NEW YORK, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wished his city goodbye as part of an NBC "Saturday Night Live" tribute to his leadership after the Sept. 11 attacks, singing part of the 1960 Shirelles' hit, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow."
Giuliani's appearance midway through the program early Sunday was well publicized ahead of time. So when he was introduced within the regular "Weekend Update" skit by comic news anchors Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon the audience knew it was time for the departing New York politician to give as formal a goodbye message as he's given in the final few days of his mayoral term.
"Will my heart be broken when the night meets the morning sun?" Giuliani sang, gamely keeping the melody along with Fey and Fallon. Toward the finish of the Carole King and Gerry Goffin pop classic the audience was clapping in unison. "Will you still love me tomorrow?" he concluded.
"We'll see," Fallon said about the tomorrow part, adding, "What do you expect, we're New Yorkers."
Giuliani said at one point that he was preparing for a trip somewhere characterized by "risk and solitude" that he told Fallon was "not a place for tender beginners like you."
Finally, Fey, the comedy show's head writer festooned with a Lady Liberty torch and crown, grew serious as she thanked the mayor "for keeping us together" after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
It was an epochal period of national adjustment in which Giuliani's steady on-camera reassurances emerged as among the most appropriate, heartfelt and admired of any prominent figure, and not only in New York. The audience reacted with sustained applause and cheers.
His post-attacks compassion and indefatigable presence at Ground Zero, at funerals for every firefighter and police victim of the attacks, seemed to wipe away the prior mixed feelings of many New Yorkers about his uneven public and personal life in office, to be replaced with overwhelming approval.
The legal term limits restriction forced Giuliani to leave office Jan. 1 when Michael Bloomberg, a media billionaire, will succeed him as mayor.
Giuliani made a second appearance at the very end of the "Saturday Night Live" program, from in front of the huge Christmas tree outside NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, when he closed the production by wishing everyone happy holidays.
