We actually watched something besides cartoons last night. I was curious about the much-balyhoo-ed return of late night programming, so we decided to give it a whirl. We started slow and worked our way up to the major networks.

First up, The Daily Show. It was enjoyable. It was a rerun, of course, but an enjoyable rerun. If you squinted so that you couldn’t see the crawl at the bottom of the screen about disaster relief, you could pretend things were a-okay.

Now, I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I’m not saying “forget it and move on.” I am saying that we all need to be able to take a little breather. We need to start gaining some perspective. This is why I was particularly interested in seeing Letterman. Just the fact that he was back in production Monday was huge, but I was particularly interested in how the 2nd show would go.

11:35. Here comes Dave. The structure of the show is, in general, back. But it’s an empty shell being filled with shock and grief about the tragedy. It’s not “normal.” To be honest, I didn’t expect it to be.

The Top Ten List was back, and perhaps perfect. Humorous but amorphous. Gentle and harmless. (Top 10 Things that almost rhyme with hat; i.e. ass, Matt Lauer).

Biff Henderson’s America made a re-appearance. We saw a segment from 1999 featuring the tiny town of Baker, Nevada.

In retrospect, I wished that the second guest, Denis Leary, had been the featured guest. Bryant Gumbel seemed to be a man who needed to go home and go to bed for a long while. After a while he started to freak me out.

Denis Leary is (in addition to being a very funny and articulate person) the founder of the Leary Firefighters Foundation. I really wished that he could have talked more.

Gumbel took us back to Tuesday, back into what happened. Leary was looking both at the present and also looking ahead. His concern for the futures of the families of the police officers and firefighters injured or killed has not really been mentioned much at all so far.

Then in the last 3 minutes of the show, Tori Amos performed a cover of Tom Waits “Time.” Let me back up for a moment, because I can describe this part of the show best by describing something entirely different. Just stick with me.

Think back to High School. There was always at least one girl who was obsessed with theater. She was famine-victim thin, wore so much mascara her eyes were reduced to little slits, and every blessed time she got near a piano she would treat anyone in earshot to a show-tuney rendition of some rock song or another. This phenomenon may have reached it’s apex during the ascendency of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love,” but I have been assured that it still occurs with frightening regularity. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with this. They’re an important source of cruise-ship piano bar talent, a precious commodity in the travel and leisure industry, one assumes.

Okay, so you remember that girl? Picture her doing “Time” by Tom Waits. There you have it.