Silent Auction Bid Leads Newtown Women

To The Right Place At The Right Time

By Shannon Hicks

During the 4th Annual Newtown Youth Services Silent Auction and Dinner-Dance back in mid-March, Susan Liss and Laurie Silber won tickets to see a taping of The Caroline Rhea Show. The prize they received during that annual fundraiser meant they would be spending a day in New York City, and their adventure still has not come to a conclusion.

The Newtown residents –– along with friends Laura Smolen of Newtown and Andrea Garmun of Fairfield –– went into the city on March 31 to be in the studio audience for Ms Rhea’s program, and ended up with stories that will keep them laughing for years to come. In short, they saw the 10 am taping of the show (which was rebroadcast in Connecticut at 4 that afternoon), but then they also received tickets to see the new Broadway production Urban Cowboy, they had dinner at Carmine’s, and Mrs Liss won a four-day, three-night stay for two at Safety Harbor Resort and Spa in Tampa. (The group also ended up with tickets to get into a taping of The Carson Daly Show, but they did not have time to get into the show.)

Oh, and Mrs Liss got to laugh it up on the Caroline Rhea guest couch, seated between cast members of the NBC program Third Watch and Ms Rhea, in a segment that will be aired on Friday, April 25 (4 pm on WVIT/Charter Communications channel 6).

“We were golden, that’s all it was,” Mrs Silber said this week. “We just kept finding ourselves in the right place at the right time.”

Mrs Liss and Mrs Silver made plans with their friends to go to The Caroline Rhea Show on March 31. The plan was to see the show, have some lunch and do some shopping, and be back home by late afternoon.

The Caroline Rhea Show is a talk-variety show that took the place of Rosie O’Donnell’s similar show when it went off the air last year. Ms Rhea keeps a light, airy feel to her set and is liked by guests and audience members alike. She is becoming known for the A-list guests her staff is able to set up for interviews, as well as the generous prize packages she gives away – sometimes completely at random – to her audience.

The ladies had to be at the NBC Studios by 8:15 for the 10 am show. That is when they learned that their seats were in the VIP section of the audience.

“Caroline Rhea is so nice in person. You really can’t help but like her,” Mrs Liss said. “I think she still has some awkward moments occasionally, but she’s also still in her first season. I’ve been watching her daily now and I would really like to see the show come back next year.

“She’s also very striking in person,” continued Mrs Liss.

“She’s just beautiful!” added Mrs Silber.

Guests during the 10 am show included Rita Moreno, who had brought with her copies for everyone in the audience of the brand-new West Side Story 2-DVD Collector’s Set, which was being released the following day, along with baseball hats for the audience and crew. Half of the black caps had Sharks embroidered in white on the front of the hats, and the others had Jets on their front.

Also on the show were cast members of Urban Cowboy, a Broadway play that recently opened. The audience was given tickets to see the show, and the Newtown group decided to stay in the city for that evening’s performance. Because of their VIP seating, the ladies found themselves seated next to cast and crew members in the audience.

After the 10 am Caroline Rhea Show wrapped, one of the show’s employees announced that they were looking for someone who could “stick around for some segment acting,” Mrs Liss recalled.

“When we heard ‘stay to be part of a sketch,’ we were all like ‘all right!’” she laughed. That is when the group knew they would be in the city for the full day –– the volunteers needed to be back at the NBC Studio around midafternoon. The Caroline Rhea Show is working now to prepare shows for the summer, so the crew is putting together two shows a day –– one in the morning, which is what is aired live at 10 and rebroadcast across the country in different time slots, and a second show for late spring-early summer use.

The featured guests of the second show taped on March 31 was the cast of Third Watch. The segments being prepared with audience members included one where two people were asked to read lines from a random movie script. Andrea Garmun was involved in the preparation of that segment, reading the role of Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? against a total stranger.

Susan Liss wanted to be involved in the script-reading segment (which also had two people reading lines from a second film), but the director did not think any of the roles would work well for her.

