We Went to the Rosie Show

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