Celebration

Celebration                                                                                1360

Monday, July 25, 2005-5:56 P.M.

What a weekend...after arriving home Friday night from my show at The House of Comedy in Niagara Falls, I got a few hours of sleep, and then joined my wife Pamela at a craft show in Sodus, NY.  It was sparsely attended and she wound up coming out a few dollars below the break-even point for her booth rental, as did many of the vendors around us.  At least it was a pleasant day.

We packed up early and I got a nice 50-minute nap and a shower before heading back to Niagara Falls.  Ray Salah broke his back, so he begged off on the trip, but my mom came along again and I had a pretty good show, considering I was dead-dog tired by the time I hit the stage.  Shelley Marshall had a good set up front, and there was a reporter from a Niagara Falls newspaper present doing a feature story on her. 

Saturday morning came hard when my daughter Harmony woke up with some bad gas pains just before 6 A.M.  After comforting her and getting her back to sleep, I knew that 8:30 was going to hurt pretty bad, which it did.  We got up, showered and picked up picnic stuff for the 2nd annual Meet Harmony Rose picnic.  We rented out the Oatka Creek Lodge in Oatka Creek Park in Scottsville, NY.  It was a beautiful day, and we had around 60 guests.  Unlike last year, I shopped smart and bought just enough food that we had no leftovers, and no one left hungry.  I spent most of the day on the grill, but I'm pretty sure I had a chance to say hi to all of our guests, including Mike Dambra, Ray Salah, Annette Lorenzo, Julie Donofrio and Kim (another comic who's last name escapes me), Steve Natarelli and Eileen Loveman (who came right from her book signing....go Eileen!   The book, by the way, is "Rhythms and Rhymes of the Heart" and it's out on Publish America press...go to www.PublishAmerica.com for more info).

There were several other non-comedy types in attendance, including my mother Linda, my brother Christoper, his wife Amy, and of course, their two chicken-legged children William Ralph and Olivia (I kid my niece and nephew...they're beautiful children), my wife's Aunts Dina and Mary Anne, Debbie and Tim Keller and three of their four children, Stephen, Alyssa and Victoria Keller (the girls were marvelous baby-sitters for the day...whenever we see them, they bee-line for Harmony and play with her all day; it makes hosting the picnic much easier).  We also had some of my Comix Cafe ex-co-workers, Natalie Gould and Dawn Short in attendance, as well as some of my wife's friends, Renee Kendrot, Crystal Scott, Mara and Dana, and I'm sure I missed some folks, but I was busy burning cow-meat over a charcoal fire.

The lodge is really a great deal...for $150, you get the lodge for the day, and inside, it's really great...they have a wood-burning stove (not so much an issue yesterday, but if it came into play, they also supply a box of firewood), an electric stove and range, a refrigerator-freezer (exactly like the kind I have in my house...the coincidence did not escape me), picnic tables galore, and two bathrooms outfitted with electric hand-dryers.  I've stayed in comedy condos that weren't that well equipped.

It was a busy day from start to finish, and I was pretty beat by the end of the day, but I'm sure it will be the only time this Summer that I'll get the chance to really enjoy myself, spend some quality time outside, and not concern myself with work so much.  At one point, I actually said out loud, "I didn't realize that relaxing was so much work!"  It got the laugh, but it also made me realize that I was going about things the wrong way...I needed to sit down, get a plate of food, and chat around with some people.  Once I did that, I really started to relax and have a good time.

Lessons learned the hard way are the ones that stick, aren't they?

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY