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An Excerpt from Late Show News Issue #189 Now Bill was completely stoked. He went to the "Late Show" a third time, and a fourth. Then he got tickets for the taping of Dec. 31. Bill took his sister Anne-Marie -- and our regular readers know the rest. Even though they had numbered tickets, they were turned away after a long wait in line, just like hundreds of other ticketholders that night. "It was 20 degrees, my sister was shivering, I was shivering, and then at the end it was, 'Bye,'" he said Monday. To top it off, when Bill got back home and on the Internet, he learned from reading LATE SHOW NEWS that ticketholders with numbers as high as 162 had been turned away that same night. That harshed Bill's mellow something strong. He composed an angry message about his experience and posted it to the alt.fan.letterman newsgroup. He cooled down, forgot about the incident and went back to Ohio. A week passed. Then Bill's parents got a call from Laurie Diamond, Letterman's longtime personal assistant and troubleshooter. She had Bill's message in hand; an assistant in Dave's office had spotted it online and passed a printed copy on to Diamond, who said she showed the message to Letterman. "And Dave said, 'On a freezing cold night, for people to be turned away just breaks my heart,'" said Diamond. So Letterman instructed her to "make restitution" to Bill, which came in the form of calls from Diamond and the show's audience coordinator Victoria Varela. Bill was offered seats to a later show. He chose March 16. Varela offered seats in the balcony. He wanted seats on the main floor. Instead, she offered him the green room. Bill gladly accepted, and is once again stoked. "The whole thing's going to be surprising," said Bill, who gets to take two guests backstage with him. "I haven't asked them for details." Diamond said it was just part of a campaign by the show to get better connected to its many online fans. "What I used to do at NBC that I don't have a chance to do anymore is -- because the viewer mail used to be collected in a box in the lobby, I used to come down and grab a bunch of mail out of the box," she said. Calling viewers who sent mail was one way for the show to build goodwill and a hardcore audience. "I was born in 1952. I'm 45 and not that much computer savvy. Helen Stoddard is a new assistant in Dave's office. She's 21 and one of these little geniuses. She pulls stuff off the Internet and brings it to my attention. She's getting us caught up again." So has Dave seen any viewer Web pages like Bill's at http://homepages.udayton.edu/~leheckwr/letterman/body.html? Diamond swears he has, pointing out that Late Show Online coordinators Jay Johnson and Walter Kim occupy an office next to a stairwell Letterman often uses. "He'll pop in from time to time and say, 'Okay, boys, show me
what you've got,'" said Diamond.
Entire contents Copyright 1998 by Aaron Barnhart. All
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