Talk Dirty

Talk Dirty                        4212

Monday, June 23, 2008-1:50 A.M.

The news has just been released that George Carlin passed away in Los Angeles from heart failure at the age of 71.  I am hurt and confused, and feeling an enormous sense of loss.  George Carlin was a hero of mine, a living legend whom I had the privilege to work for and with for a short period of time.

I discovered George Carlin the way many people did; through listening to his comedy albums growing up.  I still have a copy of "Toledo Window Box" that is well-worn, but never fails to please.  As a young comic, I remember watching one of his HBO specials with my comedy buddy, Ricky Kingston, and after the show was over, we both made the statement that we should just quit comedy, because there was no way that we would ever write anything as amazing as what we just saw and heard.  The HBO special was released as the CD "Jammin' In New York," and it is one of the most singularly perfect standup specials I have ever seen, and I've seen 'em all.

I entered into the Carlin organization's employ back in 1995.  I was recently laid off from my position at WCMF in the research department, and looking for another gig.  I used to do a radio show at WITR, the FM station operated by the students of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and as a community volunteer, I warmed the airwaves every Monday night with a heavy metal and hard rock show called "Sudden Death Overtime."  One evening, on a bathroom break, I walked down the hallway in the Student Center at R.I.T., and noticed they had a "job board."  There was an index card tacked up that said, in part, "assistant road manager" and "George Carlin."

Well, I almost pissed myself right there.  I thought it must be a hoax, or who knows what, but come to find out, it was legitimate.  George Carlin's manager, Jerry Hamza, was originally from Rochester, and part of the booking office's infrastructure was located in Rochester, even though Jerry was living and working primarily in California.  I met with Jerry, Jr., who served as the Road Manager for Carlin, and interviewed with him and got the job as his assistant.

For a period of about 16 months, I drove around with Jerry, Jr. in a Ford Bronco, all around the United States, supporting George's never-ending comedy tour.  Most people don't ever get a chance to see their heroes, or even meet them, much less see them work every night and even get a chance to share a few words with them.  I got to do all that, and more.  George was a real family man, of Irish-Catholic descent, and had a strong sense of family loyalty.  He never treated me like a hireling, always treated me with respect, and he laughed and joked with us as equals.  Too many times in life, you place your faith or worship in a celebrity and you find out that behind closed doors, they were a bastard, or at the very least, less than you had imagined.  George Carlin was as far from bastard as you could possibly be.

I admired George's work ethic.  On a few occassions, I found myself seated in a limo or on a plane with George, and was able to watch him work.  He carried a briefcase, and in the briefcase were several yellow legal pads, magazines, notebooks.  He would take them out, write, replace them, take out another pad, write some more, working on bits, ideas for TV specials, constantly working and producing.  He would leaf through magazines, tear out articles to be consumed at a later time, and the remainder of the magazine would be discarded.  He was always on the move, working, working, working.

One story that I enjoy repeating concerns George and the way he interacted with the public.  For a star of George's stature, he seemed a bit guarded, and with good reason; there are a lot of flakes out there.  You can't just sit in the middle of the street and let just anyone sidle on up to you when you're a household name.  But George was not the type to just offer the stiff-arm to folks that would recognize him.  On the morning of a concert appearance in Houston, Texas, the crew of the show were staying in the Ritz-Carlton, and George and I were staying on the same floor.  We waited for the elevator together, and this was around 1 o'clock in the morning.  A married couple in their 50's were returning from whatever nighttime activity they were engaged in, and came to wait for the elevator alongside George and myself.  George was wearing his usual ballcap and sunglasses, enough of a disguise to give folks pause and back them off from recognizing him immediately, but we were talking when the couple came up behind us and George's voice was always very distinct.  The couple got on the elevator with us, and the gentleman told George that he recognized him, and George was very flattered.  They wound up talking, and before the elevator ride was over, George had removed a copy of his then-brand new book "Brain Droppings" from his bag, and had autographed it and given it to this couple.  It was a very classy and sincere gesture, and showed how appreciative George was of his public.

George's achievements are amazing; his career has spanned generations, and he's become accessible to millions of people who recognize him from his appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live (in which he was the first guest-host EVER), film roles in "Dogma," "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," as well as a season and half of his own sitcom "The George Carlin Show," and he was even the conductor on the children's show "Shining Time Station."  He has written and filmed a new HBO special every two years since 1980, and is one of the most prolific and copied (we could fairly also say "stolen from") standup comic in history.

