From: nebusj-@-rpi-.edu   
      
   	Finally it was time to enter the studio.  My father and I started   
   from the mezzanine level where we were told that we had to show our paper   
   tickets and our wristbands.  I figured I'd see if I could get through the   
   show without putting my wristband on, and so I draped it over my left   
   wrist on the assumption the pages didn't really care all that strongly as   
   long as things looked about right.   
      
   	As we started walking forward the pages stopped my father and told   
   him he had to put the wristband on; he didn't know how.  If you can find   
   the invisible seam it exposes a sticky patch to use to complete the loop.   
   I just held mine in place with the right hand and was allowed through   
   without comment.   
      
   	But the time spent on this meant that we lost the line ahead of   
   us: we were to go downstairs, across some corridors back to the elevators,   
   to pass through the metal detectors, and get sent up to the studio.  We   
   got down the stairs fine but had to shout for help on just where to go   
   from there; when I went to tapings in the 90s we just started from outside   
   the elevators.   
      
   	Though the studio's on the sixth floor, the audience rides up   
   to the seventh in order to walk down the many twisting corridors of a   
   building constructed for radio sets that was extensively renovated to   
   provide hundreds of thousands of TV studios that Tom Snyder could record   
   _Tomorrow_ in.  There are more exposed drop-tile ceilings with rivers of   
   cables than you have ever seen.   
      
   	Approaching the Late Night studio the corridors get lined with   
   8 1/2-by-11 glossy pictures of moments from the show, most of them from   
   the 90s.  Some of them I recognized from long-ago trips, but then it's   
   not hard to guess they'd include a picture of the time David Letterman   
   was on, or of the William Shatner visit when Shatner couldn't name the   
   character he played in Generations.   
      
   	Throughout the process of getting upstairs we were warned that   
   no photography was allowed, as they always say about these things,   
   although they added a twist I hadn't heard before.  The current pravda   
   is that you must not take photographs because the studio is copyrighted   
   and of course if you violated their copyright they'd have to have   
   security confiscate your camera and probably eject you from the show.   
      
   	As we were brought in to the studio it turned out that our   
   satisfyingly low number of 14 did not mean we were going to be in the   
   lowermost rows of seats.  The seats on the stage-right side of the   
   audience, nearer Conan's desk and more likely to be on camera, were   
   already filling up, and even on the stage-left side, by the band, the   
   first three rows were crowded.   
      
   	My father and I were tucked into the fourth row where I knew I   
   might be seen on camera if they had a long, slow panning shot and I were   
   to hold up a pair of signal flares while doing jumping jacks.  Down on   
   the studio floor a large number of people, some of them rather older,   
   retired-looking folks, were hanging around by the exit there, taking   
   photographs of the whole set.  A page told me I should get fix my   
   wristband so it was fit around my wrist, which I earnestly pretended to   
   do until he went to something else.   
      
   --   
   								Joseph Nebus   
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)