Once it seemed there would always be a time for everything

[austin_dern]

As I said, if you watched the final episode of Late Night With Conan O'Brien you saw more or less what the audience in the studio saw. The stuff that couldn't be seen in the finished product would be things like what Conan did during the playing of a video message from John Mayer --- Conan stood, watching a monitor, with his fist held up over his mouth while he grinned and then laughed as Mayer sung how ``LA's gonna eat you alive'' --- or during the playing of what he called his favorite bit ever, his experience with a group of old-time baseball reenactors. This bit from several years ago took him out of the studio to a Long Island gang that plays something based on the baseball of roughly the 1860s.

I'm told by a real 19th-century-baseball historian that this group picks and chooses rules from several different eras so that it looks like old-time baseball without ever matching it exactly. Well, we can play anyway. The old-time baseball segment was indeed an all-time highlight as Conan got into the obsolete slang, trash-talked 1864 style (``If that was any lower I'd have to dig to Hades itself to find the apple! Why not dig a trench? Then the ball would be as low as you seem to wish it to be!'') and out-of-character getting exasperated at how everybody's 1864 character was a farmer or obviously dodging the draft. (It also included his hitting on one in-character woman, Nell, that I've always found obnoxiously inappropriate.) It did make up for much of that with Conan in-character reacting to a jet flying into JFK Airport.

During the final week of the show Conan had been tearing apart pieces of his set --- they didn't need it anymore, after all, and it'd just be thrown away the next Monday --- and giving it to the audience. He'd chopped up pieces of his set balcony and his Ikea coffee table and LaBamba's band podium --- which, it turned out, the producers were not expecting him to do, and which contained many miles of wiring for microphones --- previously. For the final day he got someone out in a little ... ah ... motorized towing thingy that I could probably think of an actual name for and pulled down a chunk of the proscenium around the monologue/performance area. The prospect of further set destruction drew another standing ovation, although taking an axe to the fallen column didn't produce any measurable result. The audience stayed standing throughout the first commercial break as Conan promised that the chunk would be cut up and given to as many people as possible. After the break, he promised something would go to everyone.

It's silly to like keeping chunks of sets of TV shows for whatever possible purpose they might serve. But on the other hand I do have a little chunk of Deep 13, left over from when Mystery Science Theater 3000 moved from one cable channel to another, and I like being silly. My father was thrilled at the prospect of getting, free, a chunk of lumber which had once been something.

Trivia: In setting up what became the ``Council of Four'' to expedite terms of the Versailles Conference of 1919, Japan's representatives were excluded on the pretext that their delegation was not headed up by either a prime minister or president, but instead statesman Prince Kimmochi Saionji. source: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, Margaret MacMillan.

Currently Reading: Down To Earth: Nature's Role In American History, Ted Steinberg.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

motorized towing thingy that I could probably think of an actual name for

That would be a Puissant Proscenium Puller.

I have little chunks of Xenia, OH; the Berlin Wall; and Grandstand B & a 1909 paving brick from the Speedway.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Pieces of things with actual historical or at least personal content seem less trivial than getting a piece of a TV show set, somehow. My father grabbed a brick from a demolished building just because it came from (and had the name of) a long-closed brick factory that some of his relatives worked at back in the day and that seems like a very reasonable souvenir despite little direct connection.