George's standup routines are stuff of legend; there are thousands of people out there who can practically recite the classics word-for-word; "Cars and Driving," "Football and Baseball," and of course, "The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television."  It is the only standup comedy routine ever to be quoted in a Supreme Court decision, and the precedent remains in place today.  It is this single achievment that I feel describes the higher calling of the standup comic.  As a comedian, I can make an audience laugh by speaking on a number of subjects, but when I can also delight the part of their brain that dictates logical thought, when I can make them think and absorb an absurdity of every day life, then I have really tapped into something powerful.

For me, George Carlin was the blueprint by which perfect comedy is designed.  You can still hear the echos of his topical voice in the works of Chris Rock, Lewis Black and Bill Maher.  You can hear the descendant observations of his work in the musings of Jerry Seinfeld, his absurdity in the ramblings of Emo Phillips, Bobcat Goldthwait and Steven Wright, his wordplay in the work of Gary Shandling and Albert Brooks. 

When I first started to decide to do standup comedy, the comics I looked up to were Eddie Murphy (hottest thing around at the time), Richard Pryor and George Carlin.  I never saw Pryor live, but I cherish the chance I had to meet George and watch him work, night after night, unflinching, offering up "goofy shit" or political observations or dirty jokes, or ruminations on the little things that bind us all together.  I cherish watching him control an auditorium full of people, night after night, young and old, black and white, male and female, wealthy and working-class.  And I cherish watching him, night after night, slaughter sacred cows with a twinkle in his eye.

We are lucky, that we have hours of film footage of George in his element, prowling on a standup comedy stage, hours of recorded concerts filled with wonderful, scathing routines, books filled with observations that could only come from George.  I'm luckier still that I have the wonderful memories of my time with George, and that I can pick up the torch and carry it forward.

George, I miss you buddy.  Rest in peace.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Talk Dirty-John Entwistle

You talk about the weather
Sun's out - it's gonna rain
It's gonna pour down.
Take a drive - no car
Take a walk - let's stay home
And fool around.

You talk about religion
Moses - Jezebel
Go to church - go to bed
Godspell - go to Hell
Why can't you talk dirty?
I like it, when you talk dirty

You talk about politics
White House - whore house
Revolution - prostitution
President - Mickey Mouse.

You talk about music
Chopin - too square
Heavy metal - too loud
Top twenty - who cares?
Why can't you talk dirty?
I like it, when you talk dirty.

Playboy, Mayfair, Penthouse - White House
Filthy naked poses - Moses
Masochism, sadism, lesbianism - communism
Suntan, striptease, can-can - Chopin.

You talk about painting
Van Gough - kiss my, ear
Gaugin - go where?
Van Dyke - she's queer.

You talk about Shakespeare
Romeo - or Juliet
Dickens - good idea
Oliver Twist - not quite yet
Why can't you talk dirty?
I like it, when you talk dirty.

Playboy, Mayfair, Penthouse - White House
Filthy naked poses - Moses
Masochism, sadism, lesbianism - communism
Suntan, striptease, can-can - Chopin
Talk dirty, talk dirty
Talk dirty, talk dirty
Talk dirty, talk dirty

You're Gonna Get Yours

You're Gonna Get Yours                           4183

Friday, June 20, 2008-9:10 A.M.

Well, I'd like to make an official correction.  I originally reported that the Comix Cafe was closed by the IRS...that turned out to not be the case.

The club was, in fact, due to be evicted from their space and the liquor board pulled the club's license.  In the bar and restaurant business, you have to have a wholesale distributor provide any alcohol that you offer for resale; you can't just go buy it at a liquor store and stock your bar.  The club had not been receiving product from any of the major distributors in Rochester, voiding the liquor license.

The IRS most likely would have been next, as the club has had self-proclaimed tax liabilities for at least a year; the owner told me that himself but assured me that "things were getting back on track."  Plans to move to another venue are reportedly in play, but liquor licenses are specific to premises, so it's not like you could just take the old license and go somewhere else.....it doesn't work that way.

