Wining and Dining

Monday was a busy day, which is why there was no post, even though I may have said something at some point about posting every day because it's :: announcer voice::  NATIONAL BLOGGING MONTH.

It was busy because we had an event that involved every single employee in North America and Canada and I had to help coordinate the New York portion, then after that we went to the Tisch Gala, a fundraiser for the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  When my company buys a table and needs someone to fill a seat I'm happy to tag along for free dinner and drinks.
I got to see Glen Close very very close.  And Marcia Gay Harden was next to Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.  They were all sitting at the next table over and had to walk by me to get to the stairs.  No I didn't reach out and try to pet them, or ask for their autographs, or just yell "hi" and smile and wave real big.  I acted like any proper New Yorker and feigned indifference.  I did consider stealing their leftover eclairs and trying to auction them on ebay, but ultimately decided against it.  Next time I'll at least steal the eclair and take a picture of it for y'all.

The room where we had dinner was gorgeous.  This is a picture similar to the set up, for our dinner. The room overlooks Columbus Circle and Central Park. 

You can see a slideshow of images from the event to see all the famous people I mingled with here .  You can see Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony in one of the pictures. He was a presenter which is why I got to go.

Don't Take the Golden Ticket

So last night Scott and I went to this NYU Tisch Gala. It's one of those swanky fundraising dinners that I just happened to get tickets to through work. First episode of note occured in the bathroom where I heard a real person respond to a compliment on her shoes with "they're last season though." Some people apparently really do care.
We found our seats and luckily I was sitting next to someone who could point out the famous people walking by. Tony Bennet, Alec Baldwin, Ira Cantor (some society lady). I thought it was neat to see, but none of them really blew my socks off. It was fun to see Rainn Wilson from The Office present some awards and the Coen Brothers too. The guy who invented Skyy Vodka was even there. I tried to get some pictures, but they were all really blurry since I only had my little camera. The best part of the evening was when Elaine Stritch (who plays Alec Baldwin's character on 30 Rock's mother)came out on stage in nothing more than a pair of tights, a shirt, tie and sweater vest. She sang him her favorite love song about how some man's love made her love herself and did this double handed leg pat thing that couldn't help but make you laugh. Especially when she's over 80.
As we were walking to the dinner portion of the evening people were trying to direct me to a different room from everyone I came with because I had a pink ticket and theirs was yellow. We got it all straigtened out though and they gave me a yellow one. Apparently I should have kept the pink ticket though since that was the VIP room! Oh well.
On the way out, Scott went to the restroom and I was waiting outside when I saw people taking a picture and heard a vaguely familiar voice. I snuck around to the front side of the group and saw it was Tina Fey! Every other famous person I saw that night didn't impress me much, but Tina Fey is just so awesome I was definitely a little star struck. I think she was with her husband and they were headed towards the elevator. I saw Scott coming and gave him the hurry up hand wave to get him to come along and I got to the elevator just as the doors started to close. I didn't want to force my way onto the elevator like a crazy person, but Tina Fey's husband (I think) held the door for me and I got to ride the elevator down to the ground level with Tina Fey. Yup if only I'd kept the pink ticket I could have been wining and dining with her. Sigh, the elevator ride was pretty exciting though.

Here's Scott practicing his Tina Fey hand signal.

From 2008_11_17

Totally Tisch

I had a lovely Monday evening at the Tisch Gala, honoring: Joan Tisch, Billy Crudup '94, Richard Vague, David Liu '87 & Carley Roney. Joan Tisch did a lot of fundraising for the NYU Tisch school of the arts and her family even went on stage and sang the start of a broadway song, then the professionals joined in. David Liu and Carley Roney are the founders of www.theknot.com and Billy Crudup was in movies like Big Fish and Almost Famous. I also saw a few other famous folks, like Jesse L. Martin '91, part of the original Rent cast, he was also in the movie version, Ethan Hawke, and Alec Baldwin. We said hello to Jesse, and I took a picture with a couple of my co-workers standing with him. When my friend Erin went to say hello to Mr. Martin, I of course went to grab my camera and they were already posing and ready, so being flustered I must have turned the camera to the wrong setting and it wouldn't take the picture! Then I figured it out, but for a second there I was worried that I didn't have a memory card in the camera or something silly like that. I'd only taken my little point and shoot camera, which I haven't been using as much lately, and of course all my photography class knowledge went out of my head. Oh well, a snapshot was good enough. The reason I got to go was because Sony had donated money so we got a table with all kinds of good food and drinks, and tickets to the show. Even with the Broadway strike the cast of Spring Awakening performed a couple numbers for us.
Afterward since I was already in Times Square, I went to retake some pictures that I somehow lost from last Saturday. It was a very nice evening.

From Veteran's Day...

Tonight was a volleyball game and we had a lot of the team show up, so I made everyone pose for a team picture. We lost all three games, but i thought we did pretty well considering that we were playing the number 1 team in our league.