Sunday, February 25, 2007

Less is More

Basic Instincts

Cutting Back Without Deprivation

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By M. P. DUNLEAVEY
Published: February 24, 2007

IT sounds like something that would happen in San Francisco. In 2005, a few friends gathered for dinner and started bemoaning the fate of the planet, the environmental impact of consumer excess — and ended up challenging one another to not buy anything new for six months.

By mid-2006, the rapidly growing group was featured on the “Today” show, and people were calling it a movement.

“We think of it as more of a phenomenon than a movement,” said John Perry, a co-founder of the group, now known as the Compact. “We’re grateful for our 17 minutes of fame,” he added, “but we didn’t intend this to be broadcast. We didn’t mean to attract followers.”

Yet for such a simple and not terribly sexy idea — to buy nothing new, other than food and other absolute essentials — the Compact has managed to build a groundswell of supporters. The group has more than doubled since the fall, to nearly 8,000 members from 3,000. It has even found a footing in Europe and Australia.

If Thoreau comes to mind, Mr. Perry would be the first to agree that “there is nothing new or startling” about the Compact. The main difference between the Compact and other organizations with an antimaterialism bent, like Voluntary Simplicity, he said, is that the aim of the Compact is not just to scale back financially but to reduce the environmental toll of the American consumer lifestyle.

Compact members reuse or recycle what they have and buy only used or secondhand goods — except for food, health-related items and personal things, like socks and underwear. You can spend as much as you like on life’s more intangible pleasures, like travel, sports, music and other cultural activities.

Although the group took its name from the Mayflower Compact of 1620, it is not as Puritan as it sounds. As Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a Compact member who runs a small advertising agency in Charleston, S.C., put it: “It’s about mindful consumerism, not about depriving ourselves.”

When Mrs. Abbott-Ross first joined the Compact about a year ago, she was a nonstop shopper.

Packages would arrive from eBay and she wouldn’t remember what she had ordered. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed: by the clutter, by the credit card bills, by all this stuff we didn’t need.”

Now, she says, “I don’t even think about spending.” The result is not only an extra cushion of cash, “it’s a huge stress reducer,” she said. “Now I can buy what I want, whether it’s a nice bottle of wine or organic food for my family.”

To the extent that the Compact has any structure at all, it exists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) where people can join threaded discussions about things like the temptations of Costco or whether your friends look at you askance (which many do, members report).

Mr. Perry monitors the group and has read thousands of statements about people’s reasons for joining. “I think we’ve touched a bundle of angry nerves,” he said. “People are worn out and hung over by all the stuff in their lives. Many have terrible consumer debt. They feel out of control.”

What may contribute to the Compact’s success, Mr. Perry thinks, is that it gives people a place to talk. “You can’t go to a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, I’m $30,000 in debt, and I’m addicted to The Shopping Channel.’ ”

WHILE the chance to let your hair down financially may provide some relief, the Compact offers a surprising payoff. Yes, the group’s secondhand-buying strategy has helped members to save money, pay off their credit card debts and pad their children’s college funds. And it gives people the satisfaction of knowing they are contributing less to the local landfill.

The much bigger dividend gained by many members is time.

“When you don’t go to stores, you spend a lot more time doing other things,” said Mr. Perry, who has traded his own “recreational shopping habit” for a plot in the community garden, eating out with friends and volunteering at his son’s school.

Bridget Stuart, a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, Calif., who joined the Compact in December, experienced a similar windfall of time. Now she invites friends over for dinner and to play board games and takes walks with her children in lieu of cruising the mall.

“I’m even getting back into tennis,” she said. “I used to play tennis all the time, and the biggest thing that supplanted it was shopping. That’s crazy. I actually feel like this is getting me back to the way I want to live.”



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Friday, February 23, 2007

Binge Eating

Personal Health

Out of Control: A True Story of Binge Eating

Stuart Bradford

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By JANE E. BRODY
Published: February 20, 2007

This month, researchers at Harvard published a survey finding that binge eating is by far the most common eating disorder, occurring in 1 in 35 adults, or 2.8 percent — almost twice the combined rate for anorexia (0.6 percent) and bulimia (1 percent).