In other news, I'm in sunny Florida, driving around in my newly acquired road vehicle, a black Toyota Camry.  It's great on gas, comforable as my old Corolla (RIP), and even though it is a pre-owned vehicle, shows little wear.  I took off Wednesday morning for Bluefield, West Virginia, and an engagement at Kelsey's, where I worked with Kris Shaw from Indianapolis.  The crowd was a typical Kelsey's crowd, but I tried to enjoy myself anyway.  Thursday, I got four hours of sleep before I had to start heading south to Tallahassee, a 10-hour drive.  Wednesday's drive was nine hours, and today I'm looking forward not to be driving around.  I also fell victim to the "black car curse;" the idea that red, black and white cars are pulled over for speeding disproportionately.  I drew a speeding ticket in Virginia, which I am adding to my growing collection.  I did find out that everything's cheaper in Virginia than the rest of the country; gas is running $3.77 there versus $4 or more everywhere else, and the ticket was only $131 versus an average of around $160 everywhere else.  Shoot, I may have to move there.

Last night I appeared at the Comedy Zone in Tallahassee.  It is an excellent club, laid out to exact specifications by Mr. Heffron of the main office.  As an individual with comedy club management experience, I can say without a doubt that the club couldn't be designed any more efficiently, from the location of the bathrooms  to the layout of the kitchen and service bar, to the customer's-eye view from the front door to their seat in the showroom.  Everything is designed to provide an overall great comedy experience for the audience.

My show?  I was road-weary from my two consecutive marathon sessions in the vehicle and inadequate sleep, but I was still satisfied with what I put on stage.  I got two applause breaks (I left out a new bit that has been money in the bank lately, to my chagrin) and got bags of kudos after the show.  I'm not one to pat myself on the back, but it's become painfully obvious to me that in this business, there aren't exactly a lot of folks lining up to do it, so in the interest of keeping my morale up in the face of $4 gas and flagging profits, I'll bend my elbow and do it myself.

After the show, a good number of folks hungout, and that's a good indicator of how well the show went.  I didn't watch headliner Will Marfori, opting instead to park my carcass at the bar and enjoy some chicken wings, and suck down diet Cokes, hoping the caffeine would keep me awake and alert enough to do the meet-'n'-greet after the show.  That's an old Yuk Yuk's trick I learned way back in the day; after the show, always be available in the front lounge to pal around with guests, it adds to their overall comedy club experience.  It also doesn't hurt when you're trying to sell your CD or DVD after the show.

I wound up hanging around with Jay, the mc for the week, and a group of women who were in town for training for some sort of computer criminology field.  They tried their best to explain to me in detail what it was they did, but I missed most of it because I am not technical in nature and writing this blog is as deep into computers as I get.  They introduced themselves as Kara, Mara and Dara (their real names) but I already gave them my own nicknames, Jiggles, Princess, Mom, Sarge, and the two Quiet Girls.  They were fun folks, and I'm glad the club is drawing such excellent numbers, with an almost sell-out crowd on a Thursday night.  A tip of my hat to all involved, and to Paul, the manager, who made me feel more comfortable than I am in my own home (specifically, he didn't ask me to do dishes or cut the lawn).

I'm in Tallahassee for the next two days, and then it's off to Fort Walton Beach, the site of last year's unfortunate "Ralph trapped in the men's room stall with no toilet paper" episode.  Suffice to say, I'm going to be more careful this year.

Happy Summer to you all!

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Games People Play

Games People Play                           4078

Saturday, June 14, 2008-2:40 A.M.

I guess I'm not the only one hurting over the Comix Cafe closing it's doors.  Among other entries from other comedians and responses from folks who read my blog, J.J., the owner of the Cafe, sent me this love letter:

I really appreciate your fictional writing skills as well my attorney, who will soon have copy of your slanderous blog.

 

I hope you have alot of leaves. First of all  get the truth straight, you left Ed's club in total chaos. Just ask him.

 

You were a bad manager. you wanted to be a great comic but the truth is your peers are much better and that bother you..>>>.just ask them. Ralph get out of comedy. Go back too asian noodle as a bartender. You frist have too except your limitations. Slandering me will not help you become a better comic or change your character.

 

My IRS returns show different then what you stated. See you in count you can take that to the leave pile .

 

Will see you at comic cafe .....>>>soon right???

