Josh Demanded This Be Included

After reading my last post, Josh said, "But you forgot about 'The Tonight Show'!" It's true. When we were in Southern California in October, we got to see "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien." We've both been Conan fans since he started hosting "Late Night" back in 1993, but neither of us had ever seen a taping of either of his shows in person.

The ticket

We didn't realize at the time that Conan was going to host for such a short period of time, but now we're really glad that we went. We even had VIP tickets, which meant that we didn't have to stand in line and got to sit toward the front, because Josh is randomly an acquaintance of Mark "The Love Man" Pender, who was the trumpet man in the Tonight Show band. Seriously.

On the set with Mark Pender

Josh says this about the experience:

"I met Mark Pender when I interviewed him back in 2005 at the Pleasant Hill Jazz Festival. We'd stayed in touch since then, exchanging emails here and there. He'd always told me to give him a holler if I was ever in NYC, but sadly, that never happened. When Conan took over The Tonight Show in June 2009, I was determined that we'd see him live the next time we were in L.A. Mark was nice enough to get us VIP tickets for the Oct. 13 show. The guests were Ice-T, Eddie Izzard and The Flaming Lips. It was a really cool experience, and as evidenced by this photo above, Mark waited around to greet us after the show. Later, Mark and I met up at The Baked Potato, a little club in Studio City where we watched Ronnie Guiterrez (who played bongos in The Tonight Show Band when Max Weinberg was on tour with Bruce Springsteen) and his father play some lively salsa music. It was an awesome evening!"

I also found these pictures of the Hotel Del, taken with Josh's phone (I wanted to share them because our other pictures were so foggy and made it look like the weather was bad the entire time, when it was really only overcast on our checkout day):

At twilight, from our balcony

The beach, also from our balcony

Me on the beach, possibly in the spot where Some Like it Hot was filmed

We loved the Hotel Del so much, we're planning to have our 20th anniversary party there (in 17 years).