We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place                                          3677

Friday, April 11, 2008-5:00 P.M.

Good afternoon from sunny Livonia, Michigan, home of Joey's Comedy Club in the Kickers Complex, where I'm working this week with my old friend, Steve Burr.

Steve is featuring this week and he got me the mc week, and normally I don't work at that level because I have a family to support and the bread just isn't very good at that level, but it's a club I haven't worked before and I wanted to get my foot in the door, and this was a good way to do it.

The upside is that Steve was able to get me in pretty easily, the downside is that I have to share a hotel room with him. When I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, he had divided the hotel room into his side and my side, my side being roughly the size of a saltine cracker, minus the salt. Honestly, I have my own bed and a little space to put my luggage, but I have to practically hang from the ceiling to get any space of my own. This jackass is relentless in taking over the room. I know he's featuring, but a little common courtesy wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

We've done two shows so far, and Steve has been absolutely terrible. How he bamboozles some of these clubs into headlining him is completely beyond me. To say that his reception here in the Motor City has been chilly is quite the understatement; it's like saying that gasoline's been getting a little pricey lately. Thank God he's only doing 25 minutes, it's barely tolerable and I'm going to have to try to distance myself as much as possible from this walking catastrophe. We've got two more shows tonight and two tomorrow, and hopefully Steve can salvage some dignity before he completely capsizes my ability to get rebooked here. I've never had another comic's recommendation go so horribly wrong.

The other blessing is that I get to leave Saturday night after the show and drive directly home to Rochester. It's only five hours away, and it will finally free me from the rancid stench that keeps emitting from Steve's asshole. This guy would fart in church on Sunday Christmas Day in front of the Pope's mother. And I think he lacks a complete digestive system, there's only the swallowing of food and subsequent rotting. Putrefaction could also be occurring in his bowels, I have no idea. There's a reason that he calls himself "The Big Stink," and now I know why.

God, get me out of here.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Afterimage

Afterimage                                                     3616

Tuesday, April 8, 2008-10:00 A.M.

Just decompressing from my week at Laugh Out Loud (LOL!) Comedy Club in Clayton, North Carolina, just a stone's throw southeast of Raleigh, NC.  It was a weird week, fun and strange and joyful and painful all at the same time.

I rented a car, and got a beauty this time....a white 2008 Chevy Cobalt with leather seats (heated), satellite radio, OnStar, cruise control, the works.  Brought my own GPS and I was one spoiled kid this week.  Oh, and it has a sunroof, too....this vehicle is tight.  I have it for one more week and I don't want to give it up.

I picked up the car on Wednesday night and was going to get motoring, but decided to try and get some sleep and leave early in the morning.  I went to bed at midnight (or so) and set my alarm for 5 A.M., wound up waking up an hour and a half early and never got to sleep.  I figured I better get going, and if I was going to make the 12-hour journey, I would just have to pound the caffeine and I could sleep later.

The drive itself was fine, D.C. melted away from me like never before, the city and it's outer loop always treating me like some bizarre flypaper for motorists.  Once I got into Northern Virginia, it was off to the races.  I won't bore you with the details of the drive, but it included seven cans of Diet Pepsi Max, two apples, and gasoline at no cheaper than $3.15 a gallon, which is bullshit.

I arrived at the Howard Johnson's in Smithfield, NC, and got a shower and ironed my show clothes.  The room had an ironing board but no iron, luckily I carry one like I carry all my own things, never relying on any lodging to be fully sufficient for my needs.  While I was ironing my shirt, Faye Woodroof, the headliner, called my room.

"I know you don't know who this is" she said.

But I did.

About fifteen years ago, my Grandmother and Grandfather, who lived in Florida, were heading west to go on a vacationin the New Orleans area.  Their car broke down, and Faye, who is an older lady, saw them by the side of the road and stopped and offered to help.  They had already called AAA, so Faye stayed with them until help arrived, which was kind...senior citizens broke down on the side of the road on Route 10 are very vulnerable and easy pickin's for bad people.  While they waited, they had a conversation, and Faye explained that she was a traveling standup comedian, and I had been in the game for about five years at that point, and so my grandparents were happy to relate that they had a comedian in the family, and a great friendship sprung up from that chance meeting.  Faye gave them a small postcard with her picture on it, and my grandparents happily forwarded it to me with the hopes that Faye could help me in the business in some way, and they stayed in touch and from what Faye tells me, they all met for dinner on at least one occasion.

So I told her that yes, I did know who she was and how happy I was that I finally got to meet her.

We had a great week.  Some of the shows were rough, by only the definition that the club, though beautifully appointed and state-of-the-art in design, sound and lights, could only draw on rural folks from the Southeast, and by that I mean a somewhat unrefined bunch who are largely unfamiliar with the etiquette behind a live theatrical performance and whose "inside voice" is the one they use to order alcoholic beverages at tractor pulls and auto races.