 

Well, I hate to just ignore such a heartfelt missive, so I responded:

 

Thanks JJ.  I went back and read what I wrote, and everything I wrote was either truth that I can document, get others to witness to, or is my opinion and stated as such.

 

I feel perfectly comfortable with you wanting to sue me for slander as I'm sure you have no case.  If you want to go through the legal somersaults, I'll be happy to go along.

 

In the meantime, this piece of fiction you just sent me is worthwhile to be reproduced, don't you think?

 

Ralph

 

p.s.  How could you misspell the name of your own club "comic cafe" at the very end?

 

Some clarifications: "asian noodle" is a restaurant called Aja Noodle Company that I bartended lunches at early on in my road comedy career.  I left there after a year or two, after I had established myself with enough booking agents to fill my schedule.

 

"I left Ed's club in total chaos, just ask him."  My conversations with Ed within the last six months revealed otherwise, unless he was just being nice to me, in which case, shame on you, Ed.

 

I'm a bad comic, but I've had all of two weeks off since my daughter was born, four years ago?  I stand by my statement that J.J. doesn't know anything about comedy.

 

And finally, if spelling is any indication, then I think those IRS returns were filled out in crayon.

 

Oh, and before I forget....you want your lawyer to sue me for slander?  Doesn't that poor guy have enough to do?

 

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

 

Yesterday

Yesterday                             4040

Friday, June 13th, 2008-3:10 A.M.

My home club is dead.

The Comix Cafe in Rochester followed it's sister, the Buffalo Comix Cafe, into demise on Tuesday when the IRS came and locked the doors.

I tell people that I used to run the club, but in fact, I used to live there.

A few people have asked me what went wrong, why the club went away, and the closer to the club you were, the more apparent the flaws were.  The cracks in the frame of the place were obvious to everyone except the people who were in a position to fix them.

The Buffalo Comix Cafe closed last summer after a 20-year-run.  The club was opened by Ed Bebko and Rob Lederman, who together booked one-nighters throughout western New York back in the 1980's when the comedy boom was just getting started.  They booked the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Judy Tenuta and Colin Quinn when they were just starting out, barely names of any recognition.

Ed and Rob were partners in other businesses until they started booking comedy, and Rob had some success touring for the Funny Bone chain of comedy clubs.  Eventually, they decided to just open their own club in Buffalo, and it was successful for ten years until they decided to move into the Rochester market.

Rochester had strong comedy clubs in the 1980's and early 1990's, and eventually all competition was pushed out by one club, and then that club went under, a victim of it's downtown location (Rochestarians went downtown with great reluctance) and a flagging economy and a dearth of comedy on television, stanching the desire to see standup performed live, rather than whetting the appetite for more of the same.  When Hiccup's, the last full-time comedy venue in Rochester, closed it's doors in 1995 or '96 (I forget when it happened exactly), Ed and Rob made the decision to move in.  They opened the Comix Cafe's Rochester location in the summer of 1997, and after much study of the area, decided on a suburban location in the town of Brighton, south of the city and near the prosperous towns of Pittsford, Penfield and Fairport.

Ed and Rob's goal was to replicate the success they had in Buffalo with the club in Rochester.  Rob was the face of the Buffalo club, extremely popular due to his position on the 97 Rock morning radio show with anchor Larry Norton, and they needed someone to fill that role in Rochester.  At the time, the perfect man for the job was Tiny Glover.  Tiny had performed in Buffalo and gained Ed and Rob's attention, and they tapped Tiny to be the face of the Comix Cafe.  Using his busy schedule performing at schools, doing workshops and just generally getting out in front of people all the time, Tiny was able to "paper" the house until folks started coming out to the club on their own (paper in the comedy business meaning giving out free tickets or putting names on the "guest list").  Tiny hosted every Friday and Saturday, and was the perfect spokesman for the fledgling club.  He was popular, clean, personable, and loved by all.  The success of the club was due to his efforts more than possibly anyone else (Ed and Rob's efforts notwithstanding).

Along the way, Ed had acquired a telemarketing plan originally devised by Garvin's Comedy Club, which required a team of phone operators calling homes and business and offering free tickets to come to the club.  Ed wanted Tiny to head up the department, implement it, put it into place, but Tiny declined; his daytime schedule was too pressing at that time, and it would have been difficult to commit to.  Instead, Tiny contacted someone who he felt would be a good fit for such a position; and that someone was I.

I had just recently been downsized out of a position at WCMF in Rochester, where I headed up the Research department.  Our duties included calling residences in the area and quizzing folks about their radio listening habits as well as their musical likes and dislikes.  I worked in that department for about five years when the corporate axe fell, choosing to outsource the research department to a private consulting firm.  This left me available to take the telemarketing job, which I attacked with gusto, revolving it around my tour of duty with the George Carlin tour.  I eventually left the Carlin tour when I was offered the General Manager's job by Ed in February of 1998.  I started beefing up the telemarketing department and eventually the club expanded to include Sunday operations to supplement what we were already doing Wednesday through Saturday.  Our business plan was simple; offer free tickets to our comedy shows, get folks through the doors and sell them food and drinks.

Working at the Comix Cafe was the time of my life.  I enjoyed the opportunity to mesh my talents of management (previously relegated to retail endeavors) along with my love of comedy and my recently developed phone skills.  I developed an e-mail data base, even before I owned a computer, and did data entry and sent out newsletters from the public library on my day off.  Our shows were great and eventually, after the addition of Andy Clawson (an extremely good performer and eventual manager) in our telemarketing department, we didn't have an empty seat in our 250 seat showroom any of our nights of operation.  We had a dynamite mc group, consisting of Steve Burr, T.L. Johnson, Douglas Berryhill, and myself.  I wasn't able to start an open mic, which I thought was key to a club being able to develop a local talent base, but got around that by offering comedians guest spots on every show I could get away with.  I knew what it was like to be a comedian starting out, and didn't want the new talent to have to suffer the way I did.  I made a home for everyone, made my servers and bartenders money, put on great shows that our audiences enjoyed, and made Ed what I have to believe, after rent and expenses, was a good amount of money.  Everything was going great.

Then I went and fucked it up.

My health started failing.  I had an undiagnosed thyroid problem, I was overweight, heart disease, high blood pressure, and falling arches.  My diet was atrocious, consisting of whatever I could shove in my mouth on the run, and exacerbated by 12-hour days. I would run in the club at 3:30 in the afternoon and stay until the bar closed at 2:30, count the money and make up a deposit, and be home by 3:30 in the morning.  In addition, I was getting frustrated that the only stage time I could enjoy was hosting one week a month and the occasional fill-in spot.  I watched local comics move up and move on, I watched our out-of-town guest comics having great fun, and I wanted a slice of that pie.  Also, my wife never saw me; I only had Mondays and Tuesdays off, and that was if the refrigeration in the club didn't go on the fritz, or there wasn't a special event or someone rented out the room.  I needed to make a change, to get out of the club.

I went back on the road, formally leaving the club in June of 2001.  Ed had offered me ownership less than two years before, but I didn't understand what that meant and wasn't sure I would be up to it, financially or otherwise.  In retrospect, it was the biggest mistake of my life to turn it down.

When I left, the search was on to find a replacement for me, and the first attempt came in the guise of Paul Slater, formerly of the Buffalo Funny Bone.  At Ed's request, I stayed on long enough for Paul to get his feet wet, and a year later, he left and was replaced by J.J. Parrone.  This was the beginning of the end.

I didn't like J.J. from the start.  He once said to me that he envisioned Ed's money as "a big pile of leaves" and that his job was to stop them from blowing away.  Such avarice, I thought, would only be trouble, and the insistence that the leaves were blowing away, showed a lack of grasp on the situation.  The tree was healthy, and producing leaves every week!