Yet unlike the other two, binge-eating disorder is still not considered a formal diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association. I’m mystified as to why, and when you read my story you may wonder as well.

It was 1964, I was 23 and working at my first newspaper job in Minneapolis, 1,250 miles from my New York home. My love life was in disarray, my work was boring, my boss was a misogynist. And I, having been raised to associate love and happiness with food, turned to eating for solace.

Of course, I began to gain weight and, of course, I periodically went on various diets to try to lose what I’d gained, only to relapse and regain all I’d lost and then some.

My many failed attempts included the Drinking Man’s Diet, popular at the time, which at least enabled me to stay connected with my hard-partying colleagues.

Before long, desperation set in. When I found myself unable to stop eating once I’d started, I resolved not to eat during the day. Then, after work and out of sight, the bingeing began.

I learned where the few all-night mom-and-pop shops were located so I could pick up the evening’s supply on my way home from work. Then I would spend the night eating nonstop, first something sweet, then something salty, then back to sweet, and so on. A half-gallon of ice cream was only the beginning. I was capable of consuming 3,000 calories at a sitting. Many mornings I awakened to find partly chewed food still in my mouth.

And, as you might expect, because I didn’t purge (never even heard of it then), I got fatter and fatter until I had gained a third more than my normal body weight, even though I was physically active.

My despair was profound, and one night in the midst of a binge I became suicidal. I had lost control of my eating; it was controlling me, and I couldn’t go on living that way.

Fortunately, I was still rational enough to reach out for help, and at 2 a.m. I called a psychologist I knew at his home. His willingness to see me in the morning got me through the night.

Just talking about my behavior and learning from the psychologist that I was not the only person with this problem helped relieve my despair. Still, he was not able to help me stop bingeing. That was something I would have to do on my own.

I finally reached the conclusion that if I kept eating that way, the dreadful foods would end up killing me. And I knew by then that diets were a disaster, something one goes on to go off, only to regain what one has lost. So I decided that if I was going to be fat, at least I was going to be healthy.

An Eating Plan

With my then-limited knowledge of nutrition, I created an eating program for myself: three substantial meals a day with a wholesome snack between meals if I was hungry. No skipping meals allowed. I stripped my apartment of favorite binge foods, though I allowed myself one small treat a day. And I continued with my regular physical activity.

After a month of eating three big meals a day, I had lost seven pounds. And I continued to lose about two pounds a month (as my weight dropped, so did the amount of food I needed to feel satisfied) until two years later I was back to my normal weight.

As I have learned from talking with experts who treat eating disorders, the factors that precipitated my binge eating and the route I took to “cure” myself are strikingly similar to the precipitants among their binge-eating patients and the therapeutic measures used to help them.

It is important for everyone out there with this problem to know that help is available.

While binge eating without purging occurs in 2.8 percent of the adult population, it is much more prevalent, as you might expect, in obese people.

Dr. Katherine Halmi, director of the eating disorders program at the Westchester division of New York Presbyterian Hospital, says 10 percent to 15 percent of the obese population has this problem, and among those who binge without purging, almost 90 percent are obese.

Dr. Halmi, who is also a professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, said she had found dieting a frequent “proximal trigger” among people with binge-eating disorder.

Other common risk factors, Dr. Halmi said, include a “personal disaster in a person’s life, like the death of a spouse, losing one’s job, having a serious problem at work, or being left by one’s husband for another woman.”

“People soon learn that binge-eating alleviates anxiety, similar to an addiction,” she said. “There’s psychological reinforcement of the behavior because binge eating makes them feel better at the time, even though they may feel upset afterward for having eaten so much.”

Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, an eating disorders specialist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center, says that when compared with equally overweight people who do not binge, binge eaters are more troubled by anxiety and depression.

Getting Help

The main goals of therapy are abstinence from binge eating, and weight loss or weight control, said Cynthia M. Bulik, the distinguished professor of eating disorders in the psychiatry department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Walsh adds that emotional relief is another goal, and that it sometimes results from achieving the other two.

Most popular at the moment is cognitive-behavioral therapy, with or without medication. Since binge eaters have highly irregular eating habits, the behavioral aspect introduces structure to their eating behavior: regular meals, including breakfast, and an afternoon snack if needed.

Dr. Halmi said those in recovery must not go more than four hours without eating, and that their diet should include foods they like.

The cognitive aspect tries to undo the unhealthy notions people have about food and eating, like “I’ve already blown it, so I might as well eat the rest of the ice cream” or “I didn’t eat breakfast, so I can eat more at night.”

“We also help them find more appropriate responses to emotional problems, like using relaxation techniques instead of food to deal with anxiety,” Dr. Bulik said.

The cognitive-behavioral approach, while highly effective in stopping binge eating, is less effective in achieving weight loss, she said.

Thomas Wadden, director of the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that “a behavioral weight control approach” — a structured meal plan that reduces daily intake by 500 to 700 calories but allows a couple hundred calories from foods the person likes — is effective in stopping bingeing and also helps the person lose weight.

“We see an improvement in people’s moods,” Dr. Wadden said, adding that there should also be therapy to deal with relationship issues or self-esteem, if needed.

Medication is also sometimes used with the structured eating plan. Prozac and similar antidepressants and the anticonvulsant drug Topamax have helped some patients gain control of their weight and achieve abstinence from bingeing, Dr. Bulik said, though data are lacking on long-term effectiveness.

As for me, do I still sometimes eat “out of control”? Yes, now and then.

When I feel anxious or upset, I may polish off a dozen innocent-looking cookies or a pint of low-fat ice cream. But this is nothing like it once was. And since 1967, with minor fluctuations, I have stayed at my normal weight.



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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Email messages

Essay

Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior

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By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: February 20, 2007

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

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“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame.

Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.

While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.

And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as “Britain’s first ‘Web rage’ attack,” a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.

One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame.

All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once visited in New Haven public schools. The poster, part of a program in social development that has lowered rates of violence in schools there, shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try the best response.

Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor.

Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”



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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Nature's Way = complex

Books on Science

The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies

Erik Swanson

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By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: February 20, 2007

When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.

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USELESS ARITHMETIC
Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future. By Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis. 256 pages. Columbia University Press, $29.50.
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Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.

Their book, “Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future,” originated in a seminar Dr. Pilkey organized at Duke to look into the performance of mathematical models used in coastal geology. Among other things, participants concluded that beach modelers applied too many fixed values to phenomena that actually change quite a lot. For example, “assumed average wave height,” a variable crucial for many models, assumes that all waves hit the beach in the same way, that they are all the same height and that their patterns will not change over time. But, the authors say, that’s not the way things work.

Also, modelers’ formulas may include coefficients (the authors call them “fudge factors”) to ensure that they come out right. And the modelers may not check to see whether projects performed as predicted.

Eventually, the seminar participants widened the project, concluding that erroneous assumptions, fudge factors and the reluctance to check predictions against unruly natural outcomes produce models with, as the authors put it, “no demonstrable basis in nature.” Among other problems, they cite much-modeled but nevertheless collapsed North Atlantic fishing stocks, poisonous pools unexpectedly produced by open pit mining, and invasive plants and animals that routinely outflank their modelers.

Two issues, the authors say, illustrate other problems with modeling. One is climate change, in which, they say, experts’ justifiable caution about model uncertainties can encourage them to ignore accumulating evidence from the real world. The other is the movement of nuclear waste through an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, not because it has failed — it has yet to be built — but because they say it is unreasonable to expect accurate predictions of what will happen far into the future — in this extreme case, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years from now.

Along the way, Dr. Pilkey and Ms. Pilkey-Jarvis describe and explain a host of modeling terms, including quantitative and qualitative models (models that seek to answer precise questions with more or less precise numbers, as against models that seek to discern environmental trends).

They also discuss concepts like model sensitivity — the analysis of parameters included in a model to see which ones, if changed, are most likely to change model results.

But, the authors say it is important to remember that model sensitivity assesses the parameter’s importance in the model, not necessarily in nature. If a model itself is “a poor representation of reality,” they write, “determining the sensitivity of an individual parameter in the model is a meaningless pursuit.”

Given the problems with models, should we abandon them altogether? Perhaps, the authors say. Their favored alternative seems to be adaptive management, in which policymakers may start with a model of how a given ecosystem works, but make constant observations in the field, altering their policies as conditions change. But that approach has drawbacks, among them requirements for assiduous monitoring, flexible planning and a willingness to change courses in midstream. For practical and political reasons, all are hard to achieve.

Besides, they acknowledge, people seem to have such a powerful desire to defend policies with formulas (or “fig leaves,” as the authors call them), that managers keep applying them, long after their utility has been called into question.

So the authors offer some suggestions for using models better. We could, for example, pay more attention to nature, monitoring our streams, beaches, forests or fields to accumulate information on how living things and their environments interact. That kind of data is crucial for models. Modeling should be transparent. That is, any interested person should be able to see and understand how the model works — what factors it weighs heaviest, what coefficients it includes, what phenomena it leaves out, and so on. Also, modelers should say explicitly what assumptions they make.

And instead of demanding to know exactly how high seas will rise or how many fish will be left in them or what the average global temperature will be in 20 years, they argue, we should seek to discern simply whether seas are rising, fish stocks are falling and average temperatures are increasing. And we should couple these models with observations from the field. Models should be regarded as producing “ballpark figures,” they write, not accurate impact forecasts.

“If we wish to stay within the bounds of reality we must look to a more qualitative future,” the authors write, “a future where there will be no certain answers to many of the important questions we have about the future of human interactions with the earth.”



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Friday, February 16, 2007

Talk Show seats

Cheap Seats

Live From New York, It’s Cold People Waiting in Line

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By BEN SISARIO
Published: February 16, 2007

I THOUGHT I deserved it.

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Fans of the Letterman Show line up on Broadway at 53rd street to hopefully get a ticket to be an audience member.

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Standby tickets for the Feb. 10 show of “Saturday Night Live.”

But the hour and a half I spent on wind-whipped 49th Street in Manhattan two weekends ago, hunched in the predawn freeze with 100 other people, turned out to be a weak, amateur effort. That kind of commitment may be enough — barely — to get into a taping of one of the daily comedy shows on cable. For those of us in the shadow of 30 Rockefeller Plaza that morning, however, it would take a much more punishing, more frigid, more sleepless dedication to get what we wanted: a low-numbered standby ticket to sit in the studio audience of “Saturday Night Live.”

Steve Martin once said that comedy is not pretty. It’s not cheap, either, as anyone who has run up a bar tab waiting through five stand-up comics knows. But almost every night of the week New York offers one of the world’s great comedy bargains, the chance to be part of the audience for the late-night shows watched by millions, free. In less than one square mile in Midtown, four weekday shows are taped in the afternoon: “Late Show With David Letterman,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.” And “Saturday Night Live” broadcasts 20 new episodes each season.

“Free” almost always comes with qualifiers of course. As I learned while standing my way into every studio I could, the price for those free seats is time. And in deep winter there is another cost: the price of long johns. And something to protect tender ears from bitterly unfunny gusts.

Each year thousands of organized, forward-planning people — many of them tourists but plenty of New Yorkers too — arrange for tickets to these shows months in advance. The NBC information line states that for “Saturday Night Live” all requests must be made in August for the season that follows, and if you are lucky enough to be sent a pair, they will be for a random Saturday and cannot be exchanged. The rest of us have standby lines. Since most shows overbook to guarantee a full audience, standby is often a long shot. Subfreezing temperatures, however, can be the skinflint’s best friend, since the cold generally increases ticketholder absenteeism and decreases the number of people willing to risk frostbite to take those people’s place.

That, at least, was what I was counting on with “Saturday Night Live.” Its procedure is somewhat cruel. Numbered tickets are handed out on Saturday at 7 a.m., and suppliants return that night to wait for a chance to get in. Standby, no matter how many hours of chilly hardship you have endured, does not guarantee anything.

Huddled Masses, Yearning

I set my alarm for 5 a.m. and, with the skies still dark, slumped in a cab and headed for Rockefeller Center. My confidence sank when arrived and I saw the masses huddled beneath the “NBC Studios” marquee on 49th Street. They were bundled in thick jackets, wrapped in blankets and hidden in sleeping bags, and it was clear that many had been there all night.

Taking my place behind a group of 20-somethings from Florida — a birthday crew, one of three I encountered in various lines — I rubbed the arms of my inadequate wool coat for warmth as dairy and bakery trucks barreled by. At 6:57 a perky woman from NBC came out and explained the deal: We had a choice of standby tickets to either the dress rehearsal or the live broadcast. One ticket per frozen nose.

I chose the live show, got a nicely printed blue card bearing No. 41 and headed home to thaw.

That night we queued up according to number — inside, thankfully — and waited for orders from the young women who mind this line, dressed in identical gray suits, like stewardesses. Around 11:15 one of our keepers explained with a smile that we could still be let in until just before the broadcast begins. It was 11:26 before I learned that I would not be so lucky.

Not every show is as hard to get into as “Saturday Night Live,” but none are truly easy. For “The Daily Show,” on Comedy Central, I filled out a request form for a regular ticket a few days in advance on the Web and to my surprise got a confirmation within hours. But even with this assurance I still had to wait in line. The audience is overbooked, so attendees are advised to come early.

On a blustery Tuesday I stood for almost two hours outside the 11th Avenue studio, where a banner above the door reads, in faux Old English script, “Abandon News, All Ye Who Enter Here.” Once inside I was led to a room with about 200 seats arranged on three sides around a fairly spacious stage, with Jon Stewart’s desk on a riser in the middle.

There I met my first warm-up man. Every show has one to get the audience members excited and to explain that even if they are not excited, they must fake it with lots of laughing, clapping and hollering. So accustomed the semi-vegetative state of late-night channel surfing, we were now asked to become actors.

Each warm-up man I saw relied on those hoariest of stand-up clichés, ridiculing audience members’ home states and questioning their sexual orientation. But these uncomfortable moments offer important practice for the crowd’s prime directive: Even when it’s not funny, you must laugh.

It becomes Pavlovian. I chuckled and applauded heartily when Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, told Mr. Stewart, “We’re in the universe, but not only that: because the chemical ingredients of life are the same as that of the universe, and traceable to stars, the universe is also in us.”

But is that comedy? The funniest and most exciting moments were when something unscripted or unexpected happened. I could see on a monitor the lines that Mr. Stewart was supposed to be reading when he did his end-of-show check-in with Mr. Colbert, and the madcap jokes the two men improvised over a video link — acting out Daniel Day-Lewis’s running sequence in “The Last of the Mohicans” and bellowing, “I will find you!” — drew the most honest laughter of all.

The March of the Pages

I was still cold when I left “The Daily Show” studio about 7:10, and I was dreading even worse chills for “Late Show With David Letterman,” on CBS. About 4.1 million people watch Mr. Letterman on an average night, more than six times as many as watch “The Daily Show.” For a standby hopeful, that means serious competition for those scant extra seats.

To get standby tickets for “Letterman,” you must call at 11 a.m. and correctly answer a trivia question about the show. I haven’t been a regular watcher of it since high school, and the question I was asked — Who is Rupert Jee? — I couldn’t answer. (He’s the proprietor of the Hello Deli, around the corner from the studio.) But the man on the other end said: “Not a problem. Your number is 24. Come to the Ed Sullivan Theater at 53rd and Broadway at 3:30.”

I never had to give my number. When I arrived I was handed a ticket — a real ticket — and told to wait around the corner in the Roseland Ballroom. At 11 degrees, it was just too cold for an outside line, they said. Holding ticket No. 317, I waited in comfort on Roseland’s dance floor, where word got around that the guests on the show would be Dr. Phil and Fall Out Boy. At 4:15 we were led to the theater by the show’s pages, this time all young men in Worldwide Pants varsity jackets, after Mr. Letterman’s production company, and crossed 53rd Street like a family of ducks.

The intricate Gothic Revival interior of the Ed Sullivan Theater, built in 1927, is worth the trip alone. Inside, “Late Show” has the greatest audience capacity of all, with about 460 seats on two levels. But Mr. Letterman’s off-camera manner was brusque, and being there was not much different from watching it on television.