Instead, the producer invited Mrs Liss to take part in a contest. The premise was that the five cast members of Third Watch –– Skipp Sudduth (who plays John “Sully” Sullivan), Anthony Ruivivar (Carlos), Coby Bell (Ty), Amy Carlson (Alex Taylor), and Kim Raver (Kim Zambran) –– had shared five personal secrets with Caroline Rhea prior to the show. While Ms Rhea was interviewing the cast members during the show’s taping, Mrs Liss was sitting in the audience –– again in VIP seats with her friends –– trying to figure out which secret belonged to whom.

The secrets included the fact that one cast member has naturally hairless armpits, one streaked through their high school’s cafeteria, one has an extra kidney, one is scared of guinea pigs, and one has two tattoos.

Unfortunately, the interview done by Ms Rhea did not exactly help Mrs Liss match secrets to actors.

“I had these five signs –– I felt like I was playing one of those Price Is Right games, where you have to put the right price with the right product –– and I had to run around trying to get them right,” Mrs Liss said. “The first time I tried, I got all five answers wrong. I nearly hit one of the actors with the board, too, while I was running back and forth.”

Fortunately Mrs Liss was able to keep her cool. On her second attempt to match secrets to actors, she managed to make two matches. It was for this work that she won the trip to Tampa.

“I remember joking with Caroline Rhea about her lack of hints during the interview,” Mrs Liss said. “One of the first things I said was ‘Thanks for the clues.’

“Normally I would have been really nervous, too, but Caroline Rhea was very complimentary and the Third Watch cast members were so funny and so relaxed. It made a big difference. I was having such a blast up there.”

“She really was good,” her friend Laurie chimed in. “Susan was cracking jokes and the audience was laughing right along with her.”

“I can’t wait to see the show next week,” Mrs Silber said.

“I can’t wait to see Andrea, because she was hilarious,” said Mrs Liss. “The kid she was working with was funny, too, to the point where Caroline was encouraging them to continue with their performance. And the guys from Third Watch made a point of telling her afterwards how funny she was.”

“Andrea was really good,” Mrs Silver added. “But we were watching the monitor while Susan was up on the stage, and she was fantastic. She was great.”

After the second Caroline Rhea outing, the group had dinner at Carmine’s and then headed over to The Broadhurst Theatre to see Urban Cowboy. Carmine’s was another coup for the group. The restaurant is usually booked weeks in advance, but the women were looking for an early dinner and were in the city on a Monday. Both timing events worked in their favor and they were about to get right in to the southern Italian family style eatery in the theater district.

As they were leaving the restaurant the ladies bumped into Marcus Chait, a cast member they had met that morning at the Caroline Rhea taping. He was, say Mrs Liss and Mrs Silver, “happy to see us. He turned around and said ‘Hey, you guys made it!’”

Urban Cowboy is taking a lot of hits from critics, and it had the unfortunate timing to open the same day the United States began the war in Iraq –– which also meant that its national advertising budget was lost when all programming was preempted by the breaking news –– but the ladies from Newtown say it is a lot of fun.

“I really enjoyed it,” said Mrs Liss. “It’s like going to see a country party –– lots of line dancing and music. It’s not a very philosophical story. It’s based on the movie, there’s no surprises there. The choreography around the bull machine alone is amazing.

“I didn’t think that any of the actors were weak,” she continued. “They were all strong. [Jenn Colella, who plays the female lead Sissy] is like Reba McEntire with her singing and acting.”

“It’s full of energy, and the dancing is phenomenal,” Mrs Silber added. “I thought it was excellent. I had not one complaint about it.”

“If you want to go into the city and just see something fun, it’s so worth the $40, which is all they’re charging for this,” Mrs Liss said.

After all this, the day still was not over. After the end of the play the ladies decided to walk around to the theater’s stage door. They had time before they had to catch their train back to Connecticut, so they figured they would take a chance on maybe getting an autograph or a glimpse of one of the actors leaving the theater.

Instead, as they were approaching the door one of the crew members looked out and saw the Newtown group, and remembered them from that morning. She pulled the women into the theater, and proceeded to give them a tour of the theater and reintroduced them to the actors.

“Only in New York can you be on TV in the morning and standing on a Broadway stage that same evening,” Mrs Liss laughed. And she was not exaggerating –– the tour they had of the theater took the ladies right out onto the stage on which they had just been watching the performance.

“Our expectation was to go in to see a show, do a little shopping, and come home,” Mrs Liss said.

“This turned out a little different.”