My sister and her husband live in Garner, just 10 or 15 minutes up the road, and they came out to see me on Saturday at the early show, which happily was the best show of the week.  While Friday was a knife-fight of a night, both early and late shows resplendent with hecklers, loud table-talkers and folks who were very much in the "I-don't-get-it" category, Saturday should have been a taping for my next live album.

On Sunday, the game plan was to do the 8 o'clock show, get paid, pack the hell out of there and start driving home, only there were six open-micers to go on before me, and by the time I got off stage, it was so late that I just hung out at the club and tried to sell some merchandise (which I did, and thankfully so, to off-set the high gas prices this week).  Some of the guys were really funny and I turned in a little bit of an experimental set, working some of my new political material with stuff that I knew already worked.  It was easily the most fun show of the week, and I got to pal around with some of the guys after the show.

I hit the road about midnight and except for a one-hour nap in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Comedy Zone, I drove straight through and did the 750 miles in 11 hours.  I listened to talk radio the whole way to keep myself awake, and thought about my friend Tiny.

Tiny Glover, whose real name was Kenneth (I called him a stylized version of Tiny, more like "Tin-YAY") passed away on Saturday night.  I got a call from Joe Fico, another Rochester comic, early Sunday morning, and the news really put me into a funk.  Tiny was working out on a treadmill in the exercise room of a hotel in Illinois, where he was scheduled to do a show, and had a heart attack.  By all reports, he was really starting to take care of himself, losing weight and feeling good, and now he's gone.

I knew Tiny since my early days doing standup comedy.  He was in my improv troupe, The Inner Loop, for a short time, and I have photos of him with us, in one that particularly makes me choke up now, a picture of the four of us, set up as The Last Supper with Tiny as Jesus in the middle, Ray Salah holding a round wicker popcorn basket behind Tiny's head as a make-shift corona, a poor man's halo.

Tiny and I would talk on the phone for hours back then, both of us blind squirrels trying to find that comedy nut, talking about ideas on where we could perform, how we could make any money doing this, and of course, mild gossip on all the comedy players in Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse.  We were immersed in it, and while we were never "best friends," we were friends, contemporaries, on-again, off-again partners, and we constantly converged.

Tiny left Inner Loop and formed Comedy Noir, a group of black standups who performed as a troup, including himself, T.L. Johnson, Judith Johnson (no relation), and Dean Edwards, later of Saturday Night Live fame.  Comedy Noir lasted as long as Tiny's tenure with Inner Loop, and I can't comment on the reasons it dissolved but it was quite possible that the members just had their own paths to forge.  After a long Canadian comedy club tour with Mike Dambra, Tiny realized that the clubs were hard, unrewarding work, and he focused on colleges, capitalizing on the better money and crafting an act that was college friendly...he was always known as "The Bill Cosby of Rochester," and we all knew him as the mayor.  When I booked Tiny to play a club, he would walk into the room and while other comics would superstitiously hug the back of the room, hiding from the crowd 'lest they steal their mojo, Tiny would shake 50 hands and make 50 friends before joke one came tumbling out of his mouth.

When Ed Bebko and Rob Lederman, the owners of the Comix Cafe in Buffalo, made their move into the Rochester market, there was one man that they knew had to be involved, and that was Tiny Glover.  Tiny had been playing schools non-stop for years, doing theatrical workshops, storytelling in his "Grandpa Teddy" character, and he had hundreds of school teachers, administrators and personnel who loved him and swore by him, and in the early days of Comix Cafe, Tiny brought the crowds in.  I started managing in the club shortly after and introduced their telemarketing program, which took the onus off Tiny to be a shill and let him concentrate on doing what he did best....be Tiny.  At one point, he came to me and expressed some concern that he was filling the club with folks who had seen his act many times before, and how was he to keep up with the demand for new material, and I told him "They already love you....be yourself."  This opened up his ability to work an audience, go up onstage naked (without material) and bring the organic funny that lived inside of him.  He could do no wrong in that kingdom.

When he had enough of the club and it's weekly Friday-Saturday constraints, and miscellaneous tomfoolery, he announced to me that it was time to go, and we released him with no regrets.  I could see him becoming disenchanted with the regular club grind, and especially after one night, in which a customer attempting to walk out on a check turned into a fracas between guests and an employee (the employee being a cook, and a friend of the waitress being stiffed, who came out of the kitchen brandishing a french knife, Tiny falling on the young man and wrestling the knife away from him so he could stop him from making a big mistake), I could see that Tiny had had enough.

