An Evening With Letterman

On Sunday, Josh and I decided to go into one of my favorite places, PJ Clarke's for lunch.  Josh had never been and I had been waiting months to go.  On our way there, we were walking by The Ed Sullivan Theater where The Late Show with David Letterman is filmed.  As we were walking by one of the Late Show staff members stopped us and asked if we wanted to have a chance to get tickets to a show this week.  Neither of us had been, and had wanted to so of course we said yes.  We filled out some paper work and were on our way.  After a nice lunch, we were walking back to our subway stop when we got a call from the Late Show asking if we would like to come to the taping on Tuesday! We agreed and were super excited!

I looked up who the guests for the week were going to be, and one of my favorites, Anderson Cooper was on the list (You may remember that Nicole and I had a minor Silver Fox run in a few months back) as well as musical duo Shovels and Rope.

Josh got home around noon on Tuesday and we headed into the city shortly after.  We had been told that we had to be at the theater between 2 and 3PM to pick up our tickets,  so of course, we got there at about 1:45 just to be safe and were first in line.  At 2pm on the nose, they opened up there doors and we were first in.  It was pretty painless and we got our "Group A" tickets (no idea what group A means) and they sent us over to the Three Monkeys Bar just around the corner to wait until we were called back over at 3:30.  We had a couple drinks and an appy and at 3:30 they called us back to the studio to get back in line with our group to get seated.

 After another short wait in line they let us inside (did I mention that it was FREEZING out?) and we waited probably about 20 minutes in there while they told us the rules (no, phones and cameras, no chewing gum, no whistling or being unruly in general and laugh at everything, even if its not funny). Finally they let us in to the theater and we scrambled for seats.  We managed to get about 6th row center, which was probably about as good as we ever could have asked for.  They showed a short, and hilarious video, narrated by Alec Baldwin, again with more rules and general info and then Alan Kalter, the announcer came out and chatted with us for about 10 minutes.  What a funny and genuine guy.  Paul Schaffer and his band started playing (they are such great musicians) and then out came Dave.  He chatted with us for about 10 mins, took some audience questions and then it was time!

The show went really quickly, it was over in about an hour and 20 mins.  Things were obviously a fine tuned machine.  There were only a couple retakes on the whole show.  One for Dave blowing his nose, and the band had to start their song over.  Anderson was his normal smart, adorable self, talking mostly about the terrorism in France, and Aubrey Plaza, who is a adorable just kind of chatted about nothing haha.  Shovels and Rope was great too, very talented!  My only complaints about the show were the drunk girl that passed out behind us for most of the show that kept farting, and not being able to take photos!  The camera panned over us at the end, which actually showed about 46 minutes into the show.

You can watch the full episode here: Late Show January 13 2015

Going to this taping was actually a lot more laid back and fun than I thought it would be.  Right after we were done I booked Nicole and I tickets for Kelly and Michael on Feb 11.  If you are in NYC, don't even bother trying to get tickets online, go down to the studios and ask for the shows that you want!