So there you are, beavering away in your copy shop, and suddenly David Letterman appears and asks you to make a photocopy of your face. Or he asks you to leave your deli to join him on stage for a standing ovation-just because you’re you. Or he orders 150 bagels from your bagel shop for his audience to nosh on.
Or he even whisks you both away from your workaday jobs as souvenir salesmen and sends you out on a coast-to-coast, cross-country tour with regularly televised reports of your adventures.
Just a typical day in the neighborhood-Letterman’s neighborhood, to be exact. This crowded, noisy stretch along Broadway, between 53rd and 54th Streets, has taken on an Oz-like quality since Letterman moved into the old Ed Sullivan Theater, smack dab in the middle of the block, late last summer.
For Letterman, the entertainment value of everyday New Yorkers at work in their native habitats has proved irresistible. And for the businesses that employ them, the dividends have been enormous: fame and, with it, not quite fortune, but at least a sizable boost in sales.
“There’s been about a 20 or 30 percent increase in business,” says Rupert Jee, co-owner of the Hello Deli on 53rd Street, a modest, four-table establishment that Letterman frequently visits.
Jee-he was the Letterman neighbor given the standing ovation-says the talk-show host, “reigns over this neighborhood now. Everyone has benefited from his being here.”
In his own case, Jee not only occasionally caters for the show (he reports Letterman “eats sandwiches-turkey, I think”) but also picks up lots of business from fans lined up on the sidewalk outside, waiting to get into the studio for the show’s late-afternoon taping.
Around the corner at the Longacre Copy Center, owner Fern Chapnick, perhaps best known for photocopying her face at Letterman’s request, also cheerfully recalls the time he had her make 500 copies of a vacation picture he had taken-and then deliver them onstage so he could give one to each member of the audience.
Although Chapnick hasn’t seen a huge upswing in business (most of her work is done for corporate clients rather than walk-ins), she says the association with Letterman has “been good for me personally.”
Fans come in to visit, take her picture, ask for autographs and call her “the copy lady.”
She also has an observation about the ticketholders lined up outside her shop. “They’re pleasant and orderly-they must be from out of town.”
Several doors down at Academy Clothes, which specializes in tuxedos and theatrical clothing, a list of the Top 10 Reasons to shop there dominates the glass door (No. 8: “All measurements are politically correct”; No. 3: “We’ll teach you how to pronounce `cummerbund’ “; No. 1: “Dave windowshops here”).
Academy Clothes was immortalized soon after Letterman’s arrival when he offered part-owner and manager Bart Dadon Jr. $100 to wear a sequined tux jacket in the subway. (Letterman made good on the money and Dadon split it with his tailor, Enrique Standard.)
Dadon’s father, Bart Dadon Sr., who recently was filling in at the store while his son vacationed, said that while sales haven’t soared-since “a tourist normally doesn’t want to buy a $300 jacket”-the Letterman link “has made our day a lot more pleasant.
“We meet the most interesting people,” he says of the fans who regularly drop by. The store lets them try on tailcoats and top hats, free of charge, and pose for pictures.
The “bagel lady,” Alex Mitsakis, co-owner of the Bagel Cafe on the corner of 54th Street, is one of those who has seen her business prosper, thanks to Letterman. Mitsakis says that now she “gets orders from around the country” and has begun shipping bagels via UPS.
“He’s been wonderful for business, wonderful,” Mitsakis reports.
But the two neighborhood denizens undoubtedly best known to Letterman viewers are Mujibur and Sirajul, the exceedingly gentle, polite and earnest salesmen at K&L’s Rock America Inc., several doors down from the studio.
Universally known only by their first names (for the record, Mujibur’s last name is Rahman and Sirajul’s is Islam), the two Bangladesh natives have become such regulars on the show that Letterman recently sent them out on their own cross-country tour.
And they have developed an almost cultlike following among Letterman fans-trying to interview one of them is like trying to interview a movie star, what with all the interruptions from people asking for autographs and the intermittent glare from flashbulbs going off.
“No problem,” Sirajul says winningly when a woman asks him to sign a T-shirt celebrating the just-completed tour. He estimates he signs 30 or so shirts a day.
He also genially obliges Adrienne and Alyson, both 18 and from Orlando, who ask him to pose for a picture with them, holding a sign adressed to a friend back home.
Letterman, Sirajul reports, is “a very good guy, off and on the camera.” He also observes, with gratitude, that Letterman “just made us famous” and speaks rhapsodically about the crowds awaiting him and Mujibur at their various tour stops.
“Sometimes I don’t believe it myself,” he says.
Rock America has made the clearest attempt of all the neighborhood stores to capitalize on the Letterman association and on its two famous employees. Fans who shop there can pick up a Late Show T-shirt ($19), sweatshirt ($44), cap ($28), the Mujibur and Sirajul regular T-shirt and tour T-shirt (both $16), and the Dave refrigerator magnet ($4.99).
And customers who want their picture taken with Mujibur and Sirajul but have forgotten their cameras can buy a disposable model at the store. Autographs are free and warmly given.
The neighborhood shopkeepers agree that boosting business isn’t all Letterman has done. He’s brought them together, so now-in a most un-New York-like state of affairs-they all know each other and help each other.
“I’m (now) very good friends with Mujibur and Sirajul,” reports Mitsakis, the bagel lady. “They called (off-air) from the Grand Canyon just to say how things were going.
“It’s really very friendly, everyone is very nice.”
Sounds like just the sort of place another one of Letterman’s stars, his mom, would like to visit.
