The One with the Ellen DeGeneres Show

Today was a magical day and one I will not soon forget.
One of the fun things people like to do around here is go to show tapings - The Price Is Right, So You Think You Can Dance, American Idol, Ellen DeGeneres, etc. As soon as we moved here I got a job that prevented me from going to any of these fun activities, and then once I quit said job before Fox was born, I was just too pregnant to go. Poor me. Fast forward (or rewind?) to a few weeks ago when I heard that I could apply to get tickets to Ellen's 12 Days of Giveaways, I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a whirl. That was at the beginning of November. When I didn't get a phone call a few days later I forgot about it and moved on. Then this past Saturday my phone rang and it was a random 818 number but instead of ignoring it like I usually do with unknown numbers I answered it and I'm glad I did! It was someone from the Ellen show letting me know I got two guaranteed tickets to the first of the 12 days of giveaways. Holy crow how exciting! I only had Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to really let it sink in and believe you me I watched about a million different clips of her giveaways on YouTube that got me pretty stoked.
Today was the big day!
At 11:30am I picked up my friend Veronica and we drove to the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank, CA.

We didn't need to be there until 1pm, but Veronica, who has been to one previous taping of Ellen, knew the routine and said we'd get better seats and possibilities of being in games and contests if we went early. I'm glad we did. Here's what it looked like when we arrived:

And here's what it looked like at 1pm:

Maxed out!
At 1pm somebody had us line up (or rather dash furiously and bump and run into each other to be the first ones) to get our numbered tickets. We were sitting pretty close to the entrance line so we were numbers 54 and 55.


Side note: the person who called me asked me (and everyone) to bring a new and unwrapped toy for children under 13. When I was a little girl I collected Littlest Pet Shops. They don't look the same as they did when I collected them, but it was still super fun to buy another one, 15 years later.

We dropped them off in these buckets to be donated to needy children.

Around 3pm we lined up numerically and headed into the studio.

And then I had to turn off my cell phone so I couldn't take any more pictures. But here's what happened: We went through security and then sat down for a minute then we were taken into the Riff Raff room. We had to do a silly little reenactment of placing the donated toys in bins and then we lined up for awhile. Then we were led into the beautifully decorated studio. They asked how many in our party (2!) and we were directed to the front row. I WAS IN THE FRONT ROW OF THE ELLEN SHOW! I'm pretty sure I'll be hard to miss if you watch the episode which airs tomorrow.... Veronica says they put younger cuter girls in the front rows, hehe. So then we had to practice dancing and clapping and screaming and yelling. I'm not gonna be able to talk tomorrow that's for sure! Then Ellen herself came out and the show began. She had a giveaway almost right off the bat: everyone in the audience got an Xbox Kinect! Wowzers.Then there was some YouTube star first (for the life of me I can't remember his name), but he's studying Greek something or another at Yale and he and his buddy make mash ups and post them on YouTube and get millions of hits. Fun fun fun. Then Mandy Moore came out. She's so pretty and tall and cute. I need to see Tangled - Mandy is the voice of Rapunzel. They talked about animals a lot which made me giggle. Then we had to pretend that Taylor Swift was there. I guess she performed two songs a few weeks ago and one of them will be aired tomorrow as if she were there today. Too bad, I really wanted to see Taylor. And then Ellen did the rest of her giveaways for the day. Holy moly I feel so lucky. I won't say all we got, just watch the show, and here's a pic:

Christmas definitely came early this year!
Watch the Ellen DeGeneres Show tomorrow and you might see me!