I’ll take Manhattan--and a close-up

A barelegged Katie Couric kicks her heel behind her and shivers. Oooh, she mouths to a crowd hanging on her every off-camera tick, it’s coooooold out. Her Betty Boop lips form an oversized “O” and she breaks into that wrap-around smile.

“Rock stars. These people are rock stars,” says Norma Jean Stromman, watching from Dean & Deluca, the adjacent cafe that sells buckets of mocachinos to tourists who never saw anything like this out the window of their local Starbucks. Norma Jean is from Duluth. She is mesmerized watching the “Today” show’s outdoor set.

“I just love the behind-the-scenes,” Stromman, 55, confides. She was a theater major “a hundred years ago” in college. “When you’re at home watching, it’s very packaged. But from here ... oh, it’s like live theater.”

Six hundred people make up the “Today” show’s impromptu audience this blustery spring morning. They are shoved against barricades that ring a plaza outside “Today’s” first-floor studio in Rockefeller Center. No matter that 45 degrees feels like 30 in gusts of wind. It’s spring break around the country and the tourists are flocking here.

All over Midtown, gaggles of tourists gather in front of the indoor-outdoor sets that are the picture windows of television studios. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, even the stodgy Nasdaq, offer a view into “newsrooms” while strategically placed speakers spill audio onto the streets. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that news is happening -- now! -- on Manhattan’s streets, an early-morning hour usually owned by drunks, street sweepers and joggers. (MTV knows better: Kids sleep late. So MTV broadcasts at a more civilized hour from its glassed second-floor studio on Times Square.)

These “live” audiences are almost entirely tourists -- scads of them. A real New Yorker wouldn’t be caught dead gawking at Charlie Gibson. Real New Yorkers are bored by most everything. (Wouldn’t you be if you had a baseball team that basically never lost?!)

At “Good Morning America” last week when the audience schmoozer -- a guy named Jeremy -- asked the lucky 100 invited inside the set at 7 a.m. where they were from, people started yelping: “Texas!” “Florida!” “California!” After a lone voice shouted “Long Island,” a stagehand with a decidedly New York accent cracked, “Where the hell is that?”

Out-of-towners, God bless them, know nothing of embarrassment. They carry homemade signs (“Bacon Lovers Unite”) and wear goofy hats. (A particular favorite is a green-foam Statue of Liberty crown.) They’ll do anything to get on camera. It’s the exact opposite of what you’d expect in a city of 8 million eccentrics. Didn’t the tourists come to see the natives provide the street theater? Apparently not. More captivating, it seems, is the chance to perform for the television camera or, better yet, for the folks back home.

Still, it’s hard not to be awed by the courage these out-of-towners display, getting makeovers in the middle of Times Square while a perfectly coiffed Diane Sawyer narrates, or stumbling through fox-trot lessons across the street from the elegant Plaza Hotel. This foolishness goes nicely with a bag of honey-roasted peanuts sold from carts on most Manhattan corners.

Natives like Steve Lomex have gotten good at spurning the morning media barrage the same way they ignore bus fumes and vendors hawking fake Rolex watches.

Lomex, who commutes from New Jersey, walked by three news shows -- ABC, Fox and NBC -- every morning last week and he still didn’t know that Laci Peterson’s husband had been nabbed by cops after her body was found.

“I nevah stop, even when ‘Today’s’ having one of its Friday concerts,” said Lomex. “I gotta get to work. Sometimes I’ll slow down if some girls are dancing or something.” He shakes his head, grins mischievously and rushes off. The camera catches three seconds of his slicked-back hair and sharp black suit. And that’s how he becomes as much a part of what shapes the world’s up-close vision of New York as yellow cabs or the fountain in front of the Plaza, which appears in the viewfinders of CBS’ “The Early Show.”

“My image of the city was entirely based on flipping channels in the morning,” says Lauren Swartz, a high school senior on her first visit to the city from Williamsburg, Va. Watching ABC’s Diane Sawyer periodically chat up the Millennium Hotel doorman made Lauren think New Yorkers were “basically friendly.” Then she stayed at a hotel in Times Square. She got over it. She was equally stunned that Times Square wasn’t as frighteningly large as it appeared from the looks of the Nasdaq tower when the markets opened at 9:30 every morning on her TV screen.

Her impressions, gleaned in her living room, were way off. “I like it here,” she says shyly. “It’s just not what I expected.”

It’s better.

It’s a theme park -- the only one blanketed with armed men in blue uniforms and squad cars parked around landmarks to remind America that New York values its safety. Do the shows attract tourists? Is this really about the drawing power of Katie and Diane and Paula and whomever they’re now throwing to the ratings lions on CBS? Or is it a buff New York that brings the tourists who invariably visit the fishbowl sets during non-money-spending hours before the Empire State building opens? Probably a little of both.

The media historians would remind us that alfresco journalism isn’t new. “Today” debuted its see-through set in 1994, and the others followed suit in shameless redundancy, like college boys trotting out the same pickup line at a bar. And there is plenty of television psychobabble for why these sets attract viewers.

But none of it is as interesting -- or amusing -- as just hanging around and watching tourists giddy at the prospect of 1.5 seconds of stardom.

The other morning outside CNN’s “American Morning” on Sixth Avenue at 50th Street, a peppy producer positioned two families from south Boston in front of the set’s plate-glass windows. Four freckle-faced kids and their parents -- all wearing “I {heart}NY” hats -- waited for the signal from a cameraman and then they shouted in unison: “GOOD MORNING AMERICA.”

One show is as good as another, it seems, as long as it’s set in New York.

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The New York, N.Y. column runs on Mondays. Geraldine Baum can be reached at geraldine.baum@latimes.com.