The Night Paul Johnson Appeared On Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Cross another one off the bucket list! My wife, Roseanne, and I attended a Jimmy Kimmel Live! taping on October 13th, 2015. We had the help of my daughter, Casey, in getting tickets – even backstage passes!
Casey, a graduate of Gray’s Creek High School and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, works now for NBC-Universal in their Communications (Public Relations) division in New York City. However, at the time of our visit to L.A in 2015, she was working for a Hollywood P.R. firm (PMK-BNC), which, at the time, was handling publicity efforts for some awards for which the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show had been nominated.
The Jimmy Kimmel Live! taping was set for its usual 5:30 Paciific Time start at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
My wife and I had arrived about 4:30 in the afternoon, dressed comfortably. I had learned a great lesson years earlier in life while attending professional wrestling tapings. From prior experience, I had figured out if I wanted to be able to pick myself out in a TV taping playback, it was always advantageous to wear something noticeable. It had been proven – Hawaiian shirts showed up well on color TV!
Since we had arrived early, we decided to see what we could see in the general area around the El Capitan Theatre. We took a picture by the backstage entrance (Pictured below).
We then walked around to the front entrance of the theatre. There we accidentally stumbled upon Cousin Sal taping a segment for National Bosses Day that would ultimately air the NEXT night (Wednesday 10/14/15), except we didn’t know it at the time.
I had expected to see a glimpse of Roseanne and me in my Hawaiian shirt in one of the pans of the camera across the crowd as the show opened on the Tuesday, 10/13 show, or perhaps on a return from a commercial break. On the night of the show we attended I was disappointed to learn our seats were just out of pan range.
Before the show, Cousin Sal had come up the aisle to the row on which we were sitting. Roseanne and I were in third and fourth seats respectively. He spoke directly to the two women in the first and second seats. He said to them, “The camera’s opening shot is going to be on you! So look sharp and make sure you’re not picking your nose or something equally embarrassing!”
As he spoke, I silently thought, “Drat! The best laid plans of mice and men… We’d be just out of camera range! Well, at least we had planned as well as we could to TRY to be seen!” We enjoyed ourselves at the taping. The guest was Nathan Filemon, then starring on the ABC-TV “Castle” series!
All in all, quite an orchestrated endeavor. Very interesting how his team worked the crowd. I was intrigued by how Jimmy played with his guests and how, together, Jimmy Kimmel and his team knocked out a quality show in minimal elapsed time! (Because the show was recorded, commercial breaks were not real time.)
The next day my wife and I, along with daughter Casey and Roseanne’s sister Renee, spent a wonderful day visiting L.A. area beaches, as is pictured below.
That night (Wednesday, October 14th) we watched Jimmy Kimmel Live on TV! Lo and behold! We spotted ourselves in the Cousin Sal ‘Hide ‘n’ Speak’ segment, taped the night before! Pictured is Sal talking with a girl wearing a bunny mask about her boss for Bosses Day when, simultaneous to my brilliant and observant wife saying, ” I remember that!”, we popped into view! Hawaiian shirt and all.
I lifted the photo pictured here from the YouTube video shared by the Kimmel Show of 10/14/15. (In the frame pictured, I am actually pointing at him and saying, “Hey, there’s Cousin Sal!” At the time, we didn’t know exactly what was being taped. But we’d been ready! And the three of us received nine and a half seconds of Jimmy Kimmel appearance time we couldn’t have gotten any other way!)
