IT’S THE END of May. Fear is in full blossom. Its nauseating scent clings to the clothing of all those graduating college seniors who just want to take their last keg stand and make out with the co-ed they’ve lusted after since freshman orientation. How unfair that the anticipation of change won’t let them give in completely to the decadence of their last days. But in a matter of weeks, college seniors won’t be the only ones facing a new reality. On June 1, Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s former host assumed the reins of NBC’s Tonight Show. Conan took over for Jay Leno, whose long stint in late-night has rendered him the beloved equivalent of what Mr. Rogers once was to daytime TV.
Tonight Show viewers are scared. Many worry that the Harvard-educated, pasty eccentric won’t connect with the audience of “regular Americans” like previous Tonight Show everyman hosts Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Leno himself. OK guys, relax.Take a breath. Let a fellow pasty redhead who was personally escorted through the crisis of adolescence by O’Brien himself assure you, Conan will not only be a satisfying and rich new chapter for the Tonight Show, he’ll ease you into the transition.
Conan was the public service ad that reached me. It was the summer after sixth grade when I first locked into O’Brien’s awkward sway. With parents who never saw the logic in splurging for cable, I spent those latenight hours flipping between reruns of M*A*S*H and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling on a Toshiba set so rickety that I had to change the channels with an old pair of pliers. Discovering Conan blasted open a chubby sixthgrade girl’s world. Sure I was awkward, but I couldn’t have been more awkward than the gangly spaz snapping his fingers and adjusting his collar across my fuzzy TV screen. And he had his own show! While G.L.O.W.’s bare midriffs and surgical enhancement affirmed my insecurities about my otherness, Conan fashioned that otherness into likeability. I’d never be smokin’, but just look where cracking a joke could get me.
When I was 13, my mom and grandma Enid plucked me from my Midwestern junior high and introduced me to Manhattan. For a week, we shopped in hip stores and schemed over how we’d sneak me into Late Night despite its 16-and-above audience age requirement. Grandma Enid waited three hours in line to wrangle standby tickets, my mom helped me pick out a mature-looking outfit and both pleaded with the page who tried to kick me out of line for not being able to tell her what year I was born. But we made it in! At the first commercial break, my mother whispered, “Oh, isn’t he cute?” Grandma Enid added, “That’s the kind of man you want to marry.”
Preempting the energy crisis, he helped me turn heartbreak into alternative fuel.As a senior in high school, there was no one I wanted to go to prom with more than Conan. My three formal invitations to him via letter went unanswered, but until we crowned the prom queen I still thought he might make a romantic guest appearance. He didn’t. The next month, during my English class’s poetry unit, I handed in a series of Conan haikus as an assignment.The general tone?
I wrote you letters
Saying come to my school dance,
You don’t read junkmail.
I got an A.
The economy may be crumbling, but Conan’s the reason I have a job. After the four years of college I spent jamming full of comedy-related extra-curriculars, I went to work as one of the very NBC pages who tried to kick me out of the Late Night line years before. Feeling at home within the nest of late-night television, I followed my page stint with a job at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where I remain three and a half years later.
Last year, a fat six grader’s unthinkable happened: I met Conan. I was petting one of the many dogs that roam our animal-friendly office when the object of my adolescent affection sidled up. “What a beautiful dog,” Conan said as he bent down next to me to join in the petting.
“Why breed is it?”
“Mutt,” was all I could manage.
“My family lost ours about nine months ago. We keeping talking about getting a new one, but it’s hard to feel like you’re replacing something you loved.”
If you’re among those who’ve moved on to different pets after losing ones you adored, you know that the new never replaces the old. It drags in a new era between its pointy little teeth.The new cannot replace. It’s inherently different, and it being so helps you access unchartered parts of yourself as well. Don’t worry about Conan replacing your beloved Jay. I’ve known this mutt a long time. He’s a good one.
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