I Saw You on TV...

I'm sorry to say that I never actually made it on the air during my internship. They put all the interns in a Viewer Mail skit one Friday, but, as luck would have it, I wasn't there that day.

It ended up, though, that that didn't matter, because somebody who looks like me from behind was on the show all the time. Barbara Gaines, Dave's production assistant for the last nine years, is the staff person in charge of running things on stage during the show. She runs on with pencils, drops them and runs off. For my friends watching "Late Night" at 1 a.m. everyday, I figured that was just as good as my actually being on the show. So in the name of--humor?--I let them go on believing she was me.

Did You Write Anything?

I did a little bit of everything during my stay with "the big show". Everything, taht is, but write jokes. I photocopied jokes, photocopied Top 10 lists and photocopied scripts. And that's as close as I got.

So What Did You Do?

As an intern, I was specifically assigned to a talent coordinator--one of the people who books guests on the show. Madeleine, my boss, was responsible for the "civilian guests," a euphemism for the non-famous guests (a.k.a. weird guests--the snake charmers, bug collectors, inventors and assorted others). About two weeks into my internship, she also took over the musical guests.

My job was to do whatever I could to keep her life in order. That meant sorting her mail, screening tapes, writing rejection letters, answering her phones, picking up CD's, getting lunch, organizing her office, unburying her desk and reading her 15+ daily newspapers to look for interesting guests. Madeleine, by far, got the most mail and the most phone calls of anyone on the show (there are, it seems, many more crazy people in America than there are famous ones).

As the people in charge of answering Madeleine's phones and mails, my co-intern and I liked to think of ourselves as the first line of defense against America's nuts. Calls ranged from people who wanted to say "hi" to Dave to people with ideas for the show. The hardest part was convincing people to give up and put down the phone.

I talked to one man for 20 minutes about his idea to do an interview with an ex-addict, exgovernor from somewhere who was now running for re-election. I finally got him to understand that this wouldn't be a good idea for "Late Night with David Letterman." He was silent for a second, and then he said, "You mean, this isn't Nightly News?"

A few days later, I got a call from an irate man demanding to speak to the manager. I tried explaining to him that we were a TV show; we had producers and directors, but no manager. He screamed, "What kind of McDonald's doesn't have a manager?" and he slammed down the phone.

The strangest letter we received was from some kid who sent us--believe it--his wart. At the end of a long, complicated letter which rambled on for two pages, I discovered under a large mound of scotch tape, what was unmistakably a human wart. The mailer's effort, however misguided and anal retentive, was semi-successful. His idea did, that is, make it out of the dead letter box--and right into a medical waste disposal basket.

How Crazy Did Things Get?

With the volume of Madeleine's mail, mix-ups were bound to happen.

One day, a package arrived through a Federal Express delivery from a rib company in some mid-Western state. The package didn't appear to have a name on it, and when strange, unexplainable objects appear in the office, everyone assumes that they are pitches (prospective guest ideas) for Madeleine.