An evening with Jimmy Fallon

We interrupt our usual henna stories to bring you this special report:

Jimmy Fallon, host of The Tonight Show since 2014 and one of my personal heroes.

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The W 49th Street entrance of Rockefeller Center ... a truly breathtaking building.

It was about 28 degrees F when this photo was taken.

Note the attractive art-deco gold accents around the sign.

Inside the NBC Store, where we're waiting to see if we get in to see the show. Conveniently, they have us positioned facing a shelf full of Jimmyswag.

Stephen Colbert has the Colbert Nation. Conan O'Brien has the Coconuts. And Jimmy Fallon has the Falpals.

I'm one of them.

My loving and generous husband agreed to a trip to New York City to celebrate my 49th birthday on January 25. I'd been longing to visit the big city after just one evening there in 2013 to see my talented sister-in-law in her Met Opera debut. And I'd always been fascinated by New York, especially being a fan of the Law & Order franchise since the early 1990s: a show in which the city itself is practically a character. Then I caught the Falpal bug in late 2017. I just had to see a taping of The Tonight Show.

After failing to get advance tickets online (they're free, but there's a waitlist from hell), I decided to brave subfreezing temperatures and wait in the standby line outside of Rockefeller Center the morning of January 23, and Rich generously obliged. Here's how it works: You queue up on West 49th Street, and at 9 a.m., two NBC pages come out and go down the line, handing out numbered standby tickets. It's not a guarantee you'll see the show, but if they do need to fill seats, a certain number of standby ticket holders get show tickets, which are distributed in the order you were standing in line. 

An online friend of mine from Sweden got to see the show in early January – she showed up at 4:30 a.m. and was number 10 in line, and they admitted only 28 people from standby into the taping that evening.

We got there at 4 a.m. 

Yes, I am insane. But I wasn't taking any chances.

We got standby tickets numbered 1 and 2. Not saying it was fun sitting for five hours in a meat locker, but at this point, our chances were good.

At 3:30 that afternoon, we returned to Rockefeller Center, where we got to wait some more, but at least we were in a nice, heated building. It looked like 100 people were there at the NBC Store holding standby tickets. As they spent more and more time arranging us in exact queues, I figured there must be at least a handful of seats to fill and chances were awfully good that we'd get in to see the show. And ...

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