So tomorrow is David Letterman’s last show. It’s a
remarkable thing. Some call it the end of an era. For me, the era of which Dave
was part has been over for awhile now. But then again, I don’t even feel like
I’m a part of the era in which I find myself.
I first met Dave sometime in 1984. I was fifteen or so, and I
had recently talked my parents into letting me have a TV in my room under the
pretext that I needed one for my TI-994A (if you don’t know what that is, google
it). The TV was a little 13” black and white job. Offbrand, of course. Paid for it
with my paper route money, or maybe I had started working at Lionel Playworld
by then. The thing was, I was only supposed to use the TV as a monitor. And for
the most part, I abided by my parents’ wishes. But late one night, I dared to
turn it on. In the course of flipping through the six or seven available
channels, I suddenly found myself confronted by the image of a pudgy,
bespectacled man. His odd, distorted face completely filled the screen. I don’t
remember what he was doing, or why he was so close to the camera. It didn’t
matter. All I knew was that on my television was a man who looked like a Gary
Larson cartoon come to life. It’s all I needed to see. I was hooked.