If my page-guided trip across 53rd Street for “Letterman” did not seem like the most sophisticated New York experience, I felt even less like a city slicker the next day at NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.” The policy there is for those without advance tickets to wait outside on 49th Street — the same spot as for “Saturday Night Live” — at 9 a.m. I was there at 8:30 and got No. 8; the temperature was 20 degrees. But returning to the studio at 3:45 I waited in line after line that shuffled through drab office corridors, all the while being directed by the “Late Night” crew. Go down this stairway, up that one; form a line four bodies wide; make sure your ticket is in the same hand as your wristband. It was like being a kindergartner again.

The reward was Conan O’Brien. I groaned when I heard that one of his guests would be Dr. Phil — whom I was not excited about seeing once, let alone twice — but the show was the only one that made me genuinely laugh out loud. It featured “Vomiting Kermit,” as in the frog, and a slide show of presidential candidates and their pop-culture look-alikes that paired Rudolph W. Giuliani with Skeletor from “He-Man” and Hillary Rodham Clinton with Chucky, the horror movie doll. Nobody said late-night TV had to be subtle.

Mr. O’Brien was a treat to see in person. Even paler and more boyish than he appears on screen, he was also doubly zany and energetic in his own crowd warm-up. Spending much more time with the audience than any other host, he directed two men in the front row to hug each other (they complied without hesitation) and then sent another young man to embrace the bandleader, Max Weinberg. (That one was a little less enthusiastic.)

As a live, improvising comedian, only Stephen Colbert compared. Dressed and coiffed as perfectly as a Brooks Brothers model, Mr. Colbert took questions from his crowd, which at about 100 was the smallest of all. When one man suggested that Mr. Colbert do Tek Jansen, his animated space-traveler character, “on ice,” he responded instantly with a fairly lengthy song and dance number about “super awesomely spectacular heroes.”

One of the Chosen

“Saturday Night Live” remained unconquered. As the weekend approached I waffled between staying overnight and just rolling the dice again at 5:30. Remembering the previous week’s line, I estimated that only the first 10 or 12 people had been equipped to spend the night; everyone else must have gotten there sometime between, say, midnight and 6. I split the difference and decided to go at 3.

I was 17th in line. At the front were, as I expected, about 10 people packed like sleepers at Pompeii, followed by recently arrived standees. Line etiquette allows brief absences for food and relief. I held out as long as I could and about 5:45 stepped into a nearby building and ran to the heating vents.

The skies began to lighten about 6:30, and at 7 a familiar face came out holding two stacks of tickets. I took No. 8 for the live show: a big improvement over 41, but still no sure thing.

Fast forward to 10:55 p.m. The first 12 of us were screened by security and then lined up, tantalizingly, in front of the elevator bank. There my party giggled nervously and asked the guards about eight versions of the same question: What are our chances? They gave about eight versions on the same answer: Totally unpredictable.

I was starting to lose hope when, at 11:15, a woman with a clipboard leaned around the corner and told the guard matter-of-factly, “Let ’em up.” We all hooted joyously and began our trip to Studio 8H, the home of “Saturday Night Live” for 32 years.

Taking my seat in the second-to-last row of extreme stage left, I was struck by the vastness and complexity of the operation. The area in front of the stage, and every exit I could see, teemed with activity as stagehands, producers with headsets and dozens of others took up whatever space was not occupied by a camera.

More than any other show I saw, “SNL” seemed most like an elaborately orchestrated television taping and less like theater, though the clockwork production activity became theater in itself. With sets constantly going up and being broken down all over the soundstage, the actors were often not visible, but the busy crew always was. The instant a skit cut to commercial, a woman grabbed the guest host, Forest Whitaker, by the hand and dragged him backstage. All the while Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, coolly paced the set in a charcoal suit and smart red tie.

After the show ended — it wasn’t the funniest episode I had ever seen, but I contributed my quota of laughter and applause — I walked through the doors of 30 Rock. The barriers were up on the sidewalk again and new lines were forming, this time to spot celebrities on their way out.

I was tempted to join them. But I decided instead that it was time to head for what was clearly the best seat in the house: my couch.



What's On My Other Blogs today: (click blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
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