When we decided to join my parents as their tour guides for their 25th anniversary trip to New York, getting on The Tonight Show was a MUST! We researched and figured out how to obtain tickets and set reminders to go to 1iota and find out when tickets for Sept. would be released.
When the day arrived, I had an alarm set so I’d be among the earliest to log on and try and get tickets. What I didn’t realize was The Tonight Show has it’s own calendar link through 1iota. So while I was refreshing the wrong 1iota calendar, everyone else was requesting tickets on the correct website. UGH. I was devastated. This was all my mom wanted for their trip. After multiple tries, I was able to get ONE request in for The Tonight Show taping. We got multiple requests in for the monologue rehearsal.

They say they’ll notify you at least two weeks before the event. And as that date came and went, so went my hopes that we’d get in.

We researched how to get stand-by tickets and decided Tues. morning, Sept. 20th was our only chance, as we had shows the last three nights of our trip. We got up at 5:30am and made it to the line at 5:53am. We were numbers 17-20. We sat, and stood, and looked at our phones, and as we neared the anticipated ticket hand out at 9am, we made friends with those around us. Some nurses from Sweden, a couple from Ireland and a couple from Texas. We all discussed making sure we had our IDs and our knowledge of how this all worked, which wasn’t much. To our dismay, two more people snuck in line before the final ticket hand out at 9am. We tried to get security to make them go but to no avail. So at 9am, we ended up with spots 19-22. We were instructed to be back no earlier than 3:15pm, but NO later than 3:30pm. At the first announcement, they kept 35 people in line. We felt pretty good about our chances of getting in. But at 4pm, it was announced that 20 were getting in. We had already discussed with my parents that should this happen, they were going. So with tears in her eyes, my mom was the last ushered upstairs into the waiting area. The rest of us were told to wait until they had their final count. Being the first two in line now, were were hopeful, but as time went on, we started to lose hope.

Finally, at 4:45pm, were were told 8 more of us made it! Our group of friends we had made in line all squealed and passed around high fives. We were quickly ushered upstairs where we filled in the remaining 8 seats of the studio. The rest of the people were told to head over to the Today Show place because Jimmy was going to be doing “something fun”. Most of us had already heard that he was going to be playing a game with Mark Wahlberg out there.

They have a comedian that “warms up the crowd” while you wait. Then The Roots come in, and then before you know it, its JIMMY! The show was absolutely amazing. We were a little bummed that part of the show was outside the studio but we could see what they were filming on tv screens around the studio. When it was done, I think we were all star struck and left with a rush of excitement still on our cheeks.

Then. The idea formed. What if…. we did it again TWO DAYS LATER?!?!?!?!? We wondered what the show would be like if there WEREN’T an outside game, and if Hugh Jackman, Thursdays guest, would be any different than Mark Wahlberg. We figured out that we could quickly make our way to our show after the taping was over. So two days later, we woke up at 4:30am and made it in line at 4:50am. We decided that if were going to do this, we wanted an even better chance at getting in. And a better chance of controlling late comers. This time, we were numbers 9-12. We quickly made friends with those around us this time. And eagerly shared our experience from Tuesday. Then someone mentioned that they thought you could only attend one show in six months. UH OH. We quickly googled and discovered that if you get tickets through 1iota, that was the rule, but we didn’t see anything about stand by tickets. But to be safe, we stopped talking about how we had been on Tuesday. The time went fairly quickly and at 9am, with the same pages as Tues., we received our tickets for 9-12. This time, we were to show up no later than 4pm because the show was taping later. We were a little worried about making our evening show still but figured it would go faster this time since there wouldn’t be an outside game.

We showed up by 4pm and by 4:20pm, we knew that 18 of us made it in for sure. They ended up taking 6 more, for a grand total of 24 for this showing. WOW. WHAT. A. SHOW.!!!! We were so glad that we had sacrificed sleep to get in again. While Tuesdays show was awesome, Thursdays show was AMAZING!!!!! And musical guest Shawn Mendez was just fantastic. When it was all over, we asked the page in the elevator on our way out whether we had broken a rule coming again, her response, “I guess you found a loophole”. So, Thank You, 1iota, for not giving us tickets, because we got to go TWICE!!!!!

So, any of you out there debating whether or not it’s worth it to get up early and go down there, it is. And one hour can make the difference between making it, or barely making it! Have fun!!!!