ROY EDROSO

Ed Sullivan Theatre, 1697 Broadway, Manhattan

A young woman in a brown leather coat jiggled against the cold near the Ed Sullivan Theatre at Broadway and 53rd Street, and repeated the words "David Letterman tickets" to no one in particular in a soft, querulous voice.

She worked for CBS, she explained, and there had been some cancellations for tonight's show. That seemed strange to me--did people really call up a talk show and say they wouldn't be able to make it?--but I was just coming back from my dentist and was not in a journalistic frame of mind.

She said she had to ask me some "David trivia" to make sure I was the right sort to attend the taping. She asked if I knew who Biff Henderson was. I blanked on his specific job on the show (stage manager), but replied that he was large of frame and did man-on-the-street interviews to humorous effect, and this seemed to be good enough. When I agreed to get to the taping by 4 pm, she gave me a signed, pink admittance slip and a seemingly heartfelt plea: "Be very energetic and very 'up' for the show," she said, "And David really needs a full house to do a good show, so if for any reason you can't make the taping, please call us right away."

I thanked her and walked down Broadway, thinking, right, like I'm going to RSVP David Letterman.

But as 4 o'clock grew near, I became apprehensive. Maybe David did need me. The poor man had undergone major heart surgery, after all; maybe the sight of an empty seat would be enough to fibrillate him.

I took a cab back to the theatre and presented my slip at the door. "Just in time!" shouted a young man in a Late Show jacket. "Head right in!"

I was greeted by two more LS-jacketed functionaries, who clapped their hands quietly and said "Let's go!" as I walked through a maze of those things that have replaced velvet ropes--they look like black bookbag straps strung between short posts--past what had once been ticket windows, now closed off by whitewashed plywood panels. The whole lobby, in fact, was whitewashed, even the crenelated trim; it wasn't opulent, as I had hoped, merely clean and officious.

I was directed to another functionary who took my slip and sent me back out to the foyer, where yet another one was finishing up a rah-rah speech for a clot of mildly enthused attendees. "Who are we gonna see?" "David!" "A little louder," he said, pointing at me, "or I won't give this man his ticket!" "David" was duly amplified, and I was handed my entree.

Outside the theatre, Friends of David already mobbed the sidewalk, separated into sections by color-coded bookbag straps. I was told to come back at 5 pm sharp, so I wandered the brightly lit and boring canyons of midtown, wondering if I should just blow the whole thing off.

At 5 pm sharp I returned, my ticket was examined, and by some mysterious logic I was placed between the yellow straps, about halfway down the line. Most of my group were couples, young or youngish, dressed nicely but comfortably, as for a Broadway matinee. Four or five young men and women in business clothes, ties visible under their long coats, talked the way such people talk when they're getting a quick drink after work. "I'd rather have a girl call my beeper," said one man with a mild Jersey accent, "That way I can decide whether I wanna call her back or not." The girls in the group seemed to think this charmingly roguish.

A trio of functionaries worked their way down the line. The two males wore the aforementioned jackets, but the woman wore a long olive-green wool cape over business clothes, had plucked eyebrows, dark lipstick and a well-powdered complexion, and did all the talking, in the slow, patient, theatrical voice of a choral director:

"We want you to be loud, we want you to cheer, we want you to clap. But there are two things we really need you not to do. One, no whistling. You know, when you put your fingers in your mouth and whistle? And no hooting--you know, like this?" And she demonstrated. "The reason is, the microphones are right above your heads"--she described an arc in the sky with her finger--"and they really pick those noises up."

She then told us to have a great show, and we responded vocally, with no hooting or whistling.

"She's very good," I said to one of the jacketed males. "Is this her only job, to instruct crowds on how to behave?"

"Oh, no," he said, with the tight smile of a bartender internally debating whether or not to throw out a drunk, "She just works for the show, just like the rest of us."

At 5:30 we poured into the theatre, and everywhere were people in Late Show jackets, clapping their hands and encouraging us to "have a great show" and "have fun."

We cheered when Biff Henderson crossed the stage and Alan Calter strode to the announcer's lectern. We laughed and cheered for the warm-up guy. We cheered and clapped along with the CBS Orchestra as it played "One Way Out." And we roared like injured howler monkeys when Dave himself ran onstage (at a surprising clip for a cardiac case), bantered for three minutes, and ran off as the house lights dimmed for the beginning of the show.

For the next 60 minutes we laughed loudly at dumb jokes, roared for Matthew McConaughey and Elle MacPherson as if they were Tom Hanks and Madonna, and cheered every break in the action as if it were the climax of the greatest of Shakespeare productions. Actually, we laughed and roared and cheered much louder than that.

In an age of multiple awards programs and endless 100-Greatest lists, an age in which every Broadway show gets at least a partial standing ovation, audience members are the hardest-working people in show business. We do not merely suspend disbelief, we banish it to a lonely atoll somewhere east of Temptation Island. We're on time and totally psyched, and we never miss a cue.

We've come a long way from the pit of the Globe, where the players had to come up or they got a faceful of hazelnut shells; now the players just yap nonsense at each other, while the groundlings recreate the Nuremberg Rally under the watchful eye of the Men in Late Show Jackets.