David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"Eerie or what?" Letterman asked Paul Shaffer.

And the faddish anti-anxiety medication Xanax was supposed to resemble miniatures of those horrible soft pink-orange candy peanuts that everyone sees everywhere but no one will admit ever to having tasted.

I had gotten a Xanax from my husband, finally. It had been Ron's idea. I touched my ear and tried to drive the earplug deeper, out of sight. I arranged my hair over my ear. I was seriously considering taking the earplug out.

My husband did know human nature. "A deal's a deal" kept coming into my ear.

The florid young aide with me had told me I was to be the second guest on the March 22 edition of "Late Night with David Letterman." Appearing first was to be the executive coordinator of NBC Sports, who was going to be seen sitting in the center of a circle of exploding dynamite, for fun. Also on the bill with me was the self-proclaimed king of kitchen-gadget home sales.

We saw a short veterinary film on dyspepsia in swine.

"Your work has gone largely unnoticed by the critics, then," the videotape showed Letterman saying to the film's director, a veterinarian from Arkansas who was panicked throughout the interview because, the electric voice in my ear maintained, he didn't know whether to be serious about his life's work with Letterman, or not.

The executive coordinator of NBC Sports apparently fashioned perfect rings of high explosive in his basement workshop, took them into his backyard, and sat inside explosions; it was a hobby. David Letterman asked the NBC executive to please let him get this straight: that somebody who sat in the exact center of a perfect circle of dynamite would be completely safe, encased in a vacuum, a sort of storm's eye — but that if so much as one stick of dynamite in the ring was defective, the explosion could, in theory, kill the executive?

"Kill?" Letterman kept repeating, looking over at Paul Shaffer, laughing.

The Bolsheviks had used the circle ceremoniously to "execute" Russian noblemen they really wanted to spare, the executive said; it was an ancient and time-honored illusion. I thought he looked quite distinguished, and decided that sense played no part in the hobbies of men.

As I waited for my appearance, I imagined the coordinator in his Westchester backyard's perfect center, unhurt but encased as waves of concussed dynamite whirled around him. I imagined something tornadic, colored pink — since the dynamite piled on-stage was pink.

But the real live explosion was gray. It was disappointingly quick, and sounded flat, though I laughed when Letterman pretended that they hadn't gotten the explosion properly taped and that the executive coordinator of NBC Sports, who looked as though he'd been given a kind of cosmic slap, was going to have to do the whole thing over again. For a moment the coordinator thought Letterman was serious.

"See," Ron had said as it became time for me to be made up, "there's no way he can be serious, Edilyn. He's a millionaire who wears wrestling sneakers."

"One watches him," my husband said, bent to check the fit of the cold pink plug in my ear, "and one envisions a whole nation, watching, nudging each other in the ribs."

"Just get in there and nudge," Ron said encouragingly. I looked at his mouth and head and cat. "Forget all the rules you've ever learned about appearing on talk shows. This kid's turned it inside out. Those rules of television humor are what he makes the most fun of." His eyes went a bit cold. "He's making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things."

"Well, there's been a kind of parricidal mood toward rules in the industry for quite some time," my husband said as we waited for the elevator's ascent. "He sure as hell didn't invent it." Ron lit his cigarette for him, smiling sympathetically. We both knew what Rudy was talking about. The Xanax was beginning to take effect, and I felt good. I felt psyched up to appear.

"You could say it's like what happened over at 'Saturday Night Live,' " Ron said. "It's the exact same phenomena. The cheap sets that are supposed to look even cheaper than they are. The home-movie mugging for the cameras, the backyard props like Monkey-Cam or Thrill-Cam or coneheads of low-grade mâché. 'Late Night,' 'SNL'—they're anti-shows."

We were at the back of the large silent elevator. It seemed not to be moving. It seemed like a room unto itself. Rudy had pressed 6. Both my ears were crackling. Ron was speaking slowly, as if I couldn't possibly understand.

"But even if something's an anti-show, if it's a hit, it's a show," Ron said. He got his cat to lift its head, and scratched its throat.

"So just imagine the strain the son of a bitch is under," my husband muttered.

Ron smiled coolly, not looking at Rudy.

My husband's brand of cigarette is a foreign sort that lets everyone know that something is on fire. The thing hissed and popped and gushed as he inhaled, looking steadily at his old superior. Ron looked at me.

"Remember how 'SNL' had those great parodies of commercials right after the show's opening, Edilyn? Such great parodies that it always took you a while to even realize they were parodies and not commercials? And how the anti-commercials were a hit? So then what happened?" Ron asked me. I said nothing. Ron liked to ask questions and then answer them. We arrived on Letterman's floor. Rudy and I got out behind him.

"What happened," he said over his shoulder, "is that the sponsors started putting commercials on 'SNL' that were almost like the parodies of the commercials, so that it took you a while to realize that these were even real commercials in the first place. So the sponsors were suddenly guaranteed huge audiences that watched their commercials very, very closely — hoping, of course, that they'd be parodies." Secretaries and interns rose to attention as Ron passed with us; his cat yawned and stretched in his arms.

"But," Ron laughed, still not looking at my husband, "But instead, the sponsors had turned the anti-commercials' joke around on 'SNL' and were using it, using the joke to manipulate the very same audience the parodies had made fun of them for manipulating in the first place."

Studio 6-A's stage doors were at the end of a carpeted hall, next to a huge poster that showed David Letterman taking a picture of whoever was taking his picture for the poster.

"So really being a certain way or not isn't a question that can come up, on shows like this," Rudy said, tapping an ash, not looking at Ron.

"Were those great days or what?" Ron whispered into the ear of the cat he nuzzled.

The locked studio doors muffled the sounds of much merriment. Ron entered a code on a lit panel by the Letterman poster. He and Rudy were going back upstairs to watch from Ron's office, where the wall of monitors would afford them several views of me at once.

"You'll just have to act, is all," my husband said, brushing the hair back from my ear. He touched my cheek. "You're a talented and multifaceted actress."

And Ron, manipulating the cat's white paw in a pretend goodbye, said, "And she is an actress, Rudolph. With you helping her we'll help you turn this thing just the right way."

"And she appreciates it, sir. More than she knows right now." "So I'm to be a sort of anti-guest?" I said.

"Terribly nice to see you," is what David Letterman said to me. I had followed my introduction on-stage; the sweatered attendant conducted me by the elbow and peeled neatly away as I hit the lights.

"Terribly, nay, grotesquely nice to see you," Letterman said.

"He's scanning for pretensions," crackled my ear. "Pockets of naive self-importance. Something to stick a pin in. Anything."