Tiny returned to the club several times as a headlining performer, drawing his legions of friends and followers, and we always came together in a big bear-hug, and we even worked together one last time at a corporate event, doing corporate training sketches for a group of black small business owners.  We talked about doing more of those type of shows, but it wasn't to be, Tiny with his demanding schedule and family and me with mine, but there was always the hope that we would come together again.  I guess if you believe in a life beyond this one and the rewards that await the good, we will come together again, if I play my cards right.

Danny Liberto, a brother comic who knew Tiny from the very beginning of his career, put it best when he said "Heaven has a mayor now."  And I believe it does.

Tiny, Rest In Peace my friend, you're hugging angels now.

"AFTERIMAGE"
Words by Neil Peart, Music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson

Suddenly ---
You were gone
From all the lives
You left your mark upon

I remember ---
How we talked and drank
Into the misty dawn
--- I hear the voices

We ran by the water
On the wet summer lawn
--- I see the foot prints
I remember ---

--- I feel the way you would
--- I feel the way you would

Tried to believe
But you know it's no good
This is something
That just can't be understood

I remember ---
The shouts of joy
Skiing fast through the woods
--- I hear the echoes

I learned your love for life
I feel the way that you would
--- I feel your presence
I remember ---

I feel the way you would
This just can't be understood...

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Big Bottom

Big Bottom                                 3581

Tuesday, April 1, 2008-8:26 A.M.

I haven't been blogging very much lately, as regular readers might figure out.  It's been a combination of distraction and the desire to spend more time with my family.  March was a month of close-to-home gigs, which I thought was great because if you read my last blog, weather was getting the best of me in February.  March wasn't much better, even though the farthest away I drove was Philadelphia, which is only a six-hour drive at the worst of times.

March was a month of milestones, to be certain.  It's hard to determine which ones ranked most important, and which ones were relegated to second or third, but among the very important ones were my daughter's 4th birthday, which I was home for this year (haven't really been good about being home for them in the last couple of years) and a better bill of health from my nephrologist.

Harmony turned 4 on March 11th and a couple of days later, Dr. Hix, my nephrologist, announced that after my battery of blood, urine and stool tests, that my kidney function had elevated to 60%.  That's up from a previous 48% back in January.  I suppose that a lot of the damage done to my kidneys is a result of the mild diabetes that I suffer, and I've started taking steps (literally) to slow or reverse the symptoms.  Among other things, I've been watching my carbs and starches (so crucial), eating less meat and more vegetables, and integrating mild exercise into my regular schedule.  I've started mall-walking with my friend Ray, as we found out that the interior circumference of the Greece Ridge Mall is 1.5 miles, so we go and do three laps whenever we can.  So far, we've been getting out a couple of times a week; the original goal was three times a week, but it's so difficult to manage it around work and family obligations.

Walking the mall is definitely an interesting proposition from a people-watching perspective.  There are the regular compliment of school-aged kids, who choose to demand that the world notice them through the fanatical display of hardware either in their clothing or embedded in their face.  Who wears a bullet-belt to the mall?  And why would you wear one with a cloak?  Those two things are completely anachronistic....if you get attacked by Orcs, there are plenty of garden implements at Sears, and I'm sure they wouldn't mind if you borrowed a 15-pound sledge or a pair of garden shears in the middle of such a crisis.

One day, we were walking past a shoe store and a woman coming the other way slipped and went down to a knee.  She slid through a puddle of liquid that looked like a spilled beverage, only there wasn't a cup anywhere to be seen.....there was a trail, though, that went from a puddle over to a spot directly under a bench where an elderly woman was sitting.  I'm not sure but I think it was urine.  And slipping and falling isn't injury enough without having the insult of hydroplaning through someone's piss. "Greatest Generation" my ass....get some adult diapers, wouldja?  Unless this was the magical, sword-from-the-stone Excalibur moment when this woman realized that she might be incontinent for the first time in her life, she should have been equipped with some precautions.

I'm fat...considered "morbidly obese" by my medical records (Dr. Hix, don't leave me alone in an examination room with my big ol' file to look at), but I feel I carry it well.  I'm 6' 3", and that allows me to hide a lot of sins.  Plus, I dress in clothing baggy enough to parachute with...that definitely helps.  But during our excursions to the mall, Ray and I have twice observed individuals, both of them female, who are in dire need of some sort of surgery.  They were both walking, God love them, but they had derrieres that were so large it was like some episode of "Punked," like the scam was to drop a miserably-formed individual in front of an unsuspecting observer to see their reaction.  One woman was black, and there's nothing wrong with a ba-donk-a-donk...but this woman looked like her ass was in a car wreck and the air bag went off, and she just decided to put some jeans on over the whole thing.  People like that are fun because you can start observing them from a distance and making your smart-alecky comments before they can hear you.  Another specimen was a really large woman who was walking with a relatively average-sized man, and again, God bless her because she was walking, because she could have just as easily grabbed one of those mall-issue scooters to get around and no one would have begrudged her.  So we're walking behind this couple and I'm thinking that sooner or later, we're going to have to make our way around them because she's not moving very fast, and then as we catch up to them, they turn into the Chinese Buffet....not a big surprise, and not a moment too soon.  They were still in there when we passed on our second and third laps....I guess they wanted to get their money's worth.

I got booked to do my first-ever retirement home this year, and I did the gig last Wednesday.  I was dreading the show, to be honest, because it was another one of those "gotta be clean" events, and when you're talking about folks in their 80's, I really don't know where the line is.  I got around it by doing an hour clean, with very little filler if you don't mind me bragging, and I found out three very important things apply when you're doing a gig of this type;

1.  Don't be afraid to use a book joke.  They like them, and even if they heard it before, it's fairly unlikely they'll remember it.

2.   Don't talk too fast.  Many of the folks might have some hearing loss and you don't want to jumble a bunch of words in their ears that are difficult to decode.  Plus, you don't have to do so much material.

3.  Just because they're not laughing doesn't mean they aren't enjoying themselves.  These folks have to take a nap after dinner, a nap after a bowel movement, they aren't going to waste a lot of precious lung energy laughing at your little monkey show.

The folks who stayed awake really enjoyed the show and I got a lot of nice comments afterward, and I got the feeling that they didn't get a lot of visitors and were just happy to have the company.  Well, I got a good feeling doing the show and it satisfied that tree-huggin' liberal side of me that always wants to do good and help people.  The fact that I was making a little money on a Wednesday night didn't hurt, either....hey, I've got a family to support.

Speaking of family, Harmony had her first ever school assembly last Friday and aside from me having to dog-leg it back from Philadelphia to see said assembly, the six-hour drive turned into eight because of inclement weather, which has affected me in three out of the five weekends this month.  I was getting slush-strafed all the way up route 81 and across route 90, and one double-trailer actually flooded my windshield for almost a full ten seconds, and I definitely thought I was going right into a guard rail.  The good news is that I lived and got to see my daughter sing "The World Is A Rainbow" with the other pre-schoolers and Kindergartners and I videotaped it with Ray's camera and then afterward I cried a little bit because I was so happy and I only had about three hours of sleep and my defenses were down.

Other March highlights include an appearance at Rob's Comedy Playhouse, a new club in Buffalo, NY run by 97 Rock's Rob Lederman, a funny comic and my former employer at the Comix Cafe (Rochester).  Danny Pordum and Jeff Kuz, two funny Buffalo comics came out, Jeff doing a set and working with Rob's improv group after my set and Danny just to hang out and support.  Another Danny, Danny Liberto and I worked his room in Corning, NY at the Raddison, and I daresay I hadn't had as much fun at a gig in quite a long time.  I filled the feature role and I worked with Blane Kelly after not having seen him for a few years and we had a good time catching up.  Steve "The Nuclear Guy" Natarelli and Phil Sherman worked with me at a joint called Capizzo's in Ontario, NY and we had a good time entertaining the folks out in the woods.  An older guy tending bar there recognized my name, and come to find out he used to work with my father years ago.  It was sort of a bummer having to tell him that Dad passed away, and it was a year to the day, too.  And of course, there was a show early in the month in Buffalo, a fundraiser for the Kathleen Mary House, a charitable concern to benefit women and children who had been victimized by domestic violence.  The gig included a drive to Buffalo at 5 o'clock in the morning the day before to appear on the Channel 2 morning program for approximately 30 seconds.  Still, a big thank-you to Chesley McNeil for having me and warning me about the giant storm that was coming that doubled my drive back to Buffalo and made me curse the elements.  Last but not least, I was able to make a return appearance at the Funny Farm in Gloversville, NY, where I warmed it up in front of eight customers, five comics, and the waitress' boyfriend.

And Philadelphia can kiss my ass!  My GPS found the hotel and the gig just fine, but trying to park in Philly is ridiculous.  They don't have any spots!  There was a big giant historical building across the street from the Urban Saloon which just happened to be Eastern State Prison, and for my money, they should have torn the whole damn thing down, made a parking lot, and put a little plaque in the corner letting folks know what used to be there.  Just my opinion, of course.

I did it all this month, corporate events, fire halls, hillbilly hell-holes, traditional comedy clubs, hotel gigs, and I worked every position from feature to headliner to one-man show.  I'm looking forward to a more traditional April, which includes three weeks of work at rooms I've never played before, and a return to Dr. Grins in Grand Rapids, a club I've played numerous times (and appearing with Last Comic Standing's Rich Vos).

Happy April Fools Day!  I have no prank for you, because you don't deserve such mistreatment, and everything I have chronicled here is true.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY