Near Wild Heaven

Near Wild Heaven                          7137  (355)

Thursday, March 15, 2007-9:00 A.M.

Hello and good morning, gentle readers.  I'm up and about, getting ready to shower and pack and head off to Lima, Ohio, for a week of shows with headliner Mike Armstrong.  He's the ex-cop from the Bob and Tom Show, and I'm looking forward to working with him.  The crowds should be excellent and the reviews from this club are that they treat the comics well, but they're new so a lot of that may change if history holds true.  I don't mean to be so negative, but it seems that once clubs get their feet wet, the first thing that goes are the amenities afforded to the talent.  For now, I'm just going to concentrate on being professional, doing the best show I can and giving them no reason to look at comics in an unflattering light.

My father took a turn for the worst over the weekend, and he's been moved to a hospice house.  He's there for 24-hour care, and my sister Nickki and her husband Dennis drove down from Raleigh to be with him and help mom.  Things aren't looking well, they tried to give him a bath the other day, and with all the pain medicines he's on, he "fought" the nurses, and it wasn't really him being disagreeable, it was jus the body's reaction to the coming death.  When I heard about it, the first words that came to my mind were "death rattle," and I guess that's not so far from the truth.  I'm scared for my father, and hope he passes quietly and without any pain.  I hate to think of him suffering.  His last wishes are to be cremated, and I have to sign an order to have that done because of the Ted Williams case a few years ago.  My father and mother are divorced, so it's up to myself and my two siblings to sign the order to have a cremation done.  I went yesterday to have the document notarized but with no date, so that the document would be ready when the time came, but they can't notarize an undated document so I have to carry it with me to Lima and if the situation occurs, I will have to sign and fax it from the road.

I kept myself busy by working on my CD's yesterday.  I have two shows on CD, and they aren't edited into tracks, but I listened to them and put a track listing on the stickers, which I think will be helpful to folks who want to buy something after the show, they can pick and choose which CD they want of the two based on a particular bit that they may have enjoyed.  I found out that there's a little more overlap than I thought previously, but there is also a lot of material that I don't even do on stage anymore, and some stuff that I might want to ressurect in the future.  It was a good bit of business to get into all the way around, I definitely needed a small project to distract me from the goings-on.

Saturday in Laurium, Michigan was fun, I bummed around the hotel, venturing out only to grab lunch and a newspaper.  The show was decently attended, although not as packed as I would have hoped.  The folks enjoyed Chili and myself, and we sold a bunch of CD's afterwards and signed autographs.  It was good to be all finished up on a Saturday after only one show...I wanted to get back to the hotel and try to get some sleep for the big 14-hour drive home.  We were back at the hotel by 11:00 P.M., but I still didn't manage to get to sleep until 2 A.M.  And then of course, the bad news was that the daylight savings time robbed me of an hour and when I woke up, I was already late.  I wound up leaving at 10:30 (time adjusted) and made it home just a little before Midnight, and Pam and Harmony were still up so we had a little birthday cake and I sang to my daughter, and then went to sleep before she opened her birthday present from me.  To be honest, Pam or her mother bought the thing for her on my behalf, I still don't know what was in the thing.  Pammey got upset with me that I didn't stay up, but I was really exhausted and couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.

I hosted open mic Tuesday night and it was pretty good.  I came up with a good Aldi's joke, about how lousy the products they have are.  I said that I went in and bought caffeine-free Red Bull.   The people just looked at me, and I'm pretty sure the joke is good, but I'll need to test it out some more before I pass judgement.

O.k., I really need to get packing and hit the road.  Have a good one; I've been keeping a picture of my father and me up on my myspace page (it's at www.myspace.com/rabidralph if you're interested) and I'll keep it up there until he passes, at which point I plan on putting up a journalized eulogy, because he's chosen not to have a service.  Dad is an interesting guy, and I want to be able to share some of the things about him that made him special.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY