Dancing With Myself

Dancing With Myself                        3812

Friday, March 10, 2006-1:34 A.M.

You're only as good as your last show.

Luckily, my last show was excellent, and very satisfying as well.  We had a considerably better turnout tonight than yesterday, and while they were still a little on the old side, they came to play and were a lot of fun to perform for.  Having a great show after having a lousy show the night before is like taking a tomato juice bath after being sprayed by a skunk, or so several dogs I have owned would lead me to believe.  However you slice it, the stink is dissipated.

Today was a wonderful day, considering I spent most of it battling a stomach virus that made me afraid to leave the hotel room.  During the course of the day though, I was able to shake the tree and wound up scoring a week of work in August to get me halfway back to New York from Florida.  Every year I go to visit my father down in Florida since he had lung cancer surgery a few years ago...I like to make sure he's o.k.  I got work from Comedy Zone in North Carolina, and so I'll also be able to make a side trip to visit my sister and her husband who live in Garner, just outside of Raleigh.  Always nice to visit family to break up the road work and boredom.

Also on the road work tip, I got a couple of fill-in gigs from Comedy Productions that will take me to the Northern Lights Casino in Walker, Minnesota in April and again in June.  I'm the beneficiary of another run that fell apart, but the casino wanted to keep doing comedy, so I scored two of the fill-in dates.  Hey, take the extra money and run.  I'm a fan of the casino gigs, they usually treat you well and they have buffets and sometimes you can swing a comp here and there, but the downfall for me is that I am a problem gambler, and don't really have the money to lose.  Still, the siren song of the nickel slots and the roulette table call, and I'm usually lucky only to lose 30 or 40 dollars.  Most of the time I don't gamble at all, but there's so much down time to kill, it's inevitable.  The last time I gambled was at the Chip In's Casino in Harris, Michigan, and I was up $150 on nickle slots, and went back to my room, and tried to go to sleep and prepare for my 15 hour drive home, but I was so excited, I went back down to the casino and lost $80 back.  Greed is bad!  I wound up going back to the room, which was a jacuzzi suite, and settled down into the jacuzzi and let the warm water relax me until I could get to sleep.

Tomorrow I'm going to venture out and try and find a comic book store...I'm a month behind in my favorite Marvel title, the Exiles.  I've always liked the book, but lately, they've been really stretching the imagination with the story arc, and it's got me as excited as I've been about comics since I was a kid.  It's nice being able to enjoy what has been a life-long hobby again...for a while, I'd only been reading a few titles here and there, and enjoying them only moderately.  It was almost like I'd been buying them just to buy something, like I had a 30-year streak going and didn't want to snap it.  So now I can enjoy a simple pleasure again.  Hooray for me!

I hope you reconnect with some of your simple pleasures that may have gone by the wayside this weekend.  Make yourself happy if you can.  And speaking of making yourself happy, "Barb Wire" starring Pamela Anderson just came on the USA network, one of the 12 channels of cable here at the Red Roof, and I've never seen it so I'm gonna watch it and see if I can't put my finger on what all the hub-bub was about.  Or maybe five fingers....

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY