Queen Mother Blog

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in the audience of The Martha Stewart Show.  Martha had a special call for the audience to be full of bloggers, who would be live-blogging and tweeting from their seats using netbooks, iPhones & Blackberrys.

If you missed my earlier "live" posts that I wrote while sitting in the audience, you can check them out here and here.  The show was a lot of fun to watch; Martha has a gorgeous set for her show (would you expect anything less?) and I also had a great time in NYC, since I arrived the evening before.

I met up with a group of Philly mom bloggers and we stayed together at the Holiday Inn Express Madison Square Garden, which gave us a great rate.  (Thanks Kelly for arranging the deal for us!)  The location of the hotel was perfect, we were within walking distance of Penn Station (I took the train in from NJ) and Martha's studio in Chelsea.

The night we got in we attended a tweet-up (a Twitter meetup) at the Roger Smith Hotel in midtown.  We had dinner there & then moved over to the bar where the tweet-up was occuring.  It was so great to meet and greet people who I tweet with and whose blogs I read.  One darling friend made my night by recognizing my face as "Queen Mother Blog!"  So that rocked. :)

After gobbling up the hotel's free breakfast (which was actually quite decent, not the usual Continental breakfast of stale bagels) we headed over to Martha, where I met up with my friend Linda from TGFMom.  I told you earlier that she was the one who suggested I attend, thanks Linda! :)  We then were herded into the holding cells where we waited to be placed into the studios.  Here's a pic of me (far right), Linda (middle) and our other 'real-life' friend Heather (who has a great blog called Penny Pinching Mama-thanks to her for the pics) while we wait in the holding area:


I'll spare you another recap of the show, but I will touch briefly on a few random points:
1.  I was struck by how lovely Martha was in person (and I mentioned her killer stilettos) and she seemed very gracious and friendy.  After the taping of the show, she answered some audience questions and she didn't seem like an ice-queen at all, which is actually how I kind of imagined she'd be.
2.  The ice queen was Martha's daughter Alexa.  Phew!  Everyone I've talked to who watched this show was taken aback by how unfriendly and mean-spirited she was.  Apparently Alexa has made a name for herself by making stabs at her mother, so maybe this is a persona?  I don't know, but I have to say I cringed when she said that, as a blogger, she doesn't read anyone else's blogs.  In my world, writing a blog and reading other blogs are inseparable.
3.  A little confession: I was a bit disappointed that the only audience gift we got was a cookbook from one of the guests.  Linda & I were both really hoping for a copy of Martha's "Cooking School" book, which was being featured on the show.  Or I'll admit, I was also holding out hope that the "blog show" guests would get some cool gadgetry or something social media related.  I'm not too bitter about it, because any gift at all is a bonus, but I especially felt bad for the bloggers that made huge efforts to be there for the show that day.  I overheard one girl talking about how she flew in for the show!

Since the smell of the Pad Thai cooking in the studio made us very hungry, we were getting ready to run over to a Thai restaurant (gotta love New York for availability of pretty much whatever you'd want to eat) when we spotted Martha's "crowd pumper-upper guy" Joey Kola outside the studio.  He was such a fun character during the show, getting the crowd clapping and even making a very brief cameo on-camera to deliver a gift basket.  Linda wanted to take a picture with him while we were in the studio so she was stoked to see him outside, ready to have his picture taken with us :)


All in all it was a fun trip, I was able to meet so many online friends & share a really cool experience with them.  Going to NYC is always so much fun, but also wears me out really fast! :)