So much of what happened on Late Night with David Letterman the night of January 19, 1989 wouldn’t happen today.
While most late-night shows are now routinely edited to remove flubs, jokes that fall flat, and trim interviews that run long, David Letterman’s Late Night was shot “live-to-tape” when that still meant something.
Yes, profanity would be bleeped, and there were occasional post-show edits when absolutely necessary. But those were the exception. More often than not, what viewers saw on the air each night was how the show had unfolded before its studio audience earlier that afternoon.
If a segment ran long, it ran long—and the time had to be made up later. That’s why guests were frequently bumped on the old Letterman and Carson shows, and they aren’t today.
Likewise, when things went wrong, viewers saw it. For Letterman fans in particular, that unpredictability was part of the appeal. If a guest was drunk, erratic, or simply had bad chemistry with Dave, it could make for riveting—or at least memorable—television.
On this particular night, the show had already gone off the rails well before Letterman introduced 81-year-old naturalist Dr. Frances Hamerstrom. After failing to roll a clip from his new movie during either of his two interview segments, the show’s headline guest, Martin Short, stuck around for a third, forcing producers to bump the night’s final guest, comedian Rich Shydner.
“I see on my list someone’s been crossed out,” Letterman noted while teasing the rest of the show after Short’s departure.
Years later, Shydner recalled being told backstage that he was out—and then, as Hamerstrom’s segment began to go sideways, being told he was suddenly back in. There was just one catch: he’d need to cut a minute from his act.
An accomplished ornithologist, Hamerstrom was also—like many of Letterman’s best “human interest” guests—decidedly eccentric. She wasn’t on the show to discuss the hundreds of scientific papers she’d written or her role in helping save the greater prairie chicken of Wisconsin from extinction.
Instead, she was there to conduct a cooking demonstration based on her newly released Wild Food Cookbook, which featured recipes using foraged plants and animals ranging from raccoon and opossum to beaver.
At first, the demonstration unfolded largely as expected. Hamerstrom talked about foraging as a child and presented a freshly baked wild mushroom pie. Letterman raised a concern about poisonous mushrooms, which she calmly dismissed, specifying the variety and noting that she ate dozens of species of wild mushrooms. Letterman sampled the pie and said it tasted great.
Only then did Hamerstrom reveal that the shortening wasn’t pig fat, but black bear lard. The disclosure landed as an escalation, but one still within the realm of late-night novelty.
The pigeon was not.
When Hamerstrom reached under the table and produced a freshly killed pigeon, feathers intact, its head dangling, the audience groaned. As she began plucking the dead bird on camera—explaining where the skin was weakest—the crowd’s uneasy laughter gave way to shouted protests as feathers drifted to the floor.
What made the moment unsettling was not just the act itself, but Hamerstrom’s lack of adjustment to television. She did not pause, soften the imagery, or acknowledge the reaction in the room. She proceeded methodically, as if alone in her kitchen or out in the field.
As the demonstration continued, Letterman noted that they were running out of time and tried to move the show to commercial. Hamerstrom put the bird away, only to pull another fully plucked pigeon from below the table, likening it to a Cornish game hen, “but much more expensive.”
With no time left, Letterman ended the segment and invited Hamerstrom back another night. As they shook hands—sending a final flutter of feathers into the air—the segment came to an end, clearing the way for Shydner to return to the stage, minus a minute.
Hamerstrom was indeed invited back eight months later. On her second visit, Letterman recalled her “cleaning the pigeon” during her earlier appearance, saying, “It made me sick.” Hamerstrom apologized, telling him, “I’m so sorry I had to do it in front of you,” and assured him that her new demonstration would be “much simpler.” “I wouldn’t think of doing anything like that,” she added.
Minutes later, she chopped up a snake as a wincing Letterman exclaimed, “You’re going to make us all sick again.”
That second Late Night appearance would be Hamerstrom’s last. She continued to write—and to forage wild foods—until her death in 1998 at age 90.
Watch Hamerstrom’s complete Letterman appearance at the top of this post, and sign up for LateNighter’s free newsletter to get stories like this in your inbox
You misspelled the comedian’s name. It Ritch Shydner, not Rich.