ABSTRACT
I’ve borrowed my title from a recurrent segment on David Letterman’s Late Show. The curtain rises and there, flanked by what one may take as the ornament or the distraction of Grinder Girl and Hula Hoop Girl (who each at one time featured in this segment) will be someone doing some form of vaudeville-like performance. After about 30 seconds the curtain comes back down, and Dave and his band leader Paul Shaefer decide whether or not that was something. In the event that they agree that it was something, the judgment is direct and devoid of nuance: that was something. Where the act fails to be something, there’s room for considerable qualification; my favorite among the standard forms of qualification is one I think usually comes from Paul: “Well, that could have been something, but it wasn’t.” Disagreement between them is rare and sometimes kind of interesting: the other night they had a man riding a little tiny bicycle around in circles with a woman on his shoulders sort of waving her arms around. Ruthie and I, always willing to weigh in, knew this was nothing, and Paul seemed distinctly unexcited, but Dave was clearly quite taken with it and dwelt particularly forcefully on how very small the bicycle was—evidently entirely deaf to Ruthie’s riposte that it was still only riding a bicycle and the woman added nothing to that. In the end Paul gave in. A night to two later, it was a guy in a serape and sombrero doing a goofy dance to Mexican music, and Dave, Paul, Ruthie, and I were once again all tracking together: “Oh Thank God!” Paul said as the curtain came down, and Dave said, “Well, that was certainly nothing.” After a commercial break, Dave said he just been informed that the contestant worked regularly at a theater in New York, and that it cost fifteen bucks to get in.
