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''I'm probably the only person with a show on the Internet [who]doesn't know anything at all about computers.'' So says Tony ''Inky'' Mendez, 56, the cue-card writer for Late Show With David Letterman, and, for the past three years, host of The Tony Mendez Show, a daily online series featured on the Late Show website (cbs.com/lateshow). Filmed in and around Late Show's Manhattan offices, TMS -- as its host often calls it -- features Mendez sparring (verbally and otherwise) with a surprisingly game Letterman. ''I always know if I'm in trouble, I can take my shirt off and he'll run out of the room,'' claims Mendez. (We didn't ask.) Online producer and TMS cameraman Walter Kim agrees, adding ''Anything with nudity or drooling is good.'' It helps that the boss is a more-than-willing participant. Mendez says that the few times TMS hasn't included Letterman -- when Mendez took viewers on a tour of Late Show offices, for example -- the gap-toothed jester ''feels left out, like we don't want him or something.'' With regular plugs on the TV show, the recently refurbished TMS now averages some 2,000 viewers per day. Mendez, however, isn't one of them. On a recent Late Show, Letterman asked the technophobe for the TMS Web address: ''I said, 'I don't know -- W...W...dot something.'''


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Posted Oct 12, 2001 | Published in issue #620 Oct 12, 2001 | Order Article Reprints