Mother

Mother                                                                                   932

Saturday, May 7, 2005-2:48 A.M. (Sunday Morning)

Good morning, and welcome.  I'm just back from Buffalo, New York, where I performed at the brand-spanking new Witz End Comedy Club on West Chippewa Street.  Long known for being home to the prostitution racket, Chippewa Street is now home to several "pretty people" bars and restaurants, and the only whores are the parking lot owners who charge you six bucks to let your car sit there all night.  Dammit, at least give me a carwash!

Anyhoo...Thursday's show was a damned debacle.  At one point, a staff member came up to me and Wisconsin's Kevin Bozeman, and asked us if we felt like doing the show.  It seems as though the Cinco De Mayo festivities had drawn all of Buffalo's party people downtown to every bar except ours.  We had four people, and after all of the laid-off-for-the-evening waitstaff and bartenders sat down in the showroom, we were up to 20 people.  I felt like Santa Ana himself had shot me in the chest.

Friday, the crowds were bigger...can you call them crowds?  We had 38 people for the first show, and about half that for the second show.  Shows were good, second show was great where I entirely decided to throw my act completely out of order and just do stream-of-consciousness ranting.  The group was very young, so I didn't want to bore them with my carefully crafted material about marriage, fatherhood, and the aches and pains of aging.  They seemed quite appreciative.

Tonight, the place actually looked like a comedy club, with two large groups for our two shows of the evening.  I felt like a real comic again, and not just a guy standing on an elevated surface in a bar, interrupting everyone's table conversations with my witty asides.

Friday morning, I took my car in to find out why it was vibrating so badly at speeds over 25 miles per hour.  Come to find out, my back shocks and struts were shot, and the back wheels were bouncing instead of rotating, causing an egg-like oval whobble and uneven tire wear.  My back driver's side tire was worn into a checkerboard pattern, with areas of tread next to areas with no tread, and so on and so forth.  The tire was so bad, the guys at Dunn Tire put it on display in their showroom next to the shock absorber demonstrator.  I'm going to try and get a picture of it and post it to this journal.  I am quite surprised that the tire didn't just explode on me during my trip to Ohio and Virginia, or Connecticut the week before, or on the trip to Buffalo and back on Thursday night.  I guess God must be working in my life and I just don't realize it.  Praise the Lord!

The bad news, of course, was all the work wound up running over $1000 dollars.  Thanks to an intervention from my mother-in-law, we were able to keep Team Tetta on the road and working.  Thanks, Mama Davis.  You're a lifesaver.

Tomorrow, or later today if you will, is Mother's Day, and I'm going to treat Harmony's Mom Pamela to a nice dinner out.  Won't you take today to tell your mother you love her and appreciate her?  It'll mean a lot to her.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY