Hollywood and a show

This morning we headed up to Hollywood. First stop was Hollywood and Highland. Unfortunately it was a bit hazy so you can barely see the Hollywood sign in the background.

Then over to Grauman's theater.
The characters that stand outside of the theater and try to get tips for pictures are usually pretty lame. Today there was this guy in an Optimus Prime costume from Transformers (okay, I only know the name of the character b/c of Matt, otherwise I'd be clueless) but I just thought this was a pretty darn cool costume compared to the others!

Next, we hopped on an open top van for a tour of Hollywood. I'm glad we took Matt's parents on this, because the tour guide gave us a ton of random facts that we never would have known ourselves!

The van stopped up for a few minutes up in the hills at an overlook point. Still hazy out....you can barely see the city!

The tour also drove all through Beverly Hills and Bel Aire, and a few other fancy neighborhoods that I forget the names of. We drove past a ton of homes and the tour guide kept telling us things like "This is where Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston lived" or "This is where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes live" but of course all we really saw were......a bunch of gates! I don't even remember which gate goes with which home...there were so many!

Finally, to finish off our evening, we ended up at The Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. Jay Leno does stand up comedy there every Sunday night over the summer.

It's a really neat venue. It's really small, and the seating is first come first serve. I was of course anal about the whole process of getting there extremely early, and so we were the first ones in the door! Yippee! This got us the best seat in the house (for a table of 4 anyway, the people that were only in parties of 2 were the ones that got to sit exactly in the front.) So this was our view of the stage! (They were showing a random slide show before the real show started).
This is the only picture I have of the stage because once the comedians came out we weren't allowed to take pictures. They opened up with a comedian that I've never heard of. Next, they had a special guest appearance! Kevin Nealon...if you don't know who that is, he was on SNL for several years, and has been in a ton of Adam Sandlar movies. That was really neat to see him! Next up was Jim Brogan, who was one of Jay Leno's writers for the Tonight Show. He was actually my favorite, because his entire act was not really an act. He would just ask audience members questions and play off of that, and he was so good at it!! Finally Jay Leno came out. I thought it was really neat that at the end of the night he brought out note cards and a tape recorder and read off all the jokes that he might possibly use the next day on the Tonight Show. He recorded it to see which ones got the best laughs. We laughed the whole night and Matt's parents had a blast. What a good night!