One of my friends was on it as a contestant so a bunch of us got free tickets to the taping. (She won a trip to Cozumel, I think. )

This was summer of 1989, I was 18/19.

It taped 5 episodes a day in a studio in Spanish Harlem, and they were always hurting to fill the audience to get enough energy for the taping, so my buddy and I discovered that you didn't need to call in for tickets, you could just show up. So we started to do that every day.

At one point, the production coordinator had to come over and ask us to sit in the back, because we had been to so many tapings that the editors recognized us every time the cameras cut to the audience.

We used to hang between tapings with Colin, he was a cool dude. And a stand up named Mark Cohen who used to do warmup before the shoots and get the audience in a fun mood.

They actually invited us to the wrap party because we had been there so often, but my friend and I had already planned a vacation that week so we couldn't go.

Fun times.