: NYC

Friday...
after the 3rd question on saturday about whether i was having any luck getting tickets i realized i had not communicated the SNL tickets acquiring process. this is how it works...

in mid august you email your information to an email address to be entered in a lottery. the tour guide on our NBC Studios tour told us they receive hundreds of thousands of emails each season. anyway, if you are one of the lucky ones chosen they send you a pair of tickets to either a rehearsal or a live show on whichever date they choose. you have no say in either.

so.. if you miss the lottery then you can go down to 30 rockefeller center the night before (we came across people that had been waiting in line since noon friday) and get in line to receive a number saturday morning at 7am. they go through the line handing out numbers based on which show you want standby tickets for. there is no guarantee that you will get in, as they are standby tickets and are called upon only if the people that won the lottery decided not to show up. so after you get a number saturday morning you come back to 30 Rock at either 630 or 10 depending on which show you asked for. then they seat the ticket holding audience members, and if there are any holes they start calling on the standby people in order of their numbers.. and repeat the process again for the live show.

i had done some research and saw that in 2005 the most number of standbys that got in all season were 185 people between the 2 shows and it was because the show aired on the night of a HUGE snowstorm. so... our plan was that if there were more than 200 people in line we were going to cut our losses and try to meet up with people in manhattan. well. there were around 200 people in line when we showed up. they had set up tents and tarps and you name it. it was like a single file tailgate. we decided to cut our losses..

so we headed out to the upper east side to meet AW. we went to her new bar du jour Dylan Murphy's. it was a little packed at first, but it ended up being a great little place. the jukebox must have been drawing from my subconscious. it was great, at one point people waiting for the bus outside came dancing into the bar. good good times..

Saturday...
the plan was to head to NYC to do the NBC Studios tour as early as possible cause it takes an hour and we had tickets to see the musical Avenue Q at 2pm. 10 AM was our go time. i woke up at 915. everyone else was sleeping so i showered and got dressed. i figured at the very least i could go by myself and meet up with the sleeping beauties later. KW got up and ready in record time at 930 when i told her of my revised plan. B&MK took their time getting ready and met us later. we got rockstar parking as i usually do right in times square. the tour was cool. except we couldn't take pictures. :( we got a tour of the MSNBC set, and the Nightly News set. Conan O'Brien, and lastly SNL. we were able to sit in the audience of Conan, (soooo small) and see the SNL set behind glass. it was so interesting to me to see about 20 people literally running around the set painting the various scenarios at noon on saturday. we saw people painting the locker room, the quiz show set, what i think was the charles barkley show set and the set they didn't use "the justice league" set. she said in the next couple of years ago they are going to change the basic set to pay homage to coney island, right now it's referencing grand central station. an interesting thing to learn was the seats the audience sits on are the same seats yankee stadium uses, lorne michaels didn't allot monies in his budget for seats, so he called in a favor from george steinbrenner. we also learned that each episode cost 2.5 million to make.

after the tour KW and i walked over to w45th and 8th to see Avenue Q. our seats were in the very last row at the very top, i loved them.. however the dark theater made me sooo sleepy. the musical was funny. it was dirty racist puppets. high comedy. our favorite song was "everyone's a little bit racist".

afterwards we were starving so walked over to an italian restaurant and couldn't get in, so we decided to drive over to the feast of san genaro happening in little italy. what a stupid idea that was. it took us over an hour and a half to drive downtown and when we got there it was an outdoor celebration that looked like it was 2K people past maximum capacity so we decided to take dinner out to the burbs. we went back to flushing and ate at joes shanghai. there was a 20 min wait of course after at least 45 minutes of driving. this is the restaurant B&MK took us to when cath and i were in town a couple of years ago. it was delicious.. their fried rice cakes are not at all what you are picturing and hands down the best menu item ever.

at dinner it came out that neither KW or I had ever been to "pinkberry". apparently its been featured on "the hills", it started on the west coast and is making it's way east. there was one right around the corner that BDKs brother used to manage, so they hooked us up with free yogurt. its a little hard to describe what pinkberry is.. its kind of a frozen yogurt i guess. there are 3 flavors to choose from, original, green tea, and coffee. then you put anything from fresh fruit to cereals to chocolate chips and coconut and moshi on it.. it's really quite delicious.

we waited all night for SNL and were rather disappointed with the sketches. MPs acting was bad, but i feel like the writers were on the top of their game either.. two of the first sketches were total copies of the peyton manning episode. and the ugly kids episode? ugh..

this was the funniest one..

the funniest parts of the show were the countless texts that LK and i traded back and forth during the show. like when LK wrote that HEKD thought that during the digital short that andy samberg singing was MP.. i'm thinking that MP media torch is being extinguished as we speak. it was fun while it lasted.

***UPDATE*** Here are the pics