Picking Up The Pieces

Picking Up The Pieces                           1530

Friday, August 26, 2005-12:30 A.M.

What do comedians do on their day off?  What's a day off?

I started my day by answering my desk phone, which is usually reserved for the computer line, and it was my old friend Debbie Richardson, proprietor of JR's Last Laugh Comedy Club in Erie, PA.  It was quite an interesting conversation we had; she basically called me out of the blue and asked me if I was interested in coming down to feature her club this winter.

Now, I've been there before, and let me tell ya, it's not like any other club in the country.  For starters, they don't do the mc-middle-headliner thing; they have an audience person (selected from the previous week's comment cards) host the show, then they have a 15-minute middle, then a 20-minute middle, then the headliner does the normal set.  And the club is totally clean...last time around, I got the fish-eye because I used the word "penis," and it was totally medical in nature...it wasn't a urinating penis, nor a sexually involved penis, just a penis.  Come to find out, the problem was they had heard the joke before and didn't care for it, so I dropped the joke for the rest of the weekend.  Unfortunately, it was my closing joke, so I really had to change gears (which I did).  Because the weekend was kinda "hinky" I didn't really pursue getting rebooked into the club, but this morning, Debbie started throwing dates at me, all of which I had already booked, so I took a shot and told her I had only two dates left, and she said she might be able to juggle things around, then called me back five minutes later and filled the one that wasn't New Year's Eve.  Damn, it should always be this easy.

A couple of hours later, John Yoder of the Funny Business Agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan, calls and fills my New Year's Eve.  This, coupled with the week I filled yesterday with a date at the Comedy Playhouse in Geneva, NY, has completely filled my year.  Now I can start booking 2006!  This year has been truly amazing, even with weeks of work falling out here and there, I've been able to fill them almost immediately.  Of course, that bulletproof feeling only needs one cancellation to go away, but for now, I'm riding high and that's all thatmatters.

So today, the lovely Pamela Ruth and I continued our quest to eliminate junk from our house to make room for Harmony Rose and all of her toys, clothing, and etc.  Our house looks like the final scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where they are storing the Ark in the warehouse with all the boxes and they're stacked to the ceiling.  Only the warehouse didn't have as many boxes of crap as we do.  We went through a bunch of stuff and I have come to terms with the fact that my wife refuses to write on anything larger than a Bazooka Joe bubblegum comic, and she will never throw anything away.  Consequently, we have more paperwork than we know what to do with, and only four drawers worth of filing cabinets.  We do have one big blue recycling box, but God forbid anything goes out of the house that way.  Sometimes I feel like King Sisyphus (Thurman, look it up).

Tomorrow night, Niagara Falls awaits.  It's one of the clubs that headlines me, so I'm excited because I get to do my whole show, not get hung up over the time and have fun.  It's a freeing experience that I can't describe except to say it's like skydiving in slow motion, and you don't touch the ground until you want to.  I'm psyched.

O.K., King Sisyphus was from Greek mythology, and he was doomed to roll a rock up a hill for eternity, and everytime he almost got to the top, it would roll back down to the bottom for him to try again.  And "Look it up, Thurman" was a quotation from Buffalo Bills' coach Marv Levy's Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech, directed at future Hall of Famer Thurman Thomas. 

But you knew that, didn't you?

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY