Old School
January 28th, 2010
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Let me start by saying, I’m With CoCo. To those of you who have been living in a bunker below Mount Whatthewhat for the past month, Conan O’Brien is no longer the host of The Tonight Show. To those of you who have been living in a bunker below Mount Whatthewhat for the past year, Jay Leno is still the host of The Tonight Show. I’m not here to breakdown the parties involved, as that has been done ad naseum.
However, I did want to take pause to recognize how Conan ended his reign as host of the most storied franchise in television. In the face of short-sighted executives who unceremoniously and disrespectfully left Conan with few options except to leave his professional home of some 20 years, Conan went ‘old school.’ It’s rare that anyone can be genuinely called ‘old school’ nowadays in our TMZed-world where celebrity tirades are issued via press release, and so many people take the low road. Not Conan. That CoCo is all class and he took the high path less traveled. Conan is ‘old school.’
All that being said, it’s fair to call me biased. You see, I used to work at Late Night with Conan O’Brien in New York. On my last day before departing for sunny Los Angeles, Conan told me to let him know if I ever needed anything. Despite garnering the kind of acclaim that warrants random people constantly asking him for favors, Conan told me feel free to ask him for anything because that’s just the kind of person that he is. Until recently, I never needed to ask him for anything, but as I watched his Tonight Show farewell speech I realized that I needed something from Conan. I needed to tell him “thank you.” I needed to thank him for retaining his sense of self, humor and dignity, despite being in an incredibly difficult position.
In his final speech, Conan spoke of not being cynical. I hope that we at Border Stylo can take a page from Conan’s book, and not be cynical, but be open minded to all the possibilities that the world holds for us. With a little luck and a lot hard work, maybe someday, we can call ourselves ‘old school.’
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Andrew Pettit
Andrew works in business affairs and marketing. He awaits the inevitable robot apocalypse.
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CoCo, CoCo, CoCo!!
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