The Tonight Show

Monday, March 2, 2015

The long awaited Tonight Show post! I still cannot believe that the whole thing actually happened!

The morning began bright and early in Baltimore. My friends and I caught the 6:30am bus to New York. Of course it was freezing so I curled up with my blanket scarf on the upper level of the bus and settled in for a long, long ride to the city. Once we got to NYC we headed to a cupcake shop for breakfast and some steamers.

We also indulged in a little game of ConnectFour. We played round robin while we waited for the rest of the city to open up. From there we went to Laduree, a delicious macaroon shop straight from Paris. I had trouble just picking a few flavors!

In case you haven't noticed, we basically ate our way through the city. So we stopped at an Indian place and ordered these delicious rolls. By this time, though, I was pretty stuffed. Luckily, we had about 40 blocks to walk until we got to 30 Rock and by then I was ready for pizza.

Once we got to 30 Rock the lines began. We had official tickets, but you have to get your seating assignment. We loitered around the NBC store until it was time to check-in and then waited in the check-in line for about 45 minutes. Despite us being the first in lines, we weren't necessarily guaranteed a good seat in the studio. All of the seating is done randomly. We were assigned letter 'H'.

We then headed downstairs to have lunch and then came back upstairs to get in line and go through security. After all the necessities were finished, we were escorted into the studio. It was finally our turn to be seated and...WE GOT FRONT SEATS!!

Initially this sounded super great, but for the majority of the show we had an excellent view of the cameramen and a not-so-excellent view of Jimmy. The show is taped in the same sequence that it airs and it's amazing to see how all of it works. Jimmy took questions from the audience in-between one of the segments. No one really asked about him though which was kind of frustrating.

After the musical guest, he took a lap around the studio and then headed out. We were filed out by the pages and we spilled out into the NYC evening. From the studio we found a steakhouse for dinner. We had a few hours from before the bus back to Baltimore so we wandered around the city before finding a Starbucks to wait it out.