Oh. My. God. I'm on TV!

If you look closely at the Monday May 1 edition of THE COLBERT REPORT -- wait, don't blink -- you'll see me sitting in the front row. I'm the one in the polka dot shirt laughing her head off.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I won 4 VIP tickets to the taping of THE COLBERT REPORT, one of my two fav shows on TV right now (the other being THE DAILY SHOW with Jon Stewart).

THE COLBERT REPORT tapes at 513 W. 54th, just west of 10th Avenue, next to Ars Nova. I was pleased to see there was a separate VIP line so I didn't have to join the very long regular free ticket line. My husband and I went with Kris Stewart and his fantastic and gorgeous girlfriend Lizzie Moore, and we all got great front-row seats! W00h00! The last live TV show I was on was some cooking show in the early '80s in Toronto.

The warm-up comedian (I'm sorry I can't remember his name!) was hilarious. And let's face it, you are in a hyped-up mood, primed to laugh, what with all the loud head banging music that plays all the time! (Does that make this show a musical?) But he really was funny!

We got a special treat because we got to see the "toss off" between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, at the end of The Daily Show. Normally the live audience doesn't get to see that.

Something was up, though, since after it happened, Stephen asked why they ended up going off script and doing some random BLUE'S CLUES banter, and he ripped his script in half...hmmm....was he secretly pissed off at Jon for going off script? Was Jon secretly jealous that Stephen had performed at the White House Correspondents dinner? I don't know but it was fishy that the next night there wasn't a toss off at all because of "satellite hook up problems". Yeah, right...

Needless to say it was a hilarious show, since Stephen had come off a pretty sweet weekend of the Correspondents dinner on Saturday, and a 60 MINUTES piece on Sunday. And the guest was Jon Meacham who wrote "American Gospel" was terrific.

The writers would come over to talk with Stephen during every commercial break, and the stage manager was awesome. He was really "up" with us, and looked like he was laughing his head off at every joke. All in all I had a blast!

Those TV guys really know how to prime an audience to be excited, to clap loudly and laugh a lot. So that got me thinking. Why don't they do warm up acts on Broadway? Wouldn't it be cool to have "previews" or "mini-features" before the show?

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