Touring CBS with George Pettignano!

From left to right, that's Peter, myself, and Joe - the three lucky guys who got to tour CBS!

George Pettignano has become a close friend to everyone at Patsy's. Some of you may know him as a singer - in fact, he's sung at the restaurant several times in the past. However, he's also a pretty important executive over at CBS, and the other day he offered to take my younger cousins and I on a tour of the studio!

The inner workings of CBS are naturally pretty impressive. My cousin Joe and I are both massive computer geeks, so we were in awe of the servers that CBS has. I didn't want to take any pictures of those because I wasn't sure if I'd be allowed to, but take my word for it - they had a massive infrastructure. Not only that, George actually showed us the older computers too. The ones where you had to manually plug in and remove wires when you wanted them to do different things. Apparently it was all very cutting edge in the 60's, but compared to the sleek, wireless computer systems they had, it definitely looked antiquated.

We were taken around to a lot of the sets of various shows - from the studio where BET is filmed, to another studio that hosts a variety of shows (such as the marriage ref), to all the various news and day-time T.V. studios, it's amazing how much is housed in the New York offices. The news rooms were particularly impressive, and one of the coolest parts is that several of the cameras are actually controlled by computers, rather than people. (There's even a big red "emergency shut-down" button on each of them, which I found pretty hilarious).

We snagged a picture at the Doppler booth with the CBS Early morning weather man - Pretty cool!

Finally, we got to go inside the Ed Sullivan studio, and see some prep work for the Letterman show. That was really interesting - while we didn't see Letterman come out, we actually saw the writers having a 'round table' of sorts on the stage. They were trying out various gags, seeing what worked and what didn't. It was pretty interesting seeing how some bits they weren't that excited about, but others had them (and everyone watching) cracking up. Then the band came out (including Paul Shaffer) and we got to hear them practicing the songs they'd be playing before and after commercial breaks.

 

When we'd finished touring CBS, it was naturally time to eat, so we swung back to Patsy's and had tons of food! All in all, a pretty good day. ; )

 Incidentally, George will be singing at Feinstein's on August 24th. It's going to be his biggest event yet and he's extremely excited about it. We'll be helping to host it with a four-course dinner that kicks off at 6 pm, and the show gets underway at 8:30. If you're interested, call 212-339-4095 and lock in some seats!