Reason To Believe 2194
Monday, November 7, 2005-5:43 A.M.
I just scared the shit out of Derek Richards.
Derek has a 6:00 A.M. flight this morning. Feature act Pete Lee left right after the show last night to go bunk with a friend in Chicago, about 90 minutes from here, and Derek had a 5:00 cab waiting. I heard him get up, but thought he was gone. I got up and used the bathroom, and when I came out, Derek was rolling his suitcase towards the front door of the apartment, and I think I gave him a stroke, standing there in the dark. We said our goodbyes, and off he went.
We had a good time here at the Funny Bone in South Bend, Indiana, or Mishawaka, Indiana, to be truthful. Notre Dame won this weekend over Tennessee, so everyone was happy. I mc'ed for Derek and Pete, my second such week at this club, and hopefully I'll get to come back as a feature act. This market is a goldmine for after-show merchandise, unless you're in the mc spot, in which case there's no place to set up and you get lost in the shuffle. I made money this week, but not much, and certainly not enough to live on. I'm going home about $80 better than when I came here, but the week was an investment. I'm not going to worry about money this week, though. I have a tough month coming up with some low-paying work, but I believe that we'll be o.k. I continue to have faith that God wouldn't reward me with a beautiful wife and child and then not allow me the means to provide for them.
I got a chance to pal around with some of the local talent, but not as much as if I'd worked the full week. Taking the two road gigs seemed like the right thing to do, but I wonder if I'd been better off if I stayed put and tried to build up some chemistry with the staff and regulars at the Bone. No matter, what's done is done, and it's always better to regret something you've done than something you haven't done.
Show-wise, everything went well, I think. I haven't mc'ed in a long time, and certainly not outside of my home club in Rochester, NY. It felt a little strange, and I stuttered and stammered a few times, but nothing life-threatening. I wrote some Amish material based on my lunch experienceon Saturday, I sat next to a big group of Amish folk at Old Country Buffet. I usually roll out the Amish material when I'm in Pennsylvania, but there seems to be an Amish community of substance here in North Central Indiana. I listened to Lenny Bruce's Carnegie Hall concert on the road trip this week, so I was copping some of his rhythm, taking it slow and really letting the crowd digest what I was saying instead of doing the rat-a-tat-tat delivery that I usually rely on. It gave me fewer laughs per minute total, but the laughs were heartier and more applause breaks. I need to explore this and see where it takes me, and I have three shows in Pennsylvania this weekend at the Reading Comedy Outlet to give it a shot.
The furnace at home is still broken as we are at the tender mercies of the heating and cooling companies. We went through some folderol with one company, asking them to come in and clean our heating ducts, only to wait on them and wait on them, and then finally be told, "Oh, we thought you were still shopping for estimates." I think they don't want to do the work. It's 47 degreees in Rochester, and not scheduled to get much warmer today. Pam has been sick, and Harmony is starting to show signs of sniffles. I feel so helpless being eight hours away, but I'm getting an early start this morning. I don't know how smart it is to drive on five hours of sleep, but I've driven with less. Derek left three cans of sugar-free Red Bull energy drink in the fridge, so I'll cop those for the ride home, and use the caffeine boost if I start flagging. I brought oatmeal with me, so I'm having breakfast right now, and I'll be showering and packing soon, and hitting the road. My goal today was getting out by 8:00 A.M., and making it home by 4:00 P.M., so I'll beat that in a rare instance. If we're still furnace-less by Friday, maybe I'll take Pam and Harmony to Reading, given that Pam doesn't have any shows herself this weekend.
My car is really starting to show it's age and wear. I have some sort of an alignment issue, probably in the back, and the car shakes when you get it going up over 65. My passenger side seatbelt thing is broken, so you can't click the belt down, and the lights on my radio don't work. The radio itself works, but at night, you can't see the readout to know what station you're listening to. That's not such a bad thing, you're not supposed to be looking at the radio at night, you're supposed to look at the road. Also, the back driver's side door is mechanically frozen shut. The lock goes up and down, but the door won't open. If a car door is going to be frozen, you want it frozen shut. I had a Chevy Malibu years ago where the driver door would close some of the time, not all of the time. I was a student at Monroe Community College, and one day came out of class to find my door hanging open in the parking lot. Praise the Lord and pass the bungie cord.
