All Fired Up 4742
Sunday, August 24th, 2008-3:30 A.M.
I'm exhausted. The last 48 hours have whupped my ass, and I'm still awake.
I'm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Comedy Zone (Hi Heff! Hi Joel!), and just rattling down from the adrenaline and caffeine from two great shows tonight with my friend, Matt Davis.
The last time I checked in, I was in San Antonio, Texas. Can I book a tour, or what? San Antonio in August. It was 102 degrees when I left that town. In Upstate New York, 102 degrees is a cooking temperature.
I stayed in my air-conditioned convenience apartment the whole week in Texas, not wanting to brave the daunting heat or sweat through my week's allotment of clothing. It was bad enough that I packed sparsely and still got whacked $50 for "overweight luggage." I had to shift my stuff to a carry-on bag, which allowed me to make the weight limit. My question is, though, the airplane was still carrying the same amount of shit....how come I had to pay on the way down but not on the way back? It's a scam, and the airlines will bilk you for every dollar they can.
After my uneventful trip home, my back started giving out. I was schedule to play Rob's Comedy Playhouse in Buffalo, NY, and by that Saturday, I was a cripple hobbling around on a cane. I had a great time at the show, and even did improv with the other two acts, Danny Pordum and Mark Colona, but it was all word game stuff, because I wasn't up to doing anything physical. I drove to Buffalo up and back, with my pretty wife in tow in case I was unable to make the whole distance, but I was only having trouble standing, not sitting. Actually, sitting felt pretty comfortable.
By Monday, though, I was in great pain and Pamela begged me to call a chiropractor. I did, and I swear to God that as soon as I made the appointment, my back started getting better. By the time the appointment actually rolled around on Wednesday, I was fully upright and working around the house. I had even found time to work with my new software program that allows me to convert cassette tapes to CD. My first project was a live Bruce Springsteen concert that aradio station friend of mine bootlegged for me. The tape was almost 13 years old, and I'd been freaking out about getting it transferred over because I know that tape is brittle and I didn't want to lose this concert, it was from the "Ghost of Tom Joad" tour and featured Bruce alone with his guitar in Philadelphia....a great show.
So here's where the torture comes in.
On Friday morning, I was scheduled to appear on The Break Room, which is the morning show on 96.5 FM, WCMF in Rochester. They had started doing a radio feature called "Lemons to Lemonade" which was basically bringing comedians on to their morning show to do their standup sets after commercial breaks, with the idea being that our local comedy club had recently closed, and this would be a nice outlet for the local comics.
I was scheduled to be in Harrisburg that night, but figured I would do the radio, make the five hour drive, do the shows, and then catch up on my sleep.
Here's the wrinkle; because I had been laid up in bed the whole week, my sleep pattern was all screwed up. I was sleeping in the day and prowling the house at night. So the night before radio/drive/shows, I was awake until 4:00 A.M.
When my alarm went off at 5:30, I knew I was boned.
I made the show and sucked down a big cup of coffee, and it went well. The whole time I sat in on the show, I was fixated on the fact that I was the only person in the room who was approaching 6:00 A.M. from the other side, the end of a long day with only a small nap to tide me over.
The show went great, they had done a "man-on-the-street" interview with some people, dropping my name in and seeing if they could get any sort of recognition reaction. One bit, they told a woman that John McCain was going to select me as his Vice-President, and the woman said she was going to vote for him no matter what. But no real recognition of my name or who I was, and this is in my home town where I've been begging for attention for the last 20 years. Another woman they interviews and they told her that Buffalo Bills quarterback Trent Edwards had been hurt, and that I would have to start in his place, and she only replied that her son was a big fan, and that he knew about the injury. I took it in stride, but they did these bits with other comics as well, and I understand that some of them didn't appreciate it. Shit, it's morning radio....they don't make or break your career on morning radio.
So the show went well, and I realized that I wasn't going to get any sleep, so I packed up my luggage and headed off to Harrisburg. When I arrived, I found out they were on summer schedule, so we didn't have to do a late show, and I squeezed a one-hour nap for myself and then did a prairie fire of a set (blazing hot, and all over the place) that the people really seemed to like. After the show, I thought I would catch up on my sleep, but I get back to the room and CNN is on (it's always on in my hotel room) and the big news was announced that Joe Biden was Obama's veep pick.
Well, political junkie that I am, I stayed awake until I couldn't stand it anymore, right around 4 A.M. I would up sleeping almost twelve hours before I actually got up. I didn't even leave the Doc Holliday's/Conference Center. I ate in the restaurant, enjoying a nice salad and their signature Steak-Stuffed Poblanos (Yum!).
So tonight, we had two really good shows, and I'm going to sleep in instead of trying to drive home overnight...my family has seen plenty of me and I'm going to be home all this week, so the pressure's off. I'm glad to be home, too, because I have a lot of catching up to do.
Before I go, my take on Biden is that it's a good pick. Hillary was obviously an automatic "no," and that's a shame, because they would have had an avalanche of votes. Tim Kaine and Kathleen Sebelius would have been two "who?" candidates, and Evan Bayh was "iffy." Bill Richardson had a whole lot of foreign policy experience, which would have been great, but I guess the powers-that-be decided that you couldn't have two minorities on the same ticket. That left Biden as a counter-punch to claims that Obama didn't have enough experience. My only gripe was that it makes up a ticket of two Northerners, so unless hordes of southern blacks come streaming into the voting booths in November, the Southeast United States is going to look pretty red on the map. But that's not exactly big news, Democrats don't do well in the South anyway, and I think it's a shame that Southerners piss away their economic self-interests on horseshit issues like gun ownership and abortion. I guess you get the government you deserve. I just hope all those displaced Hurricane Katrina victims re-registered to vote wherever they're living now. That oughta shake some things up.
O.K., I'm going to bed. Please love each other and stop being stupid.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
