My City Was Gone

My City Was Gone                        7067  (285)

Wednesday, March 7, 2007-7:00 A.M.

Good morning beloved friends and readers...thought I'd check in while dealing with a small bout of insomnia brought on by stress, caffeine, and the inability of maintaining an even bedroom temperature.  It was 7 degrees out last night, and getting the bedroom just the right warmth for sleeping was driving me crazy...I was either freezing or lying in a pool of my own sweat, neither a good combination for sawing logs.

I hosted open mic at the Comix Cafe again last night, killer sets by Danny Viola and a new guy named Trent, everyone else sort of flopped around like fish up there, including me.  I wasn't trying to phone it in, but I didn't have much new to say, and didn't want to beat the dead horse of my old material.  I had some new political stuff, but the crowd was young-ish, and my experience is that they just don't care about such things, so I kept it short and started bringing on the acts.

It's taken me two days to recuperate from Saturday and Sunday...I finished up my two shows in Charleston, West Virginia with headliner Robert York, and after the second show, I got settled up, packed the car and started northward.  I decided to go up through Ohio rather than tempt the mountains of West Virginia and the speed traps that lay in waiting at the bottom of each hill.  I hit patches of snow which wasn't horrible but was mostly annoying.  A mere nine hours later, I was in my bed, resting up with a mighty four hours of sleep before getting ready for a benefit show at Nazareth Academy.

The benefit show was put together for a guy named Tom Sciolino, you can read about him at CaringBridge - Be There ~ Helping friends and family stay in touch and informed.  I did some standup comedy and it went pretty well, it was quite a mixed audience, people in attendance from toddlers up to grandparents.  The trick with shows like these is to be clean, and interesting enough to keep the parents focused without talking over the heads of the children.  I did some local material, capping on Wegmans supermarkets, talking about our heavy snowfall and then did some tried and true Halloween material, which is money in the bank.  I think doing some Amish stuff was either over their heads or they just didn't like it, but I shouldn't have tested them...I went on after the intermission, and by the time I hit the stage, folks had been at the show for over two hours.  I should have realized that less would have been more, but I was too exhausted to make that judgement.  I guess I don't have to tell you that I slept well that evening.

So now I'm just enjoying a few days off before heading up to the cold wasteland of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan....I spend so much time up there it seems that I should just build a house and stay there, but I don't like pasties.  If you don't know what they are, check it out here -> Pasty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  I'm doing two shows in Laurium, Michigan with headliner "Chili" Challis, a comic who I've been paired with quite a lot these past two years.  He's a veteran Tonight Show writer and a cool guy, and I enjoy his company, so we ought to have some good fun.  The week after, I'm in Lima, Ohio, home of one of my first ever road gigs with headliner Mike Armstrong, and the week after, I get on a plane (a couple of them, actually) and head on down to San Antonio, Texas for a week at the Rivercenter Comedy Club with headliner Andy Campbell.  I finish up the month doing a run through Michigan and down into Indiana doing my own headline show with a feature act to be named later, it seems, as the club website hasn't been updated and currently has no show information at all on it.

It's a 15-hour jaunt to the UP this week, so I'll be leaving early to make it, and probably catch a hotel room in Saginaw or something, just to break the trip up.  I'm good in the car, but not that good....15 hours is just ridiculous.

I'm looking forward to Lima next week, because as I mentioned, it was the site of my first road gig.  I took along comedy buddy Ricky Kingston and we headed off to the far post of Ohio, and like a rookie, I had no idea how long it was going to take to drive and we left far too late and really had to dog-leg it to make it to the show on time.  It was a real experience, I tell you what.  The next gig was further east, in Mansfield, Ohio, and Ricky and I stopped off at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton on the way home.  "When are we ever going to have a chance to do this again?" Ricky said to me at the time.  Well, 17 years later, I've been through Canton so many times, I can't even count, but at the time, he was exactly right, because it was a long time before I went that way again.  Good call, Ricky.  We ate at a restaurant across the street, and I remember Ricky bugging out because they put coleslaw on his Reuben.  It's a German thing, and his Irish Catholic ass had a coronary.  Amazing the things the memory decides to store away.  I remember the sandwich incident, but I can't do quadratic equations anymore.

O.K., I'm getting back off to bed.  I think the room may have cooled off enough to get some sleep finally.  I'll check in with you later, thanks for reading.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY