Too Long In Exile

Too Long In Exile                                  9576  (2786)

Monday, November 12, 2007-11:44 A.M.

Did you miss me?  I'm back.  I haven't blogged in five weeks.  I went into exile for a month, and then added a week to express solidarity with the Writer's Guild strike.

Ha ha.

Actually, I took a break after a friend of mine made a comment about my running journal.  I guess a couple of local Rochester comics made a remark about my blog (which was funny and true), and it made me become introspective about this blog and the process of keeping it.

When I started keeping the blog, it was with the intention of keeping a running, blow-by-blow account of my life as a standup comic out on the road, an account that my infant daughter could go back to years from now and read about what her father was doing when he went to work.

Well, something along the line hijacked that process.  People started reading it.

I am nothing if not an attention whore.  I was starved for attention when I was a boy, growing up in an Italian household with two siblings, where you had to fight to be heard, much less acknowledged.  My parents encouraged my pursuits, but were not totally aware of them.  Perfect example, my father knew I wanted to be a writer, so he went out and bought me my first typewriter, a nice manual model from Sears with on-line correction, and then later, a fancy electric one.  But he never read anything I wrote.  Dad wasn't much of a reader, just TV guide and the morning paper.

Standup comedy was a cry for attention, just as my foray into working in radio was a cry for attention.  I went back to college three years after I graduated from high school, a victim of my parent's and my ignorance of the college application process.  I was literally signing up for classes at St. John Fisher college in Rochester the day before classes were to begin, and it felt forced and I didn't feel ready, and I aborted the process out of fear.

When I returned to school, it was at Monroe Community College, and I discovered the campus radio station on the second day, the campus activities board and school newspaper a few days later.  And after only a year, I visited my first comedy club and got on stage at open mic night.  I will celebrate the 20th anniversary of that event this coming May.

All of those outlets were designed to garner me attention.  I was very good in school, but always in the top ten percent, usually never first or second.  I was voted "Chronic Complainer" in my Senior Yearbook, but at the same time, earned "Most Spirited."  I ran for Student Council President as a junior and won, because no Senior wanted the job.  I had a landslide victory over a Sophomore, a young lady who wasn't very articulate, and reveled in the prospect of leading assemblys, chairing meetings, and generally making people consume all of the hot air I was generating.

Even as a comic, I regularly lapse into the trap of basically telling an audience "Dig what I have to say," rather than concentrating on making them laugh and enjoy themselves.  My show isn't about them, it's about me!  How dare they sit and stare at me and my offerings?  I can get preachy and ramble on about points that I consider to be important and sacred, but I'm in the wrong venue.  It's about beer and chicken wings, not the indiscretions of the Right Wing.  It's about laughs and dick jokes, not educated discourse.  And if I think something's wrong with America, then maybe I should just write a letter to the editor.

Well, this entry isn't a cry for help, it's the result of five weeks of heavy meditation.  Do I continue to write, and if so, what about?  The "old" blog style was becoming a parody of itself.  I was writing about where I went to lunch, a bad habit I picked up from a comic I used to read who was opening for a big name performer, and he would detail the catering.  I guess I thought it was funny that he was getting almond-crusted tilapia, and I was eating biscuits at Cracker Barrel or making a turkey sandwich in my hotel room out of my mini-fridge.

On a show a couple of weeks ago, a fellow comic was lamenting to me that "Since when did it become the law that if you enjoy your job, it's no longer considered work?"  Comedy is hard work, but a lot of people seem to think it's very easy.  On the surface, it is just talking for an hour or so, and then hanging around in the bar soaking up alcohol and affection, but it's the result of a lot of denial and sacrifice.  Ask any comic who's been in this business fifteen years or more about missing birthdays, anniversaries, school plays, recitals, christenings and any other number of important family events, and the accounts will be legion.  And God help me, I cannot see the forest for the trees, that with a daughter who just started preschool this week, and will be turning four years old in March, will have to go down that road with me, dealing on a daily basis that daddy's never home.

My last blog was about the death of comedy as a business, and maybe it was just my way of excising the feeling I had that I would have to give up this business in the name of having a stable home life, and to do well and justly by my wife and daughter.  It's true, the business is hard and the economy is rough, but comedy hasn't been a cornucopia of plenty since the early 80's, years before I got involved in the game.  I turn 41 on Thursday, and the prospect or idea of changing professions is daunting to me, for a couple of reasons.  First, I would be changing professions at a late age, with no real training in any field other than wise-assery.  Basically, I'm gonna be the sassiest toll-collector on the New York State Thruway.  Second, in no matter what vocation I undertake, I'm most likely going to be robbed of that attention that I currently enjoy, and I do not know how that will affect me on a long-term basis.

A mid-life crisis is a terrible thing, but I believe that's where I've found myself, wondering about the future, lamenting the past, and damning the present.  The secret, a good friend of mine who is basically in my same age demographic, is to not dwell so much on the negatives and give myself credit for the positives.  And to work on myself.

Well, one area that I guess I need to work on is to not be so needy in the area of public adulation.  So that means I'm not going to write as much.  A criticism of my blog, in the past, was that I didn't write with any passion, I didn't talk about things that were emotionally strong.  I fixated on pithy minutiae, and it made for a boring read.  So I'm going to strive to only return to this forum when the spirit moves me, when I get cranked up by something important, when I get touched by an angel or when I get driven to tears.

And hopefully it will be a fitting body of work for my daughter to go back and read.

Yours Sincerely,

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY