OH, the magic of television!

Well, yesterday I took the day off of work and went with my friends Alice, Connie, and Sandy to a taping of the Martha Stewart Show in the afternoon. We met for lunch before hand and then headed to the studio.

After a long stint in the "holding room" where we had refreshments (NOT homemade by Martha), signed release forms, and got "pumped up" by the audience wrangler we headed into the studio. We were seated in the very top row. The audience prep guy was a commedian who entertained us while we waited for the star herself to show up. He was pretty funny.

The set looked just like it does on TV but it was cool to see in real life. I always thought her show was live but no, it is taped before a live studio audience. Our show will air on Friday. The special guest was Wynona Judd but she couldn't be there for the taping so they did her segments earlier and were going to add ours in. In the end I don't think they got us on camera at all. They didn't do very many audience shots. Probably because they had 2 different audiences and they don't want anyone to notice.

We watched a segment on decorating lamp shades (ugly and a really short segment), cleaning cookware (could have been useful if the segment was more than 2 minutes long), and making a passionfruit souffle (which I don't eat). It was more fascinating seeing how a show is made than seeing the show itself. There were about a million production assistants in the studio doing who knows what, at one point they held up little signs that said speed up or slow down in addition to the teleprompters, and we saw the stage managers instructing Martha on what to do for each bit during the commercial breaks. At one point the director was in the kitchen set and started eating some of the props in the background (jelly beans in a giant vase). The segments were REALLY short. Probably because they air at the end of the hour where segments are shorter and commercials are more frequent. At one point in the souffle making Martha put the suffles in the oven and then when she went to pull the cooked souffles out they weren't done so they stopped production so the food could keep cooking. So to kill time Martha took questions from the audience. Alice asked a great quesiton about cakes.

When it was all over we each got a cheesy T-Shirt as a free gift. I was hoping for a new car but hey, beggers can't be choosers. The only good thing (no pun intended) about the T-shirt was that on the back they had printed Martha's instructions for folding T-Shirts. I loved them. I refolded all of Greg's T-shirts this morning (like 50 of them) using her technique in under 10 minutes. It is fast and easy and they take up a lot less room and look great. I guess that made the whole trip worthwhile.