Smokin'

Smokin'                            2233

Friday, November 11, 2005-11:31 P.M.

Just when I think I have this computer stuff nailed down, they change it on me.

I'm staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania, home of the Reading Comedy Outlet.  It's a very nice hotel with a nice weekend comedy room in it, and I enjoy working it because it's a short drive from home, and the accomodations are superb.

So when I got here today, I wanted to hook up the ol' laptop computer and do some answering of e-mails and business stuff, to decompress from the five-hour drive.  I first tried to connect to wireless internet...I figured the Sheraton's gotta have a broadband connection.  No dice.  So then I tried to connect to AOL with a dial up connection.  Still no love.  I look at the in-room dialing guide, and see that you have to dial the 610 area code, even for local calls.

After the show, I got back to the room and tried to wrestle with the AOL start-up screen.  Long story short, the Sheraton has a thing called Data Valet, which basically is a high-speed connection in the room.  There's a cable hidden under the table with a big fat connector that looks like a phone cable, but bigger.  I hooked it in to the laptop (while Sanji the tech support guy talked me through it) and logged right on.  Technology's great, I just wish I didn't have to be Chuck Yeager every time I wanted to check my e-mail.

Tonight's show was a car-wreck.  Jay Warren, the usual mc, was out, and I got a solid 4 minutes of silence right at the beginning of my act.  I didn't do anything unusual, I just got no love right out of the gate, and at one point, a woman interrupted me and chided me for my use of the "F" word.  Instead of telling her to fuck herself, I cleaned up the set, figuring that she wasn't alone....I was getting rounds of coughs and treated them like they were standing ovations.  I got off at the end with some of my dignity intact, but not all of it.  It was by far a substandard set, and even though it was still pretty good for a feature act, it was not the kind of set you want to have when you're trying to prove to clubs that you're good enough to close.

At home, the furnace repair people finally came, andblew a Kilimanjaro of ancient ash out of our duct work.  Installation of the new furnace begins tomorrow, and we should be ready to power up and have heat by Monday.  I'm excited because I can get into some of the other things around the house that I've been putting off because the cold has just been unbearable.  I was sick most of yesterday, because I have one room in the house that's actually warm, and it's actually too warm because the heat doesn't get evenly distributed, and I don't handle temperature changes very well.  I think I might be part lizard.

In other horrible, depressing news, my father called me and let me know that he has cancer.  He had a malignant tumor removed from his lung about three years ago, and the most recent offending member was a boil that formed on his index finger which he had infected last year while working in the garden without gloves.  They removed it and did a biopsy, and it was indeed malignant.  Now, my father was a heavy smoker for many years, and so was my grandmother, and my grandmother died of cancer back in 1994 at the age of 82.  My father, a three-year cancer survivor, refuses to quit smoking.  It's obviously a personal choice, and I understand that cigarettes are highly addictive, but I'm resentful that he won't completely quit.  If he dies even a few years early because he refuses to quit smoking, that's a few years of his company that his family and friends will be deprived of, and I lament that.  My daughter Harmony still hasn't met Grandpa Tetta, and I want her to see him at least once before he shuffles off this mortal coil.  I need to schedule some work down in Florida this year so I can take Pam and Harmony down there and my daughter can meet her grandfather.  It's important, I think.

O.K., sorry to be such a bummer, but it's on my mind and I feel a lot better writing about it.  Keep ya head up and keep smiling.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY