Viewer Mail on Letterman, September 22, 1989

Viewer Mail preceded first by Dave's cab story, then a Top Ten list that had been written literally minutes before read on the air.

From "Top Ten Facts About Late Night and David Letterman's Top Ten List," by Elon Green, New Republic, May 15, 2015:

Head Writer Steve O'Donnell:
There is one that was particularly memorable, that I personally had to write extremely quickly—and I mean in under two minutes or so.

There had just been a crash at JFK. An airplane had, like, jockeyed down the runway and just gone into the bay. It was called Flight 5050. And there were no known fatalities.* But it was a very strange, eccentric airplane crash. So the list we had prepared an hour or so before the show was "Excuses of the Flight 5050 Pilot."

*There were, in fact, two fatalities, but this had not been reported at the time of the broadcast.

And I'm standing literally backstage. The band is playing. Dave is looking at the blue card and says, "You know, Steven, I don't think we can do this list. I know no one died, but it's still a plane crash! And it seems like a bad idea. Do we have anything else?" And, of course, we didn't really have anything else, but I said, "What if we do 'Top 10 Numbers Between One and Ten?' I'll mix 'em up." He said, "OK." Well, I went to the chyron operator and we kind of wrote it as quickly as we could. It really took us about two minutes. I tried to get an element of surprise in there. For example, there's a tie at number one, and I did that by at number three having a fraction. Two and a half or seven and a half or something.

Viewer Mail features Dave's assistant Laurie Diamond and Paul's music assistant Chris Albers.