J.J. started out as the General Manager, and eventually bought the club from Ed.  J.J. didn't know anything about comedy (he once bragged about being able to get Steinfeld to work the club), and his management style was to surround himself with weak individuals who could be either bullied or were so loyal, they would never say "no" to him.  Again, at Ed's behest, I stayed on to show J.J. the ropes, and J.J. went about putting the ropes around my neck.  He dismantled the bookkeeping system.  He eliminated the petty cash.  He started raising menu prices and cutting portion sizes, turning the club into a "clip joint."  He watered down the booze, or at least poured well liquor into top shelf bottles.  He stripped the telemarketing department of any incentive to do their jobs, took away Andy's commissions and eventually fired him.  He put security systems in place to micromanage minutiae that didn't need to be there; in a club that issued free tickets for a living, he maniacally demanded that the tickets be counted every night, suspecting that the box office staff was issuing free tickets for paid admissions and pocketing the cash.  And he neglected the club.  He became a ghost around the place, appearing only now and then to yell at the staff, on the sales floor, in front of guests.  I had to pull him off of Lisa Kyper, one of our servers, and plead with him to take her into the office or the kitchen to yell at her, but not in the main service aisle three minutes before showtime.  Every day, I went to work in fear of what was to come next; he hired five managers to do the work of two, and every day, it seemed like he had a new complaint about what I was doing wrong, or what I wasn't doing at all.  My chest ached just walking into the place, and so I removed myself.

My biggest complaint with J.J. was that he looked upon comedians as an obstacle; they were all greedy, looking out for themselves, and getting in the way.  If comedians were hanging out in the back of the room, watching the show and nursing a beer, they were poachers and needed to be swept out as soon as possible.  They were not welcome in any way.  And his judgment of touring comedians was asinine to say the least; good, crowd-pleasing acts were passed over in favor of comics who just happened to be Italian.  And J.J. had no problem being bullied around by big-name special acts who would talk him into booking their friends at outlandish pay-scales, which he would say "yes" to in order to appear savvy.  He booked talent that he personally liked, with no regard as to whether the audiences would appreciate them.

The business stayed healthy for a few years.  Every time I thought the place would implode, J.J. would resurface, flush with cash and a new lease on life.  Purported gambling debts (he opened a sat club in Syracuse allegedly first scouted on a trip to Turning Stone Casino) started draining the club of the ability to pay their debts in a timely manner, and the club's credit rating went all to hell.  Ed tried to put some checks and balances in place by installing Mike Glosek, a comic from Buffalo and a good friend of his for years, to help run the place, but it was too little, too late, and J.J. treated Mike like a spy anyway, and tortured him the same way he tortured me.

An attempted club in Aruba seemed to be an escape, a hide-out for J.J., and eventually closed.  The hotel was owed thousands of dollars, and threw J.J. out on his ear.

I'm leaving out a whole bunch of details and supportive evidence, but none of it matters; there's a long trail of bounced checks, employees who quit, stories of disaster surrounding the last days of the Comix Cafe. The club was mismanaged into the ground, the cash flow wasn't managed with any due diligence, and the leaves have blown away.  And this past week, the IRS came through and took all the stems and cut down the tree.

I have an aching in me that I'll never get rid of, that with a little more courage or discipline, that club would be mine today and a good place to perform (for the comics) or see a show (for the audience) or make a nice living (for the servers, bartenders, box office workers, telemarketers).  I allowed a monster to be unleashed on the world, and probably destroyed him, too.  He's almost certainly looking at bankruptcy at best and jail time at worst, for tax evasion or fraud or who knows what else if you believe what you hear on the street.  His sin was that of greed, but more than that, vanity.  He had a system in place, handed to him on a silver platter, and he thought we were nuts, that he could make it so much better.

And I'll bet you a big pile of leaves that he really believed it.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Selling The Drama

Selling The Drama                                4004

Friday, June 6, 2008-10:15 P.M.

Good evening, bitches.

That's how my good friend Chad Riden from Tennessee sometimes greets his audience when he's hosting a standup comedy show somewhere across the United States.  I thought I would use it in my blog because I'm not working any-damn-where this week.

My comment earlier tonight to my wife after looking back on the week is that it's been like a vacation, but without that irritating vacation pay to have to deal with.  Other professions get one, maybe two weeks paid vacation a year.  Standup comics are independent contractors and have no such luxury.  This week just happened to be a week off because no work presented itself and try as I might, I was able to scratch no employment out of the dirt.

So, the lemons equals lemonade formula dictates that I treat the week as an opportunity.

Sunday was a travel day home from Charleston, West Virginia.  The trip was only about eight hours but it ate up most of the day.  I got my rental car back to the airport a couple of hours early, and then Pam and Harmony and I went out for a bite to eat.

