Travels with FatCatAir

Wednesday September 27, 2006

Daily Show

So my wife and I went to NYC for a long weekend this past weekend. This was actually a Christmas present I gave her last year, a three day weekend in New York and tickets to The Daily Show. We were supposed to go last April but things got screwed up with the tickets.

Getting the tickets is kind of strange. You request tickets by sending an email and then eventually you get an email saying that you have tickets. You don't really have tickets though what you get at first is a note saying that they will send you ticket confirmation 2 weeks prior to the show. When you get that confirmation then you immediately have to reply to that email and if you are fast enough you get the tickets. Not that you are then assures of getting in anyway.

Well back when we were going in April the second email they sent 2 weeks prior to the show was determined to be spam by spamassassin running on my home server and thrown out. By the time I realized that it was too late and we couldn't go. So we had to ask for tickets again and start the whole process over. We asked for Sept. 25 as our 1st choice and Sept. 18 as our second choice. Bill Clinton was the guest on the 18th and Pat Buchanan was the guest on the 25th so it was unfortunate we didn't get our second choice!

They tell you to line up 1-1.5 hours before the doors open at 4:45pm and that you may not get out until 7:30pm. We got there about 75 minutes before hand and were 175th in line. The studio holds somewhere around 250 so it was good we weren't much later.

Security seemed to be more than I'd have expected for going to a TV show and once we were inside and the taping was about to begin Jon Stewart let us know the the guest on Tues. was Pres. Musharraf and that security had been checking out the place all day.

It was surprising to see how low rent the set appears in person. Considering this is the new improved set it hard to imagine what the old one looked like. The other surprising thing was how fast the whole show seemed. Seemed much faster than when you see it at home even though at the commercial breaks everytthing stops for about the same time as the real commercials. Sort of like TV timeouts when you are at a football game. All in all we enjoyed it immensely.