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I went to a taping about 8 years ago; we planned our spring break trip around it.

The producers do interview everyone who goes into the studio, unless you've been called to contestants row within the last X number of days, in which case you are inelligible and you just go right in and sit down. You have about 20 seconds to tell them where you're from, show them how charismatic you are, and win them over.

I have a friend in L.A. who has gone a number of times, and he said that if you contact them ahead of time and let them know you're going to have a group of at least 25 or 30 (I forget the exact number) then they will guarantee that at least someone from your group will be called to contestants row. It's much better odds than hoping you'll be chosen from the entire audience.

They do two tapings a day. We were there for the afternoon one, and as the studio emptied, the people coming out were telling us what they had won. One huge football-player looking guy was being teased by his friends for winning a dinette set; he looked pissed. It was pretty funny.

When you're waiting outside of the studio, they have all of the audience members seated on two super-long benches that wrap around the outside of the studio. There was a group of about 6 very large and sassy black women who had been to an insane amount of tapings - they were even recognized by the pages and one of the producers. As we were all seated there waiting for the first show to finish taping, they started a Soul-Train style dance-off down the aisle between the benches we were all sitting on. They were grabbing all sorts of random people, most amusingly a couple of old white guys, and making them get up and boogie past everyone while we all cheered. It was hilarious. CBS should be paying these ladies for pumping up the audience before we even got into the studio.

The studio itself is very tiny. Cameras make everything look bigger.

During the taping, you can see them rolling the different games out and putting them into place. They only thing that they obscured from our view during its setup was the Big Wheel, which kind of made me question what is really going on that they don't want you to see.

Once or twice the models dropped a product or knocked it off a pedestal during the pricing games. After the show was over, they then brought those games back out and re-shot the models doing their thing so they could splice it in to the show later.

They gave us all a nice little TPIR postcard and told us the air date of the show, so we could write it on there and send it to someone who we wanted to tune in. Nice little touch.

They have pages who go around labelling the name tags everyone wears. It never occurred to me that of course it would take several people to label everyone, but since the handwriting is so uniform, I always imagined it was just one dude. They must have to learn to print it all a certain way.

Bob chats with the audience during "commercial breaks" (they seemed to do a live-to-tape format, so the filming took place in real time). He asked where people were from and made little jokes and stuff.

Afterwords you could get "autographed" headshots of Bob and the models. I was crawling over people to make sure I got one of Kathleen. Sadly, this was after Holly left; she was always my fave. But Kathleen still had it going on.