Monday, we hit the ground runnin' and opened an eBay store.  I have a huge collection of heavy metal magazines from the 80's, heavy metal albums from the 80's (many of which were small, independent labels that only produced 1,000 or so copies and hence said albums can be considered rare), and comic books I've been collecting for almost 35 years.  We spent a good deal of time listing those items, and scanning and listing the items at top speed still only let us put about 10 or 11 items up at a time.  If you're interested in having a look-see, you can go here: eBay Store - Collector's Comics and Magazines:  If for some reason the link doesn't work, feel free to cut and paste this -> http://stores.ebay.com/Collectors-Comics-and-Magazines_W0QQssPageNameZl2QQtZkm into your browser.  Or e-mail me if you're looking for anything specific.  Chances are good that I have it and just haven't listed it yet.

We started looking for replacement cars today; my Corolla's been dead for over a year and I've really been dragging my feet looking for a replacement.  We looked at a few different cars, test-drove three or four, but haven't found anything we liked yet that's really in our price range.  I'm a no-frills kind of guy; if I have to crank a window open by hand, I'm good with that.  I've never been stuck with a crank window frozen into the "down" position, and a good pouring rain running down my neck as I tried to figure out how to get the sucker back up.  Power windows, power locks and power mirrors to me are all things that can go faulty on you....it's just more stuff to have to repair as the car gets older.  Pam feels that power everything is "basic" to what a car should have, below that you might as well be on a Greyhound Bus.  Sometimes I wonder where the good old-fashioned girl I married went off to....

I nailed down some more work this week, which is always cool, even though I'm "on vacation."  My upcoming Summer tour to Florida is shaping up to be a good one, with plenty of work while I'm down there.  I cut back the tour this year to three weeks based solely on the fact that that was all the work I could scrounge for that period of time.  I'll have a weekend off when I get back to prepare for the big Tetta/Davis annual picnic, this year taking place at Powdermills Park.  The flyer looks like this:

SAVE THE DATE! YOU ARE INVITED TO THE

"SORT-OF-ANNUAL-DAVIS/TETTA-FAMILY-&-FRIENDS-PICNIC."

 

SUNDAY, JULY 13TH, 2008, we have rented the

RAND LODGE at POWDER MILLS PARK.

Pam and Ralph will start the grill at high noon,

and will begin partying around 12:30pm-ish.

We will continue to party until 9pm-ish.

(As you are in the inner circle, you already know that all of Pam's times are "ish"...)

 

We supply the hamburgers and hotdogs for this shindig,

and we ask that everyone bring a small dish/dessert to pass.

Chocolate is always in good taste...

 

There will be games to play and gossip to dish all day long!

Drop in when you can, leave when you want!

This is a fun and relaxing time to hang-out and

enjoy a nice summer day at a friendly soiree!

 

Please RSVP BY JULY 11TH

as to how many will be coming with you,

so we'll know how much to buy.

 

This is THE EVENT OF THE SEASON!

Don't miss it!

 

Also, please update us with your mailing address,

so we can be sure to keep you on the Christmas Card list too! :)

 

And, if you need directions, check out the Powder Mills Park website to:

Get driving directions to the park.
(You'll need to use YOUR address, unless you're starting at our place.)
Download the park map.

Seriously, if I can find work for that weekend that's close to home, I'm gonna take it....vacations are for people who hate their jobs.  I happen to love mine.

Tomorow, we're heading to Syracuse to see my new niece, Victoria Anne Tetta.  I know I'll be climbing the walls by Saturday night with no gig to go to, but I'll get over it.  It's like when I give a blood sample every three months at my doctor's office....it hurts, I don't like it, but it's quick and then I get back to my life.

Maybe somewhere along the line, I'll actually get some writing done that matters.  That was a goal for the week, and it's been largely (actually, totally) ignored in favor of taking my daughter to the park, spending time with my wife, and doing some Hazel-the-maid tasks around the house.  And that's not such a bad thing; I probably wasn't going to write the new "For Whom The Bell Tolls" this week, or even "Salem's Lot."  I do, however, have a series of "radio plays" that I want to get down on paper, and then get some voice talents to perform them and put out a CD.  I have some great ideas, including a sketch that addresses the George Carlin debate, "Can rape be funny?"  I think I have an idea that broaches the subject tastefully and draws the comedy out in a way that's never been done before.  I just have to write it.

O.K., I'm gonna stop blogging now and go write it.  Thanks for reading.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY