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 Brendan, Wanda, Dane and Me I am not generally a fan of watching parades on TV. More often than not, the parade's broadcast is preventing me from watching something else ... like SportsCenter or cartoons or The History Channel. But even more than that, attending a parade in person comes with the benefit of not having to listen to the people who broadcast parades on television. Were it possible to bottle insipid, the Katie Courics, Al Rokers and America's finest soap stars would have it going on. In L.A., things are made slightly better by the parade's broadcaster being game show legend Bob Eubanks. Hearing his voice without having to watch the ipecac-like Newlywed Game seems oddly like a benefit. And having Meg's mother there to explain a lot about the parade's inner workings and background definitely made the experience more enjoyable than usual. As did the mammoth slabs of French toast she gave us ... it was like I was eating a loaf of bread with syrup. Not being hung over also helped. Our plans had originally been to actually attend the parade, or at the very worst the float display that follows it, but those fell by the wayside on fears of further mingling with the Rose Bowl masses. The previous night we'd tentatively decided to try and get tickets to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which would have required a 4-5 a.m. wakeup for the 8 a.m. day-of giveaway. You can pretty much infer how that went over, especially considering I've never watched an entire Tonight Show from beginning to end ... ever. The Tonight Show idea was mostly Charlie, who really wanted to see a taping and, as far as I can gather, is a fan of the show. When Meg came in the guest room and whispered to me that we wouldn't be going anywhere that morning, who was I to complain? As a compromise, we decided to make a day of it in Burbank, the home to pretty much every network not named CBS.  -- Those Disney bastards just get their fingerprints on everything. Coming as we did, the swath of Burbank we crossed was nothing but entertainment-related buildings -- Warner Bros., Walt Disney, NBC, ABC, Nickelodeon, etc ... even things we passed that weren't studios had something to do with TV, like the bowling alley that is, as our host described, "in everything." Burbank is clearly a municipality with money. Instead of the tattered benches with lawyer ads all the other towns have, Burbank has solid concrete benches with "BURBANK" on them in block lettering. All the streets are recently paved, the library and high school look recently replaced ... it's a city that knows its tax base.  -- Though the wildfires did a number on some of the mountainsides. The tour was really not something to be recommended for a holiday like New Year's. When no one is actually working on shows, sets or costumes, there tends to be not a lot to look at. This would probably be why the pages we talked to were so shocked to see people not just after Leno standby numbers, and why the five of us got our own personal tour. Of note, since you can't actually take any pictures: • The tour starts with a video presentation explaing how NBC Burbank "is on the cutting edge" of technology and whatnot. The video then highlights some of the shows on which their technology is cutting edge: The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Later with Greg Kinnear -- both of which stopped production in 1996. • I haven't been on the NYC NBC tour, but I was struck at how few shows are actually taped there. The predominant ones are Days of Our Lives and Leno, but other than Access Hollywood and Weakest Link, there's not much else that goes on there. Really, outside of Days of Our Lives, there's not much else that goes on there. • Speaking of Weakest Link, it now fills the studio where Johnny Carson taped for 30 years. From the original Tonight Show to the second run of a borderline game show. When Carson dies, I hope he remembers to roll over in his grave. • The NBC parking lot is an actual part of the tour, where you both get to see across to the NBC commissary, the back of the hill with the Hollywood sign on it and whatever car Jay drove to work in that day. Today, it was light brown roadster with Illinois plates and windshield wipers that couldn't have been more than six inches long. When Meg asked why it was registered in Illinois, our guide couldn't really come up with an answer, though I can't really fault her for that one. • Come to think of it, our guide didn't have the answers to a lot of things. When she tried to explain that the current peacock logo has six feathers to signify NBC's six divisions, she could only name two -- News and Sports. (The Net reveals the other four to be Entertainment, Stations, Network and Operations.) I guess that's why she was giving tours on New Year's Day. • She did, however, know the three tones of NBC are 'G,' 'E' and 'C,' for the General Electric Corporation. Well, I thought that was interesting.  -- Send your 'Headlines' to ... (CD4) At the beginning of our tour, we grabbed #18 in the Leno stand-by line. The whole ticketing process is actually very well organized -- everyone, from those NBC VIPs saved seats to every show, plus those who requested tickets ahead of time, got them that morning or just have standby places -- are told to show up at 4 p.m. At 4, all the ticket-holders present are let in, and the standby crowd is lined up in order. Anyone with a ticket or standby number who shows up after that is sent to the end of the standby line, where they are left to bitch and not get in. The pages relay to each other just how many seats are left in the studio, filling in the blanks up until taping time hits around 5.  -- If you're lucky, the yellow provides the salmon. The Leno set has about 400 seats in it. Each standby number is good for 4, so that meant there was potentially seventy people standing in front of us. Course, if nine of the numbers in front of us failed to show up, that might help our cause. Really, I can't imagine #18 often gets one in the taping with room to spare, but I also can't imagine the guest lineup of Brendan Fraser, Wanda Sykes and non-musical act Dane Cook had people sprinting in from Orange County. Least there was one advantage to coming on a holiday. Course, when only two people get into the studio after your group, the hopes for a decent view of the action aren't very high. Especially when they then tell you walking in your threesome will have to split up. That all comes right before they put your friend in the front row of the bleachers, and you and your girlfriend in the seats marked off as "Reserved for Mavis Leno." At first, I felt incredibly guilty about being so fortunate. People who had planned trips to the show months in advance were probably sitting in seats much worse than the ones we'd lucked into. Then during the interview with Brendan Fraser, he and Jay proceeded to have a conversation at length about both PlayStation 2 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Then during commercial breaks, Fraser started taking digital pictures of everything and everyone. It was at that point I knew I belonged there. As Leno shows go, it was a generally entertaining experience. We missed most of the crowd warmup stuff, but halfway through the monologue, all the mics went out and delays ensued. Given the warm-up is little more than a comic mocking the audience and calling girls on stage to whore it for free stuff, you really can't go wrong. The night's skit was a Jaywalking asking Rose Bowl players tough questions, such as "How do you spell Oklahoma?" Wanda Sykes is funny enough to get a link. Dane Cook ... he discussed kids who smell like pee and coddling office psychopaths. And the whole taping ended with Jay doing the pre-news teasers for the rest of the week. And if you habitually tape The Tonight Show and save it for posterity, go back to the opening of the 1/1/2003 episode. After Jay is shown shaking the hands of his guests down front, you'll see Meg's head, Charlie's entire upper body and a good piece of my forehead for about a second before the shot pans back to the stage. And f that weren't enough, we were on again as the show went into its first break. It's no Mark Coen playing "Know Your Breeds of Dog" on Letterman, but it'll have to do for now.  -- Through the magic of propping the camera in the grass. | ||||||||||||||||
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