O.K. Yesterday, I wrote about my heroes, and I can't believe I didn't mention Bruce Springsteen as number one, or at least in the top three. I discoved Springsteen exactly when I should have, when his "Born In The USA" album came out. I was just out of high school, and I remember gradution night, I went home while everyone else was partying because I had to work the next day. I put the album on and listened to Bruce sing about working class hopes and dreams, redemption, mistakes made and never corrected and everything that I was feeling at the time. I worked cutting crew at Tops Friendly Markets, by which I mean that when all of the boxes of product came in, the cutting crew would display cut the boxes so that they could be stacked and still shopped from. We'd cut the lids 3/4 of the way, so they'd hinge, and cut the front off, leaving a small lip at the bottom to hold the product in place. And when I say the crew did all this, I mean it was me; the store would receive 13 or 14 pallets of merchandise for the front disply, and I would go in on Saturday and cut and price all day long, getting it ready for the night crew to have it in place for the new ad week which started Sunday morning. I brought in a boom-box radio to listen to while I cut boxes, priced bottles of cooking oil and boxes of cereal and gallon jugs of bleach, lifting them off the stack, down to my buscart and then down on to the empty pallet at the end of the line. When "Dancing In The Dark" was a radio hit, I remember hearing it five times in an eight-hour shift, and wondering if there was anyone else listening at their job who heard the song all five times.
Anyway, I didn't realize it at the time, but Bruce was quite the populist, and a champion of the working man, and never lost touch with his blue-collar roots. I wound up working at the radio station that played Bruce's song five times in one day, and while I was there, the music director gave me a cassette copy of an unreleased Bruce Springsteen concert, recorded in Detroit. At the time, the Detroit newspaper worker's union, the men and women who roll in the paper and the ink and get the papers printed overnight so they can be delivered in the morning, was on strike. It was an ugly strike that lasted a long time, and the union's fund to support it's members had run dry, and newspapers had to be lifted by helicopter off the roofs of the newspaper's offices because the strike line was getting ugly and violent. Bruce announced to the people in attendance that he was donating the money from all four nights of shows to the union's general fund to help out the workers who were striking for fair pay, and then later, we found out that he not only gave the money, but matched it out of his own pocket. It made me happy to know that I was throwing my adulation at a performer who also had a conscience, and did the sort of thing that I wished I could do, ride in on a white horse and help people who were scared, tired, hungry and hurting. This was a guy who was arguably the biggest rock star in America, and he still found time to perform on "We Are The World." Do you think that was a mistake, a momentary lapse of personal taste, or a full-fledged effort to help hunger and homelessness? I think it was the latter.
I've never seen Bruce perform live. I've either been too busy or too broke to see him (money and time....I never have them together), even when he was touring around stumping for John Kerry in the last election. But he's staunchly Democratic, even though you would imagine that would operate to the detriment of someone of his financial status, and yet he is...and he's not an ignorant man, he knows what the policies of the Left would mean. It would mean he would have to pay his fair share, perhaps an unfair share, to support policies and programs that would benefit the less well off. And yet, he's cool with that. Maybe because he grew up blue collar, working class, and knows what that means...he understands the struggle of people trying to live their lives, provide for their children as best they can, and try to maintain their dignity when they can't provide, taking what the folks on the Right call an "entitlement," like somehow the poor simply justask for money and services to be forked over, as if all the while they aren't being eaten up inside, looking at the ground, wrapped in the cold reality that sometimes their best efforts aren't good enough.
I've got eight hours of blacktop in front of me and a family waiting, so I'm going to go now. Thanks for stopping by, and taking the time to allow me to share my thoughts with you.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
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