The Saks Fifth Ave Bioshock/steampunk Xmas windows (see set on Flickr).

Sometimes, the bear eats you. It's December 1, and I barely scratched out 6K words on my NaNoWriMo novel. But this was not the ideal month, with the first week lost to the election, and the final weekend to a business trip to NY where I had the opportunity to see The Daily Show and "A Little Night Music" on Broadway.

I knew by last week that I wasn't going to make the deadline, so when we headed off to Pennsylvania to see the in-laws for Thanksgiving, I took along the short story I'm currently writing, and made a lot of progress in the final edit and polish, and I'll have that in the mail this month, so I consider that a moral victory.

On Sunday, on the way back to RI, they pushed me out of the car in Manhattan since I needed to be in town at 9am Monday for two days of business meetings.

So I wandered over to TKTS, and "A Little Night Music" was up. One of the advantages of only needing a single: the seat was first row orchestra. Bernadette Peters is absolutely amazing, and her "Send in the Clowns" is a heartbreaking theatrical experience, one of those moments — which occur most often in Sondheim shows — where the music becomes transparent, and you are not listening to a "show tune," but rather to a revealed moment of lived experience transmitted through song. Peters's delivery was devastatingly brilliant. And Elaine Stritch, as the borderline-senile grandmother, was at once commanding and frightfully vulnerable. Altogether, an amazing cast, and they're running through January, so if you have the opportunity, it's one Broadway ticket worth the price.

Monday was a full day meeting at mumble-mumble corporate headquarters, followed by the best team building event imaginable: VIP tickets to The Daily Show. One of our managers has a relative who works on the show, so we went in a side door, were tagged with little green VIP wristbands that said, "Not a threat to national security or The Daily Show," and got a tour.

It's like walking into a newsroom. The production has at least two floors of a building on the West side, and the feel is not like a TV production company, but more a media operation. Imagine walking into NBC news headquarters. There is a floor-length bullpen of cubicles full of writers and segment producers. An area where half-a-dozen interns were logging video. A couple of dogs wandering around. One room features a twenty-foot long, 8-foot high rack of DVRs, where just about everything on TV is being recorded and cataloged; around that room are desks where researchers sift through footage to find those devastating clips the show uses so expertly. An enormous master control room with a wall of monitors and banks of switchers. Makeup rooms. A couple of high-end edit suites.

We arrived during the rehearsal: the show is written in the morning, rehearsed at 4, then there are rewrites and tweaks, and the taping is at 6pm. The studio is larger than I would have expected, about 200 seats, with the majority facing the set, and a smaller VIP section off stage right. We were sitting with a bunch of Jon Stewart's high school friends, and when he came out to do his warmup, it became clear why special guests are out of direct line of sight: Stewart threw a glance at the guys behind us and called one of them by what was obviously their high school name, and broke out laughing. Just like he does in interviews. He's not acting when the guests say something that cracks him up. It's totally authentic.

As always with TV, the physical set is much smaller than you'd think. When Samantha Bee — sorry, Kim Sam Bee — came out to do her segment on North Korea, she was literally five feet from Stewart's desk. There are just two floor cameras and one on a boom, and just about enough space for them to move around.

But what was most notable was how tight the show was. For something written in a day, it was shot in about 45 minutes — during the commercial breaks, the floor manager and a script guy would go up and caucus with Stewart, but only for a couple of minutes. No retakes, no touch ups. When I watched the show Monday night, what I saw was what they'd shot in the afternoon. Clearly, a well-oiled machine by this point, but when you consider the enormous amount of research and pre-production that has to happen every day, it's still pretty amazing.

Full disclosure: Yes, it should be pretty obvious why I haven't posted anything in a week. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break.