What? Oh, this is the Colbert Report.
This has been an insane fannish few days for me -- my body cannot stand the levels of adrenalined psychitude I have reached! Friday night was a massive Harry Potter party in Harvard Square, where fandom basically seemed to have broken free of its restraints and gone romping around the real world - I may try to write that up later, because yikes. But yeah, so I was high on Harry Potter all weekend, and then super early on Monday morning, moireach and I took the Chinatown bus down to New York to see The Colbert Report taped.
Monday kind of sucked, because we were exhausted from lack of sleep, and it poured rain all day, so I was soaking wet and walking all over the city, and then we tried to get into the Daily Show taping on standby, but were denied. :-( But things picked up in the evening when we managed to get $3 margaritas and $3 beer in Manhattan (!!!! WHAT) with furies. A drunk trannie walking by the restaurant insistently called us Charlie's Angels. HAHA WHAT. Oh, NYC, you are flattering yet batshit. It may be the funniest thing any random person on the street has ever said to me, rivaled only by the time a couple of weeks ago when me and M were walking to the T and a dude said, "You look beautiful, ladies. Don't give up."
But Tuesday was sunny and gorgeous and not too hot, and we poked around the city a little bit. But we wanted to be the first in line, so we went over to the studio around 1:30, beating the next arrivers by a good 45 minutes. (For those of you interested in arrival times, we were #1 and 2 at 1:30; #3 and 4 got there at 2:15, and then a bunch of people arrived between 2:30 and 2:45.) The Daily Show and Colbert Report studios are both in a hilariously gross neighborhood, all car dealerships (?? in Manhattan??) and the Larry Flint Hustler Club, and at TDS the whole place smells of manure because the horses for the horse-drawn carriages are stabled around there. The outside of the Colbert Report studio in particular is really low-key - no pictures of Stephen or anything, just an awning with "The Colbert Report" written on it, and a chalk drawing of their logo on the sidewalk.
Waiting in line wasn't too bad -- for awhile we were watching interns going in and out of the studio (a catered lunch arrived around 2:20), but then some audience coordinator people made us line up down this gross alley where we couldn't see the door anymore. But we made line buddies with #3 and #4, a father and teenage son from Houston, and talked, and read. (Our conversations kept going back to HP without segue, it was pretty lame. Sample dialogue: "Why does the building across the street not have any windows?" "I don't know, but it's creepy. Look at all the vents." "It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory - nobody ever goes in, and nobody ever comes out." "I hope nobody has to work in there." "Yeah, and I also liked how you could tell that Harry was grown up by the way he finally unpacked his trunk.")
They gave us numbers and let us into a drab waiting room around 5:15 - tickets #1-4 all had notes inside them from past heroes, which was adorable. Mine was from Laura, 6/28/07 (<3 <3). So me and moireach added our own notes and stuck them inside the tickets too. We finally got let into the studio itself at 6:20 or 6:30. There were a lot of VIP tickets, who were mostly seated in the second and third row, though two of them inexplicably got the chairs usually reserved for first in line. But it turned out fine - we were still right in the front row, directly in front of his desk, and the cameras never blocked our view or anything. I watched the show this morning, and you can vaguely see us in the front row in shots of the audience - I'm wearing jeans and a green shirt, and M was in a red dress. And like everybody says, the studio really is a lot smaller than on TV, and it was interesting to get a better feel for where everything is.
The warm-up comedian, Pete, came out and did his thing for awhile - I don't know if he's the one people don't like or not, but he was fine, and we laughed at his jokes so he seemed to like us a lot. (He told Colbert we were the best audience they'd ever had, but I have the feeling he says that to all the girls.) And they gave us all instructions about when to cheer - their high tech applause signal is, literally, the stage manager waving the papers he has in his hand. Haha. Classy. Anyway, as Pete was talking, the stage manager signaled to him, and they announced to us that we were going to get to see a toss! Apparently the Colbert audience hardly ever gets to see one, because they usually do them before the audience is in the studio. But the Daily Show was running late, so we would get to see this one. M and I looked at each other all, OUR GET PSYCHED MIX IS ALL RISE, because all we had wanted from this experience was to see a toss. DANGEROUS LEVELS OF PSYCHITUDE REACHED. And then Stephen came out, chewing on a pen. He looked... just like on TV, only REALLY CLOSE to me. I was expecting seeing him in stage makeup to be weird and jarring, but it actually wasn't that weird at all, and he didn't even seem surprisingly short or tall. Just regular.
Because they were about to do the toss, he didn't run out, or high five us, or even take questions. But that was totally made up for by the toss itself. While they were setting up, Pete the warm-up comic was talking to Stephen. Pete's bald, and our 18-year-old line buddy had a lot of curly brown hair in a shaggy 18-year-old boy kind of haircut, and Pete had been joking about this before Stephen came out, patting the kid's head and stuff. And so now Pete said to Stephen, "Look at this hair," and pointed at the kid, and Stephen looked and was like, "Wow, that's a lot of hair," and Pete was like, "I just want to know what he did right to get that hair." And Stephen said, "Pete, he has a pure heart." Heee.
(Everything that follows is all to the best of my recollection - I might've gotten conversations a little out of order, and I've probably forgotten some stuff. It's funny how when you're really excited and desperately trying to remember everything, reality seems to be moving way too fast and bright, like a fever dream or something.)
So then Jon came up on the monitor, looking down and writing on his script, and Stephen said, "Hey Jon!" Jon didn't look up, though, and Stephen said, "Oh, he doesn't know we're here. Hey, Jonny!" Then Jon looked up, and we cheered, and we could hear Jon's audience on the other end too. And I guess they usually chat a little bit first to make sure the connection's good, and Jon started out by saying, "Stephen, how's the little girl?" And Stephen said, "Oh, she's okay." And then he turned to us and told us that his daughter had been in the hospital all weekend. So Jon was asking how she was, and Stephen said she was doing better, and home, and the antibiotics had worked. (He kind of gestured at his ear? But they were cagey about what she was sick with, understandably - I hope she's okay! Poor kid. Stephen was incredibly great the whole show, but I thought he seemed maybe a little tired underneath, which is understandable if he was at the hospital all weekend.) Stephen said, "All she wanted for this weekend was to lie in bed and read Harry Potter without her brothers bothering her. So I told her that she was getting that, only every once in awhile someone would come in and jab her with a needle." And we laughed, and then Stephen said, "VOLDEMORT!" and made a stabbing motion. And Jon was like, "I'm glad she's better. I'll call tomorrow morning, and I can hear more about it then." And Stephen was grinning and said, teasing, "Oh, I won't be there," and stuck his pen back in his mouth. And Jon said, "Yeah, that's right, I'll just talk to your robot assistant." And Stephen said something about how he'd have to ask if Jon was okay, now, and Jon said, "Yeah - it's funny. You know how when people see you on the street, they don't think about all the stage makeup and lighting, and so when they just see me, Jon Stewart, all of 44 years old, they almost always look at me" (and he kind of mimed someone peering at him) "and right away say, 'Are you okay?'" And we were all laughing, and Stephen was grinning, and Jon said, "And as they're leaving they're always like, 'Okay, nice to see you -- and seriously, there's a tanning bed right around the corner.'"
So then Jon went to talk to his audience and get set for the toss, and Stephen turned to us and joked, "I don't know what he's talking about, my daughter's fine." And then they started the toss itself, Jon introducing it on the monitor, and Stephen started with the lines. It was news stories only with animal noises or words in, and the first one was "purrrrr"-fect, and when Stephen got to it he made a purring noise, with dramatically rolled 'r's, and the next one was "moooooooo"-ving, and he did a cow noise, and then he got a couple of sentences further and eventually tripped on a long word and started laughing and they stopped. Jon was saying, "So close! So close! Almost made it!" And Stephen was like, sorry, sorry! And Jon said he had no illusions Stephen was going to get through that, and then was like, "I had no idea you were going to anthropomorphize the noises," (haha, SIC) and Stephen said, "Here's the terrible thing. I hadn't read the stage directions until I was in the middle of that monologue, which, by the way, was nowhere near the end, and they say I'm supposed to do finger quotes around the animal sounds. But I had already started with the noises, and the next one was a whale, and I was thinking, 'How the hell am I supposed to do a whale noise? Click??'" And Jon was cracking up, and we the audiences were totally losing it too. Jon said, "Yeah, when you did the sound I was like, Huh, interesting character choice!" And Stephen was laughing really hard. So they were like, okay, one more time. And started it all over, but this time when he did air quotes around the 'purr' in perfect, we were all thinking about him ridiculously wondering about how to do a whale noise, and I could hear Jon's audience giggling. And once Jon's audience started giggling, Jon started to lose it too, and put his hand over his mouth where he was really, really trying to keep from smiling but he was being very unsuccessful, and finally he giggled and once Jon giggled, Stephen completely lost it, and burst out laughing and put his head down, and when he came up again he was laughing so hard he looked like he was in pain. Stephen was saying, "Not fair! Not fair! He started laughing! Did you see that? That is not fair!"
So then they went to do it one more time, but by this stage there was basically no chance that they were going to get through it, and we were all laughing way too much at the "purrrr"-fect and all that, and Stephen lost it again, and Jon was yelling "Three strikes and you're out!" This was the one they aired, and at that point in the broadcast version, they were just on Jon, but on our end when Jon said that, Stephen stood up from his desk and mimed a baseball swing.
Basically, the toss was everything I had ever dreamed of and more, you guys. My heart about exploded. After that, they went right into filming the show. At the start, when he said that about how the pregnant woman should sit down and not give him a standing ovation - there were no pregnant women in the audience. In fact, when he said that he pointed right at moireach, who is not pregnant (UNLESS STEPHEN KNOWS SOMETHING SHE DOES NOT). Hee. Anyway, Stephen did the whole thing with basically zero mistakes. (Right after the orphan camera girl bit, he had to restart a sentence, but he didn't even pause between messing up and starting over.) It was actually really impressive - he just delivered this huge monologue straight through without missing a beat. He seemed incredibly confident and in control. It was also really strange to watch him as part of a live audience, but with him talking directly into various cameras -- maybe especially when he was talking into camera 3, basically looking completely away from the audience. Also, the monitors were kind of far away, so occasionally I was just focused on him and totally missed that a graphic had come up over his shoulder or whatever on the screen.
During the commercial breaks, writers and the stage manager came up to confer with him about script pages, but usually not for very long - the whole show went by ridiculously quickly. During the last break, though, after the guest, they were playing "Holland, 1945", which Stephen apparently knows all the words to, and while one writer (Allison Silverman, I think?) was making notes on a script page, Stephen was looking up at her and mouthing the words along like he was serenading her. But she wasn't paying any attention at all (though the audience was paying VERY close attention, and all laughing), and every time she looked up, he'd just smile at her and she'd give him this confused look, and then he'd go back to singing. It was pretty cute.
And then, way too fast, the show was over! He thanked us for coming and everything. Also, before the interview, he had high fived the whole audience on the other side of the studio, so we'd missed out. To make up for that, he came over to the front row of my side, and he shook the hand of every single person in the front row. And then he came back the other direction and high fived the whole second row. It was SO nice of him, and so weird to have him look right at you and shake your hand and tell you thanks for coming.
The whole experience was so interesting. I had actually managed to get tickets to the IOP "Conversation with Stephen Colbert" interview at Harvard this December, so it was really fascinating to compare the two times I've seen him live now. At the Harvard talk, he interviewed as himself for like an hour, and then filmed a bit for the show at the end, and it was really interesting to see the contrast between him being out of character and in character. The change was really dramatic, and it was weird to see him slide from being kind of low-key and himself to being "Stephen Colbert", all performing and bombastic. And so I sort of expected to see that at the show, a dramatic difference between him being himself and him being his character, but it actually wasn't like that at all. At Harvard, when he was doing the bit, he kept messing up his lines (he didn't have a teleprompter, so he just had to memorize it that second), and he was really sheepish when he fucked up, and he generally seemed way more like a person, so that the difference between Stephen Colbert and "Stephen Colbert" seemed really marked. But at the show taping, he seemed way more confident and in control, and also way more "on", if that makes sense, way more like he was performing the whole time, even when he wasn't in character. He seemed very conscious of the audience, and that they were hanging on his every word, and that he was supposed to be entertaining us. Even when he was just chatting with Jon before the toss, it was very much like a performance. I mean, not in a bad way? And obviously the contexts were really different, so it makes sense - at Harvard, he was doing a pretty serious interview as himself, and it wasn't in a performance context, so he was being more like a human and less like an entertainer. (And obviously, the Harvard interview was also a persona - I'm sure he's even different from that when he's with his friends or family.) And during the taping, he was being really funny and charming and entertaining, but you definitely had the sense that it was someone who was performing, and someone whose guard was up. Really interesting to watch.
All in all, it was such a great experience, even better than I had hoped. Anyway, blah blah, then my mom came and picked us up, etc. (Haha. Or, we took the Chinatown bus back, got into Boston around 2 am, and are now dying of exhaustion.) And now I have two days to get my affairs in order before leaving for Canada! YIKES. But so worth it.
Monday kind of sucked, because we were exhausted from lack of sleep, and it poured rain all day, so I was soaking wet and walking all over the city, and then we tried to get into the Daily Show taping on standby, but were denied. :-( But things picked up in the evening when we managed to get $3 margaritas and $3 beer in Manhattan (!!!! WHAT) with furies. A drunk trannie walking by the restaurant insistently called us Charlie's Angels. HAHA WHAT. Oh, NYC, you are flattering yet batshit. It may be the funniest thing any random person on the street has ever said to me, rivaled only by the time a couple of weeks ago when me and M were walking to the T and a dude said, "You look beautiful, ladies. Don't give up."
But Tuesday was sunny and gorgeous and not too hot, and we poked around the city a little bit. But we wanted to be the first in line, so we went over to the studio around 1:30, beating the next arrivers by a good 45 minutes. (For those of you interested in arrival times, we were #1 and 2 at 1:30; #3 and 4 got there at 2:15, and then a bunch of people arrived between 2:30 and 2:45.) The Daily Show and Colbert Report studios are both in a hilariously gross neighborhood, all car dealerships (?? in Manhattan??) and the Larry Flint Hustler Club, and at TDS the whole place smells of manure because the horses for the horse-drawn carriages are stabled around there. The outside of the Colbert Report studio in particular is really low-key - no pictures of Stephen or anything, just an awning with "The Colbert Report" written on it, and a chalk drawing of their logo on the sidewalk.
Waiting in line wasn't too bad -- for awhile we were watching interns going in and out of the studio (a catered lunch arrived around 2:20), but then some audience coordinator people made us line up down this gross alley where we couldn't see the door anymore. But we made line buddies with #3 and #4, a father and teenage son from Houston, and talked, and read. (Our conversations kept going back to HP without segue, it was pretty lame. Sample dialogue: "Why does the building across the street not have any windows?" "I don't know, but it's creepy. Look at all the vents." "It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory - nobody ever goes in, and nobody ever comes out." "I hope nobody has to work in there." "Yeah, and I also liked how you could tell that Harry was grown up by the way he finally unpacked his trunk.")
They gave us numbers and let us into a drab waiting room around 5:15 - tickets #1-4 all had notes inside them from past heroes, which was adorable. Mine was from Laura, 6/28/07 (<3 <3). So me and moireach added our own notes and stuck them inside the tickets too. We finally got let into the studio itself at 6:20 or 6:30. There were a lot of VIP tickets, who were mostly seated in the second and third row, though two of them inexplicably got the chairs usually reserved for first in line. But it turned out fine - we were still right in the front row, directly in front of his desk, and the cameras never blocked our view or anything. I watched the show this morning, and you can vaguely see us in the front row in shots of the audience - I'm wearing jeans and a green shirt, and M was in a red dress. And like everybody says, the studio really is a lot smaller than on TV, and it was interesting to get a better feel for where everything is.
The warm-up comedian, Pete, came out and did his thing for awhile - I don't know if he's the one people don't like or not, but he was fine, and we laughed at his jokes so he seemed to like us a lot. (He told Colbert we were the best audience they'd ever had, but I have the feeling he says that to all the girls.) And they gave us all instructions about when to cheer - their high tech applause signal is, literally, the stage manager waving the papers he has in his hand. Haha. Classy. Anyway, as Pete was talking, the stage manager signaled to him, and they announced to us that we were going to get to see a toss! Apparently the Colbert audience hardly ever gets to see one, because they usually do them before the audience is in the studio. But the Daily Show was running late, so we would get to see this one. M and I looked at each other all, OUR GET PSYCHED MIX IS ALL RISE, because all we had wanted from this experience was to see a toss. DANGEROUS LEVELS OF PSYCHITUDE REACHED. And then Stephen came out, chewing on a pen. He looked... just like on TV, only REALLY CLOSE to me. I was expecting seeing him in stage makeup to be weird and jarring, but it actually wasn't that weird at all, and he didn't even seem surprisingly short or tall. Just regular.
Because they were about to do the toss, he didn't run out, or high five us, or even take questions. But that was totally made up for by the toss itself. While they were setting up, Pete the warm-up comic was talking to Stephen. Pete's bald, and our 18-year-old line buddy had a lot of curly brown hair in a shaggy 18-year-old boy kind of haircut, and Pete had been joking about this before Stephen came out, patting the kid's head and stuff. And so now Pete said to Stephen, "Look at this hair," and pointed at the kid, and Stephen looked and was like, "Wow, that's a lot of hair," and Pete was like, "I just want to know what he did right to get that hair." And Stephen said, "Pete, he has a pure heart." Heee.
(Everything that follows is all to the best of my recollection - I might've gotten conversations a little out of order, and I've probably forgotten some stuff. It's funny how when you're really excited and desperately trying to remember everything, reality seems to be moving way too fast and bright, like a fever dream or something.)
So then Jon came up on the monitor, looking down and writing on his script, and Stephen said, "Hey Jon!" Jon didn't look up, though, and Stephen said, "Oh, he doesn't know we're here. Hey, Jonny!" Then Jon looked up, and we cheered, and we could hear Jon's audience on the other end too. And I guess they usually chat a little bit first to make sure the connection's good, and Jon started out by saying, "Stephen, how's the little girl?" And Stephen said, "Oh, she's okay." And then he turned to us and told us that his daughter had been in the hospital all weekend. So Jon was asking how she was, and Stephen said she was doing better, and home, and the antibiotics had worked. (He kind of gestured at his ear? But they were cagey about what she was sick with, understandably - I hope she's okay! Poor kid. Stephen was incredibly great the whole show, but I thought he seemed maybe a little tired underneath, which is understandable if he was at the hospital all weekend.) Stephen said, "All she wanted for this weekend was to lie in bed and read Harry Potter without her brothers bothering her. So I told her that she was getting that, only every once in awhile someone would come in and jab her with a needle." And we laughed, and then Stephen said, "VOLDEMORT!" and made a stabbing motion. And Jon was like, "I'm glad she's better. I'll call tomorrow morning, and I can hear more about it then." And Stephen was grinning and said, teasing, "Oh, I won't be there," and stuck his pen back in his mouth. And Jon said, "Yeah, that's right, I'll just talk to your robot assistant." And Stephen said something about how he'd have to ask if Jon was okay, now, and Jon said, "Yeah - it's funny. You know how when people see you on the street, they don't think about all the stage makeup and lighting, and so when they just see me, Jon Stewart, all of 44 years old, they almost always look at me" (and he kind of mimed someone peering at him) "and right away say, 'Are you okay?'" And we were all laughing, and Stephen was grinning, and Jon said, "And as they're leaving they're always like, 'Okay, nice to see you -- and seriously, there's a tanning bed right around the corner.'"
So then Jon went to talk to his audience and get set for the toss, and Stephen turned to us and joked, "I don't know what he's talking about, my daughter's fine." And then they started the toss itself, Jon introducing it on the monitor, and Stephen started with the lines. It was news stories only with animal noises or words in, and the first one was "purrrrr"-fect, and when Stephen got to it he made a purring noise, with dramatically rolled 'r's, and the next one was "moooooooo"-ving, and he did a cow noise, and then he got a couple of sentences further and eventually tripped on a long word and started laughing and they stopped. Jon was saying, "So close! So close! Almost made it!" And Stephen was like, sorry, sorry! And Jon said he had no illusions Stephen was going to get through that, and then was like, "I had no idea you were going to anthropomorphize the noises," (haha, SIC) and Stephen said, "Here's the terrible thing. I hadn't read the stage directions until I was in the middle of that monologue, which, by the way, was nowhere near the end, and they say I'm supposed to do finger quotes around the animal sounds. But I had already started with the noises, and the next one was a whale, and I was thinking, 'How the hell am I supposed to do a whale noise? Click??'" And Jon was cracking up, and we the audiences were totally losing it too. Jon said, "Yeah, when you did the sound I was like, Huh, interesting character choice!" And Stephen was laughing really hard. So they were like, okay, one more time. And started it all over, but this time when he did air quotes around the 'purr' in perfect, we were all thinking about him ridiculously wondering about how to do a whale noise, and I could hear Jon's audience giggling. And once Jon's audience started giggling, Jon started to lose it too, and put his hand over his mouth where he was really, really trying to keep from smiling but he was being very unsuccessful, and finally he giggled and once Jon giggled, Stephen completely lost it, and burst out laughing and put his head down, and when he came up again he was laughing so hard he looked like he was in pain. Stephen was saying, "Not fair! Not fair! He started laughing! Did you see that? That is not fair!"
So then they went to do it one more time, but by this stage there was basically no chance that they were going to get through it, and we were all laughing way too much at the "purrrr"-fect and all that, and Stephen lost it again, and Jon was yelling "Three strikes and you're out!" This was the one they aired, and at that point in the broadcast version, they were just on Jon, but on our end when Jon said that, Stephen stood up from his desk and mimed a baseball swing.
Basically, the toss was everything I had ever dreamed of and more, you guys. My heart about exploded. After that, they went right into filming the show. At the start, when he said that about how the pregnant woman should sit down and not give him a standing ovation - there were no pregnant women in the audience. In fact, when he said that he pointed right at moireach, who is not pregnant (UNLESS STEPHEN KNOWS SOMETHING SHE DOES NOT). Hee. Anyway, Stephen did the whole thing with basically zero mistakes. (Right after the orphan camera girl bit, he had to restart a sentence, but he didn't even pause between messing up and starting over.) It was actually really impressive - he just delivered this huge monologue straight through without missing a beat. He seemed incredibly confident and in control. It was also really strange to watch him as part of a live audience, but with him talking directly into various cameras -- maybe especially when he was talking into camera 3, basically looking completely away from the audience. Also, the monitors were kind of far away, so occasionally I was just focused on him and totally missed that a graphic had come up over his shoulder or whatever on the screen.
During the commercial breaks, writers and the stage manager came up to confer with him about script pages, but usually not for very long - the whole show went by ridiculously quickly. During the last break, though, after the guest, they were playing "Holland, 1945", which Stephen apparently knows all the words to, and while one writer (Allison Silverman, I think?) was making notes on a script page, Stephen was looking up at her and mouthing the words along like he was serenading her. But she wasn't paying any attention at all (though the audience was paying VERY close attention, and all laughing), and every time she looked up, he'd just smile at her and she'd give him this confused look, and then he'd go back to singing. It was pretty cute.
And then, way too fast, the show was over! He thanked us for coming and everything. Also, before the interview, he had high fived the whole audience on the other side of the studio, so we'd missed out. To make up for that, he came over to the front row of my side, and he shook the hand of every single person in the front row. And then he came back the other direction and high fived the whole second row. It was SO nice of him, and so weird to have him look right at you and shake your hand and tell you thanks for coming.
The whole experience was so interesting. I had actually managed to get tickets to the IOP "Conversation with Stephen Colbert" interview at Harvard this December, so it was really fascinating to compare the two times I've seen him live now. At the Harvard talk, he interviewed as himself for like an hour, and then filmed a bit for the show at the end, and it was really interesting to see the contrast between him being out of character and in character. The change was really dramatic, and it was weird to see him slide from being kind of low-key and himself to being "Stephen Colbert", all performing and bombastic. And so I sort of expected to see that at the show, a dramatic difference between him being himself and him being his character, but it actually wasn't like that at all. At Harvard, when he was doing the bit, he kept messing up his lines (he didn't have a teleprompter, so he just had to memorize it that second), and he was really sheepish when he fucked up, and he generally seemed way more like a person, so that the difference between Stephen Colbert and "Stephen Colbert" seemed really marked. But at the show taping, he seemed way more confident and in control, and also way more "on", if that makes sense, way more like he was performing the whole time, even when he wasn't in character. He seemed very conscious of the audience, and that they were hanging on his every word, and that he was supposed to be entertaining us. Even when he was just chatting with Jon before the toss, it was very much like a performance. I mean, not in a bad way? And obviously the contexts were really different, so it makes sense - at Harvard, he was doing a pretty serious interview as himself, and it wasn't in a performance context, so he was being more like a human and less like an entertainer. (And obviously, the Harvard interview was also a persona - I'm sure he's even different from that when he's with his friends or family.) And during the taping, he was being really funny and charming and entertaining, but you definitely had the sense that it was someone who was performing, and someone whose guard was up. Really interesting to watch.
All in all, it was such a great experience, even better than I had hoped. Anyway, blah blah, then my mom came and picked us up, etc. (Haha. Or, we took the Chinatown bus back, got into Boston around 2 am, and are now dying of exhaustion.) And now I have two days to get my affairs in order before leaving for Canada! YIKES. But so worth it.