A BRAND NEW Kitsch-en Dinette Set!

Pt. II of III

Canadian friend Jen & her new husband Steve were honeymooning in San Francisco, and had planned a stop in Los Angeles to conclude their trip with a taping of The Price Is Right (TPIR from hereon in, because that’s what all the cool kids call it). They had two extra tickets, if my husband and I were interested – (Based on my last post, you can correctly surmise that I was). As for Mr. Nakedcrusaderrobyn, with a crazy deadline looming at work… Not so much. I called my friend Elliot, who seemed to have a similar penchant for cheesy game shows, we made some t-shirts, packed some snacks, and drove down to Los Angeles on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend.

 

The taping was Monday afternoon at 1pm, and Jen & Steve were eager to get in line for tickets (you may recall that we already had tickets, but the first set of tickets didn’t seem to guarantee anything except entrance on to the highly secured (okay, just a fence and a bored-looking security guard) CBS Studio grounds), but after driving 6 1/2 hours, Elliot and I… not so much. (last Boratism, I promise).

 

We arrived at Elliot’s sister’s place (conveniently less than 1 mile from CBS) around 11pm, and Jen & Steve were out near the airport (about an hour drive, round trip). Since they were hoping to get in line around 1am, (they had heard this was the magic number in order to maybe, almost, probably, hopefully guarantee a coveted spot on Contestants Row), and some sort of Thanksgiving weekend parade had backed traffic up all over Elliot’s sister’s neighbourhood, there was not much point in trying to snag a few hours of sleep (which had been our original plan, sleeping bags and pillow in tow). But no biggie, right? We were gonna see Bob-freakin-Barker in t-minus-14 hours

 

We dropped the honeymooners off at 1:30am in front of the CBS studio gates, took the car back to Elliot’s sister’s place (although, in retrospect, if I had known how helpful a rain free shelter on wheels might have been for the following 18+hours, I would have forked out the $10 for parking), and joined them in line around 2am.

 

There were about 15 people in line at 1:30, but the crowd had ballooned to about 40 by 2am. Fortunately, Jen & Steve had secured our spots in line by renting $5 lawn chairs for us from the genius bagel shop entrepreneur across the street from the studio, so we didn’t get too many dirty looks when we joined them. (Thank-you again J&S. Those chairs were the best things, of anything.)

 

Having never stood in line over night for anything, not even tickets to the NKOTB concert I wanted to attend in grade 4 (“But MOM! What could possibly happen to a group of 9-year-olds on the streets of Toronto in the middle of the night?”), I had no idea how to handle the culture and etiquette of Line Standing.

 

Seasoned Line Standers do not stand – they sit – on folded lawn chairs which they stow in their cars, parked nearby. They have blankets. Umbrellas. Snacks. Thermoses of hot beverages. They Know What They Are Doing. We, clearly, did not.

 

There are two main types of Seasoned Line Standers Sitters:

Those who are chatty, hyper, and extremely happy to be standing on a mostly deserted, rainy Los Angeles street at 4am,

And:

Those who aren’t.

The latter category of Line Sitters seem to consider themselves martyr-like for enduring the hardships of night, rain, sleep deprivation, etc., and, naturally, transform themselves into blanket and tarp covered statues.

We are sandwiched between these two personality extremes. Grumpy Statue Camp doesn’t emerge from their blue covers until the line starts to move at 6:00am. Hyper Chatty Camp consists of a mother-daughter team from, cute-drawly-accents withstanding, one of the Southern states. Daughter is on break from her delta-belta-pi university, and they are vacationing in Los Angeles with the hopes (and seemingly sole purpose) of appearing on TPIR. They didn’t know they needed tickets, so by about 9am, and much cheer leading and shrieking, we didn’t see them again.

TPIR – The Final Frontier (aka Pt. III) – will be posted Thursday.