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David Letterman's retirement is gathering velocity.  May 20th.  Oh, my god.  Is one of the five stages of grief Nostalgia?  It's been flooding over me lately.  When I was little, my dream was to be interviewed—about what, I don't know—by Johnny Carson.  Then when he retired I set my sights on David Letterman.  I can see I'm going to miss that one by a long shot too.  But there was one person peripheral to my life who had the pleasure of performing on Letterman about twenty times in the 1980's, and his name was Brother Theodore and for one night, he was my babysitter.

Even by the lax standards of 1970's parenting, inviting Brother Theodore to babysit me and my sister was remarkable, bordering on insane.  

Brother Theodore, born Theodore Gottlieb, was a good friend of my dad and mom's from their nightclub days in New York City.  My parents performed sketch comedy together in the 1960's in the vein (but maybe not quite the heart) of Nichols and May or Stiller and Meara.  Everybody on that circuit was interconnected and so my father discovered and became a devotée of Theodore's midnight show in the East Village.

My father and Theodore had an immediate appreciation for each other.  My dad even made a short film based on Brother Theodore's act.  I put a link to it at the bottom of this post (I believe my Mom is the woman sitting on Theodore's lap because I recognize her English teeth).  They both considered themselves to be intellectually superior (true), they were obsessed with word-play, chess, arcane knowledge and Orson Wells.  They were also depressives with a somewhat bleak view on life.  Excepting each other, they were used to being the smartest, wittiest person in the room and they weren't shy about it.  My dad once proclaimed "I'm a better writer than Dostoevsky."  Having not yet read Dostoevsky and at that point being completely in my fat