Hollywood Stars

The day began very early - in fact, as we were driving into Hollywood this morning, the day had definitely not begun. We were up at 4:30 and parked at the Hollywood Bowl by 5:40 and why? We were going to Oprah Winfrey's post Oscar Show at the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards. Gary is to be commended for finding these tickets on line from someone who couldn't use them.This was a guaranteed star sighting. Of course, going to this theatre meant leaving cameras, pagers, phones, etc. at home - therefore no in-theatre photographic evidence.

As we were waiting in the line waiting for the shuttle to take us to the show a mere few blocks away, we were also reminded to leave umbrellas in the car. Got a present for Oprah, leave it in the car. A script idea - car. A book idea- car.
There were two parking lots full of people going to the show - clearly the Kodak is one big theatre - a couple thousand I'm guessing. After standing in line in the lot for a couple of hours, we took the short bus ride to the Kodak, went in the back door due to a still closed Hollywood Blvd. in front of the theatre and proceeded to stand for another couple of hours to wait for the doors to open.


When we finally got into the theatre, we found ourselves with good seats in the middle of the first mezzanine and we continued to wait for the 10:00 start of the show. Although the show is taped, it is live-to-tape, which meant that the one hour show took one hour to tape - no retakes.
So, our first star was David Foster who was in the audience since, as a pre-show special, we were treated to two songs performed by Oprah's latest find, the 16 year old Charisse, who is recording with David. Then came Oprah! She was great and kibbitzed with the audience off camera.
We didn't know the star lineup for the show, except Hugh Jackman who was first. After last night's Oscars and Hugh's great song & dance work and Slumdog's 8 Oscars, we had a new appreciation for Jackman and on the show he was even nicer.
Next came Kate Winslett, then Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz and finally the cast and director of Slumdog Millionaire. The show finished with a musical number from Slumdog. We felt extremely fortunate to be in the audience for this show and the early hour and long waits ended up being worth it.
We chose to walk back to the car, which was only a 10 minute walk and then famished, since it had been too early to have a serious breakfast, we set out in search of lunch. We settled on an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills, Il Pastio, and all thoroughly enjoyed our pastas. Following lunch, we rolled down to Spago, Wolfgang Pucks' high end restaurant and as we stopped across the street from the restaurant, first Sidney Poitier and then Rob Reiner got out of their respective Mercedes and went in for lunch.


In Beverly Hills, it's one Rolls & Bentley & Aston Martin after another, but the 1/2 million dollar Rolls coupe that pulled up to Spago's front door was definitely worth sharing on the blog.

We had a slow afternoon, in fact a quick nap, before we revisited the Oprah show on TV that we'd seen live. We felt that Sean Penn came across better on TV than he did live, as he talked very quietly and was hard to follow. We all agreed that it had been a great Hollywood day!