was a fun experience with a good bunch of coworkers at an excellent price.

No business like show business

My parents came for a long-weekend visit, and it was just as much a vacation for me as for them. I was able to show them some of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but we also did plenty of stuff that was new for me too.

We did so much that this will have to be a multi-day post, so stay tuned. And stay tuned (yes, I'm very punny today) to David Letterman on Friday night-- we got last minute tickets to the taping. The Late Show tapes Friday's show on Monday evening, and we were able to get tickets by stopping at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Sunday, filling out a form and proving we were fans by telling them about our favorite segments.

The guests were Jaime Pressly (from My Name is Earl) and a comedian. More interesting was seeing the set in-person. I watched Letterman with Dad from the time I was a little girl until I graduated from high school, and sporadically since then. Although I'm not a frequent viewer now, I have such good memories of watching it with Dad that I really wanted to see it in person.

Unfortunately, Paul and I got split up from Mom and Dad when we were seated, but the two of us were about nine rows back directly in front of where Dave does his monologue at the beginning. It was a neat experience, but probably one I won't repeat soon- we had to be there by 5:30 to pick up the tickets, return at 6 to get in line, wait a bit longer to be seated and then wait some more until the one-hour taping started at 7. I'm glad we did it though.

The next day we went to a completely different taping-- The View. A relative of a relative is a stage manager there and was able to get us tickets (Paul went to work). The handful of us who got tickets this way were seated first, in the front-- we were in the second row and I think we almost could have reached out and patted Barbara Walters on the shoulder. I was amazed how small the set was! I think I heard it holds only 200 audience members.

Unlike at Letterman, we could take pictures inside the studio during the commercial breaks. A couple of the hosts even came out and talked to the audience. The woman sitting next to me spoke to Sherri Shepherd for a bit.

The breaks were the most interesting. I always thought it was a large stage, with the table at one end and the couch where they do the interviews in another. Nope. The crew moves everything out of the way and sets everything up in the 2- or 3-minute breaks.

The woman who got us our tickets chatted with us for a bit and was extremely nice. It was also fun to see her name in the credits at the end of the show. Of course, I taped that day's show on the DVR and we watched it when we returned to the apartment that night. The back of our heads were shown quite a bit!