The View: An Experience

Unless I have an appointment or am planning to take a trip, I rarely take time off from work. While the idea of staying in and lazing around the apartment on a traditional work day is a nice one, it is one that I rarely indulge. However, when I was invited to a live showing of The View, it seemed right to accept and put my PTO to good use. Mind you, I’d never watched the view before yesterday’s show and my opinion of the ladies (as a gaggle of chatty-kathys) was not a flattering one. But I thought, why not, it’d be an experience. And it was.

Close to an hour after I had intended to awaken, I resisted the urge to spend the day in bed and sluggishly prepared for the experience that awaited me. Winds and heavy rain was not enough of a deterrent and I made it to the studio before the 9:30am cut-off that was printed on the ticket. C. and I waited for about 30 minutes before we made it through the lobby door and past security. There, in the hallway, we would wait another hour before being taken up to the studio where we would have an up-close look at Whoopi, Joy, Sherri, Elizabeth, and Barbara.

Although a seat was most welcome once we were finally admitted into the studio (we were met with cookies and juice) the wait was not completely uneventful. While waiting a good 20 minutes to use the restroom, Debbie Morgan, the actress who plays Angie on All My Children walked by on her way to the elevator. She was dressed very casually with her hat pulled down low and obviously did not want to be bothered, which no one did.

The studio where The View is filmed is much smaller than we had expected. The layout can best be described as stadium seating with three sections (right, center, left) and directed to the tiny table where the ladies sat. We were seated in the second row of the right mezzanine section. It was a good seat although the cameras obstructed my view of Elizabeth and Sherri and I caught Barbara in profile only. The show itself was pretty tame but after screaming and clapping on cue for the first 10 minutes, I was ready to sit back and listen.

It was a day of “Hot Topics” which featured Mel Gibson’s divorce, the child actress from Slumdog Millionaire being sold by her father, President Obama and Chavez, among other. However, I was more interested in what was going on during the breaks (pictures to come). Some of the hosts got make-up touch ups, there was much interaction with the crew, and the warm-up comic fielded our questions and tried to keep us entertained. The ladies stayed on stage almost the entire time and seemed to be working non-stop. All in all, I was glad the show was live and merely an hour long because both my hands and mouth were tired from all the work they had to do. But I was glad that I got to experience the show without all the frills and I gained a renewed respect for the ladies as intelligent and hard-working, positive women.