Letterman sent his homespun Midwestern mother to cover the Games, and it was great fun.

Dave: “How are things over there in Norway?”

Dave’s Mom, deadpan but cheery: “Still cold!”

Dorothy Mengering, Dave’s Mom, died Tuesday at her Indiana home at the age of 95. She’ll be remembered for her frequent appearances on her son’s late-night show, the best of which happened at the Olympics.

In trips to Lillehammer in 1994 and then to Nagano in 1998 and Salt Lake City in 2002, Mengering showed off her hotel-room soaps, and took sleigh rides, and ate at a Norwegian McDonald’s, and asked mystified Europeans if they knew her son. She interviewed athletes and celebrities, one time asking Hillary Clinton if she could help out her son with all those speeding tickets he got in Connecticut. It was both a joke and a brilliant deconstruction of Olympic television coverage that was well on its way to becoming overbearingly serious and seriously schmaltzy.

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The sheer mom-ness of it all was almost too much.

Dave: “Is it cold there, Mom?”

Dave’s Mom: “It’s 4 degrees Celsius.”

Dave: “Well that don’t do me no good, I’m from Indiana. What the hell is that?”

Dave’s Mom: “You figure it out.”

According to a 1996 St. Petersburg Times story, the network asked Letterman to come up with some sort of tie-in on his show for the 1994 Winter Games. He said he initially was worried about the idea of sending his mother to cover the Olympics but soon had his doubts erased.

“I actually thought this might be something for my mother, and I didn’t know if it was because we had used her on the phone before or what. But, I was surprised that people took to it,” Letterman said. “The best part of it for me was that she got through the three weeks with some dignity. And she was not embarrassed, so that was nice. I was very worried about that.”