Last Friday I was on the computer and I went to Oprah’s
OWN web site. I saw that Rosie O’Donnel is taking over for Oprah at Harpo
Studios here in Chicago. I looked at Rosie’s page http://www.oprah.com/rosie/rosie.html
and noticed that
they had last minute tickets available that you could sign up for. So I filled
out the form and sent it to them. Last minute tickets are the way to go if you
want to be in the audience. That’s how I got on Oprah’s show twice before she
went off the air. But she still owns Harpo Studios and Rosie works for Oprah.
Well two days
later I get an email to attend a test show for Rosie’s new show. I didn’t know
what a test show was but I wanted to go. I thought it would be better than
sitting around in this stupid apartment. On Tuesday I went to my disability meeting
at the township. I told the people about it and I said that I was allowed to
bring one guest with me. “Does anybody want to go with me?” I said. Out of the
five other people that were there at the meeting, one girl said she would love
to go. That was cool because I didn’t want to go alone. It’s always so much
more fun to share a fun experience like the Rosie Show with someone else.
We had to be down
there at 12:30 in the afternoon. She picked me up a little earlier than normal,
just in case we ran into traffic or some other problem. We had a pleasant ride
downtown. We were really running early so she showed me around her old
neighborhood that she grew up in. It was on the way to Harpo Studios anyway.
When we got down
there we couldn’t find a place to park. We kept driving around and around.
Finally we found this valet parking for some restaurant and asked them if they
could help us since my guest was handicapped and couldn’t walk very far on her
cane. They were very nice and helped us park our car.
The line at Harpo
Studios to get in was getting long and we still had to wait another 45 minutes.
I knew my guest couldn’t stand that long so I went to the front entrance and
told them about her problem. They quickly got a chair for her and she sat down.
We were at the head of the line. When it was time to go inside, we were the
first two people to go in. We had to sit around for about an hour waiting. It
wasn’t a bad wait because my guest was excited and we were having fun. They had
had a morning show and we had to wait for them to clear out first. In the
meantime they had given us a card to fill out. It had three questions that you
could ask Rosie. Just before we went into the studio itself, the people working
for the Harpo’s Studio went through the cards we had to fill out and they
selected about a dozen people from those cards. They were the first ones to get
seated along with a few other people.
Since we had tickets number 1 and 2 we went into the
studio next. This time we got to sit up front in the studio with the band right in back of us. That was cool. We found out by talking to the people next to us that Henry
Winkler, ”The Fonz” was going to be one of the guest on the show. Cool! My guest and I didn’t have any idea what was
going to happen at this “Test Show,” So it was thrilling when The Fonz walked
on stage. He was funny and Rosie and Henry Winkler joked around.
The Rosie Show
turned out to be very funny and everybody was laughing and thoroughly entertained
throughout the show. Rosie’s next guests were two policemen that appeared on
some other show where they were carp fishing with their hands. I didn’t follow
that mainly because I couldn’t hear them. Maybe that’s the testing part of the
show. Stage hands were always doing something trying to get the look of the
show just right.
They changed the
set and took away Rosie’s desk that she was using to interview her guest and
cleared the stage. A microphone and stand went up with a couple of speakers. Alright,
someone was going to sing. Josh Kelly walked out and everybody cheered. He
brought his guitar and sang.
In between guests
when they were changing sets on the stage, Rosie would come down and ask if anybody
had any questions. I couldn’t think of
any so I just enjoyed Rosie’s humor.
The last thing
they did was to set up the stage to look like a quiz show with two podiums. I
don’t know how they selected the two young girls to answer the questions. Rosie
would read several peoples first names and the contestants would have to guess
what their families last name were. The winner won something but we didn’t
find out what it was.
That was the end
of the show. On our way out they gave a gift bag. We got a copy of Josh Kelly’s
CD, a bag of some kind of potato chips,
a bag of Garrett’s popcorn, a gift
certificate for a sample of some kind of cupcake that you had to go downtown to
get and a Rosie Key chain. But the good thing is that we are going to get to come back in December
for a live on air show. I hope they give out Christmas presents for that show. That would really be great if we got that lucky.
I thought Rosie
was funny and everybody in the audience had fun. I’m sure glad that my guest
had a lot of fun too. It was so nice to be able to share the fun we had at the
show with each other.
Bill
