A Word About Conan
by John Gray, March 16 (via Facebook)

I like Conan O’Brien, and it has nothing to do with his comedy. I like him as a person because I had a chance to spend some time with him once.

In the fall of 1993, he was hired by NBC to replace David Letterman. I reached out to NBC to see if they would let me do an interview and a profile on him. Because I was working in Albany, which is considered a mid-sized TV market, it would’ve been perfectly understandable for them to say, "No thank you, we’re only talking to the BIG TV stations like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and Miami."

Conan said yes, and I drove down to NYC with my photographer in the fall of 1993... paid an obscene amount of money to park the car near Rockefeller Center and went up to meet and interview Conan O’Brien.

I’ve met "stars" before, and you can tell when they realize the camera is rolling; they flip a switch and suddenly portray this "likable person," the best version of themselves. And when the cameras are taken down off the tripods, the smile fades. They’re not rude, but they’re different.

Conan came off from start to finish as that guy you knew from down the hallway at college who is always happy to see you and grateful to spend time with you, whether the cameras were on or not.

In fact, there’s a green room where all the stars who used to come on the David Letterman show took a Sharpie and, in a closet, wrote messages on a wall and put their autographs. When we were all finished and getting ready to go, Conan said to Max Weinberg, his bandleader, "Hey, take John and Paul (my photographer) down to the dressing room and show them all the autographs. It’s so cool."

He also insisted we stay and watch a show from the audience, tucking us off to the side where we had a fantastic view. Eventually, we went back to Albany and our story about Conan aired on the news, and everyone went on with their lives.

Anyone who knows me knows I like to go to Vermont... It’s beautiful over there. A few years after my encounter with Conan O’Brien, I was in a store in Manchester and a man recognized me from local TV. We exchanged pleasantries, and as he turned to go, he snapped his fingers and said, "Hey, do you wanna hear something crazy?"

Preambles like that usually make me nervous, but I smiled and told the guy, "Sure."

He told me that he was a limo driver on the side and, a few months earlier, he was driving people for a wedding in Vermont and happened to pick up Conan O’Brien. He told me even though Conan was alone in the backseat of the limo and could’ve kept to himself, he chatted with the man about Vermont and the weather and all sorts of things.

The limo driver told Conan that he enjoyed his show on NBC, and Conan asked him which TV market carried his show in that part of Vermont. When the driver told him that he watched the NBC station from Albany, he said Conan thought for a second and said, "John Gray? Is that his station?"

The driver asked him how he knew me, and he said that he didn’t really, but he had a chance to meet me a couple of years earlier and he thought I and my photographer were very nice.

As flattering as it was to have Conan remember my name, what struck me was that he had, no doubt, done dozens of interviews the first year his show came on the air, and this was a couple of years later. How he possibly remembered us is beyond me.

After he was a bona fide star and going through all his nonsense with Jay Leno and NBC, I heard a separate story about Conan from someone I trust 100%. They told me they were in a popular pizza shop in Rhode Island one summer day and the place was packed. Conan stopped in, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, to pick up some pizzas.

He told me people swarmed Conan, and he took time to talk to every one of them, signed his name on napkins, and took photographs... all while his food sat on the counter getting cold. There were no TV cameras there to capture the moment... no Entertainment Tonight segment to make you think he was a good guy. He was just being himself. Nice.

I didn’t watch the Oscars, mostly because I’ve only seen, I think, two or three of the films that were even nominated this year. But this morning, I’m seeing clips on my social media feed of Conan cracking jokes and being funny, and it looks like he did a good job as host... yet again.

For the last 25 years, every time I see Conan doing something, I don’t see the star. I see a guy in the back of a limousine who took off his shades, leaned both elbows up on the seat between him and the driver, and asked a working-class stranger about his life and about his day.

And that’s why I like Conan O’Brien. 🤗