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Monday, August 15, 2005-2:30 P.M. (Central Time)

Hello from the Germantown, Wisconsin Community Library!  The weekend in Madison is at a close, and we had a super time with headliner Mike Armstrong (from Louisville, Kentucky...the 16th largest market in the United States).  Ray Salah was a welcome addition to the show, and received a lot of nice compliments from Gus and the staff at the State Street Comedy Club.

Mike was quite a trip to hang around with, although we didn't spend much time together during the day.  Apparently, on Friday afternoon, Mike dressed up in a polo shirt, RayBan sunglasses and a nice pair of shorts, and paraded up and down college avenue with a cup, soliciting money.  He was telling people, "I don't want to work," and he wound up collecting $18 in half an hour.  Madison is very liberal, and there are quite a few people up and down the street collecting money and signatures for every cause you could imagine.  I'm a liberal myself, but even I know that half the causes are the same as pissing in the ocean...they don't make very much good.  Mike wound up donating the money to a food pantry.

Ray and I met every kind of strange person you could want to meet this weekend; there was an able-bodied young black man who attached himself to Ray and Mike as they walked down the street with me, and then tried to get us to buy him a piece of pizza.  I think Ray stiff-armed him in the chest, I'm not sure.  There were a family of Oompa Loompas in a Subway sandwich shop halfway between Dubuque, Iowa and Madison that were just the silliest people you ever could have seen.  The older guy looked like Jonathan Winters when he would pull his pants way up on the old "Mork and Mindy" TV show.  We had to leave there, because we were laughing too hard and we didn't want to offend anyone.  Finally, when we were in Dubuque, we visited a few pawn shops to see what there was to see, and a guy came in with two bags of goods (stolen?  Who knows?) and a line of bullshit a mile long.  He had just been released from prison, please don't say no, can you buy these things, I'll let 'em go real cheap, yadda yadda yadda.  I think the guy did buy them, because the ex-con left the shop with a smile.  I was busy looking at bass guitars, so I didn't catch the whole exchange, but I did see the tracheotomy scar on this guy's neck that was so big, it looked like a cadillac hubcap.  The bass guitars were weird; there was a left-handed model and a right-handed model, and they were both strung upside-down.

Ray and I hit a whole bunch of used book stores, library book shoppes, and even one open-air market with a bunch of hippies just giving stuff away.  Ray scored a small pile of "Far Side" cartoon anthologies, and we spent the weekend listing books for sale on the internet.  I've sold a half-dozen titles, and I think Ray is at 15 sales or more.  It's nice to have something to divert your attention from the boredom of having a whole day to kill, waiting for showtime.

So we're settled into the Milwaukee, Wisconsin comedy condo, and there's no phone service, so my laptop isn't internet capable.  Luckily there's a library right down the road with internet, so it's probably going to be my home-away-from-home for the week.  Tuesday night, there's a show in Rockford, Illinois...one of my favorite rooms out this way.  Today, it's kill time slowly for Ralph and Ray.

Have a happy day, and stay out of the hot sun.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY