Thursday, February 26, 2009-11:55 P.M.
Good evening from the cold, snowy, wind-swept, frigid, warmth-challenged town of Rutland, Vermont, home of The College of St. Joseph (CSJ). I'm in the middle of the big tour, taking the Dash For Dollars Comedy Game Show out on the road, as well as my own hilarious comedy show.
This week, I knocked two more states out of the box, New Jersey and Vermont. Believe it or not, in 20 years of doing standup comedy, I'd never performed in either state, and they both border my home state of New York. Well, that monkey's finally off my back! I started out Sunday night heading south for Jersey, the town of Carneys Point to be precise, and even though it's in southern New Jersey, it is really a Philadelphia suburb. I got in rather late due to some unexpected weather that wasn't horrible but the snow was obfuscating the white lines on route 81 and I couldn't see a damn thing. By the time I got into New Jersey, everything was fine and I was off to the races.
The show went off fine, although I had to do some 11th hour prop-shopping. In the game show, we use several wacky props, and while most of them are re-used, some of them get consumed, like toilet paper and bubble gum. I set up my show, and then ran out for said props, returning with plenty of time to spare. The show was fine, but afterwards, I was bushed; I got in late the night before and really didn't wind up getting a good night's sleep, and coupling that with a 9 AM report time, I was pretty spent.
After the show, I dragged my feet and then finally packed up and headed for Newton, New Jersey, located in the northern part of the state. I didn't have a hotel reservation, as the college decided instead to provide me with a lodging stipend. The problem was that when I arrived, all the hotels were sold out. I wound up staying in a location slightly farther away from the college than I would have preferred, but even though it was a mom 'n' pop, they had wireless internet, a fridge and microwave in the room, and all the comforts of home. They even provided shampoo.....take *that,* Motel 6!
I had a day off so I used the time productively, getting the van an oil change, doing some writing, and mostly listening to and dissecting President Obama's address to Congress. Wednesday morning, I checked out and made my way to Sussex County Community College, where my reception was warm and welcoming. They even gave me a special parking tag that allowed me to basically park right up against the building where the game show was being staged, and that was quite appreciated. The cash booth is cumbersome enough, without considering a 25 gallon storage tote full of props, the tripods and frames for the backdrop and the vinyl backdrop itself, four hula hoops and a putter....it's a pain toting all that stuff in from parts unknown!
The Monday morning show was hard, and I expected that it would be. Monday mornings, it's hard to get motivated and excited. But the Wednesday show was like pulling teeth! I couldn't predict how difficult it would be to come onto a college campus and basically give away money, and get ignored like a guy at an off-ramp with a cardboard sign that said "Hungry-Homeless-Help." But there I was, begging for some sort of interaction with a crowd of students who couldn't be bothered. Oh well. Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.
After the show, I headed north to Rutland, Vermont, and the College of St. Joseph where I currently reside. No game show for me this evening, rather, my own headlining set. CSJ is a small college, but the people opened their doors to me and really made me feel welcome. The advantage of the size of the school is that everyone is on a first-name basis. The school provided me with on-campus accommodations, basically a dorm room, which was perfect. I got in Wednesday night and settled in, visiting the "downtown" area of Rutland in search of dinner and a LAN cord to take advantage of the internet connection in the dorms. I found a decent Chinese buffet, and after dinner, retreated to the dorm for a good night's sleep.
Today, I had lunch with Rob Lukaskiewicz, the gentleman in charge of student affairs and my gracious host. We had a nice chat and spoke of many things, including the challenges of parenthood, student involvement on college campuses, and the book I'm writing about standup comedy. He had his fingers crossed regarding the attendance of the show (the "town hall" meeting of the night before drew zero) and we were pleased that the total attendance fell just a few heads short of our goal. The show itself was staged in a beautiful 200-seat theater, and it was the type of venue I wish I had the opportunity to play in all the time. After the show, I chit-chatted with some of the students, then grabbed some sandwiches from the on-campus sub shop and retreated to my room to watch movies on DVD and of course, compose this blog.
Tomorrow, it's off to Warwick, Rhode Island, and a two-day engagement at the Comedy Zone (I've heard nothing but good things) and then Sunday is a day off to make it to Fort Wayne, Indiana for the game show. Tuesday and Wednesday I make my way back home with gameshow dates in Cleveland and Middletown, Ohio, and then Thursday night, I'll be judging the finals of the standup comedy competition back home in Rochester. Friday night, the game show runs back up to Canton, NY (my first repeat engagement since taking the gig) and then a weekend off before heading to Connecticut, West Virginia and Virginia. March is shaping up to be a very busy month, and that's fine with me. I love the stage and the opportunity to perform for appreciative audiences. And to be completely honest, I'm happy to have a job in a time when a lot of people don't, either for the want of a job or just having lost a good one. And I'm doubly lucky that it's a job that's so much fun, it doesn't even feel like work.
Stay warm....the winter's almost over.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Used Cars (Bruce Springsteen)
February 16, 2009-8:05 P.M.
Wow. The days are starting to blend together, even more than they used to.
I've been staying busy, and I'm starting to wonder whether or not "burn out" is better than "rust out." God knows, I've done them both.
I only wound up doing one show at Pare Restaurant back on Saturday the 7th, but it was a good one. I worked with Rochester comics Dan Maslyn and Annette Lorenzo. The room was full, and set up just fine for comedy. I pulled out all of the air in my lungs and did an hour and 5 in the closing spot....I don't know what I'll ever be able to do to placate my love of the stage....when I get up there, I can't stop! It's a sickness! Still, it was a fine show with a lot of nice comments afterward.
Sunday morning, I packed and headed off to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, for another installment in the college tour of Dash For Dollars, the comedy game show. I drove all day, starting around 10:30 in the morning, and managed to escape the death-trap that is Chicago, Illinois. I was sure I would wind up hitting major traffic there, but Loren, my assistant (ok, she's the voice programmed into my Tom-Tom GPS) re-routed me further south so I didn't have to deal with it. I got in to the hotel around 2:30 in the morning, but I picked up an hour because of the time change. I slept well after the 16 hour drive, as you could imagine.
The next morning, I was up super-early, and hit the continental breakfast (you gotta love waffles) and actually attempted to hit the work-out room, but the treadmill was busted. I always have a weird feeling using hotel excercise equipment these days, as my friend Tiny expired about a year ago doing exactly the same thing. The hotel desk clerk claimed that the machine had been repaired, but I found it unplugged and when I plugged it in, it only worked for a minute or two and then the power shut off, and I decided that I didn't need more of a hint to pack it in for the day.
I checked out of the hotel and headed over to the college, where I wound up spending the day. I did a lunch-time teaser event, handing out t-shirts and money to promote the evening event, and then killed time. I set up the equipment for the show, ate lunch, and went to the bank to get the proper increments of currency for the money booth. After the show, the students from the Student Activities Board treated me to dinner and even gave me some burgers to go, and I hit the road. The first thing I did was to gas up, because Iowa is a long, wide and unforgiving state, and there is nothing happening between the major cities. There was some sort of windstorm hitting the area, and I pumped gas as the corrugated steel canopy above me at the gas station shook like it was about to come loose. The winds howled at me all the way east, and around midnight, I decided I'd had enough. My destination was a Motel 6 (the preferred accomodations of the Ralph Tetta national comedy and game show tour) and I found one in Cedar Rapids. Imagine my surprise when at check-in, the desk clerk punched my driver's license information into the computer and then announced that I'd stayed at that particular property before. In fact, almost two years earlier to the day. I had to think about it, and talking to my mother on the phone the next day, I realized it was the tour that killed my old Toyota Corolla back in 2007.
Tuesday, I drove back the rest of the way and managed to get home before midnight. I listened to so much talk radio I actually overdosed and by the end of the drive, I was searching frantically for a music channel that was playing something that I not only like but wasn't sick of yet. I've spent years working in radio and there's not a lot of music I can say that for. Lately I've been digging the Bruce Springsteen sattelite radio channel, but I know the day is going to come when I tell the Boss to take his job and shove it. It's probably going to take a long time for that to happen, because I have a ridiculous fascination with Bruce. I also agree 100% with his politics, so maybe I'll stay in the union for a while...and as long as the new albums keep holding up, I should be alright.
Thursday, I hosted at The Comedy Club in Webster, bringing the first group of semi-finalists for their in-house comedy contest to the stage, and finishing up by introducing Kris Shaw, a comedy buddy of mine from Indianapolis, Indiana. They asked me to do five minutes to warm up, and of course, I went over. It takes me five minutes to remember my jokes, much less tell them. Two of the four contestants tied, and will move on to the finals, Dan Maslyn and Pat Duffy. I'm judging again this Thursday, and I'm looking forward to seeing who else will advance.
Saturday, Pamela and I packed up the car, dropped Harmony over to my mother-in-law's house, and headed to the Western Ohio town of Beaverdam, for an evening comedy show on Valentine's Day. The trip got started about 90 minutes later than I had hoped, as wrangling my wife and daughter into the car is only slightly less challenging than herding cats. After much Andy Capp and Flossy fighting in the car, we made it to the Comfort Inn and I started getting ready, pressing my clothes, shaving, and getting ready for the 9 PM show. We hadn't had dinner and were trying to figure out where we could eat in a timely fashion, what with it being Valentine's Day, a Saturday, and a small town with limited options. We wound up having to go to Lima, the next largest town over, and after seeing a mob scene at the chain restaurants around the mall, opted for a Captain D's meal, which pleased my "vegetarian wife who still eats seafood" to no end (the actual term is pesce-vegetarian, but I like to call her a "pesty vegetarian"). We arrived at the club with plenty of time to spare and were pleased to see that there was a full boat in attendance.
I was working with Scott Dunn, a former Rochester home-boy (actually he worked in Batavia) who now makes his home in Indiana and he's a regular caller to the Bob and Tom radio show, and a draw in the midwest. I did my 35 minutes with relish, and had so much fun with the accomodating crowd that I had to cut set-ups and did the last 10 minutes as punchlines only. It wasn't really that bad, but it seemed like it in my head. I wound up getting a phenomenal reaction overall, the owner was pleased, and I sold a boatload of CD's and DVD's after the show. It was great.
On the trip home, we were frought with pitfalls every step of the way. I stopped at a gas station in front of the hotel to repleshish the window wash fluid in the car, and the hood wouldn't close. We drove the first 100 miles with the hood rattling and looking like it would fly up in our faces at any moment. We finally pulled into a Wal-Mart in Fremont, Ohio and got an oil change, which the car probably needed anyway (my wife's car has no documentation in that respect....no window sticker, no receipts, and no memory of when the service was done last). Along with the oil change came the added service of the technician properly clicking the hood down into a fixed position. I guess we're good until we have to get under there again, hopefully it won't be too soon. Then, of course, driving through Cleveland, we hit two pockets of snowfall that looked like we were dead in the water, and then they dried up as quickly as they came. It was bizarre. We finally made it home, and I can't remember when I've been this tired. I took all day today to rest and recuperate, and luckily, I have no obligations until Friday, and it shouldn't be a bad excursion. I'm a little concerned, because next week, the college tour really starts revving up, as well as a weekend in Rhode Island. I'll also be performing for the first time in the states of Vermont and New Jersey, two close-by states to New York that have thus far eluded my grasp.
Hopefully the weather will cooperate, and it will be an uneventful tour. I'm just glad to be working, to be honest.
Thanks for reading, and be good now.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
Wow. The days are starting to blend together, even more than they used to.
I've been staying busy, and I'm starting to wonder whether or not "burn out" is better than "rust out." God knows, I've done them both.
I only wound up doing one show at Pare Restaurant back on Saturday the 7th, but it was a good one. I worked with Rochester comics Dan Maslyn and Annette Lorenzo. The room was full, and set up just fine for comedy. I pulled out all of the air in my lungs and did an hour and 5 in the closing spot....I don't know what I'll ever be able to do to placate my love of the stage....when I get up there, I can't stop! It's a sickness! Still, it was a fine show with a lot of nice comments afterward.
Sunday morning, I packed and headed off to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, for another installment in the college tour of Dash For Dollars, the comedy game show. I drove all day, starting around 10:30 in the morning, and managed to escape the death-trap that is Chicago, Illinois. I was sure I would wind up hitting major traffic there, but Loren, my assistant (ok, she's the voice programmed into my Tom-Tom GPS) re-routed me further south so I didn't have to deal with it. I got in to the hotel around 2:30 in the morning, but I picked up an hour because of the time change. I slept well after the 16 hour drive, as you could imagine.
The next morning, I was up super-early, and hit the continental breakfast (you gotta love waffles) and actually attempted to hit the work-out room, but the treadmill was busted. I always have a weird feeling using hotel excercise equipment these days, as my friend Tiny expired about a year ago doing exactly the same thing. The hotel desk clerk claimed that the machine had been repaired, but I found it unplugged and when I plugged it in, it only worked for a minute or two and then the power shut off, and I decided that I didn't need more of a hint to pack it in for the day.
I checked out of the hotel and headed over to the college, where I wound up spending the day. I did a lunch-time teaser event, handing out t-shirts and money to promote the evening event, and then killed time. I set up the equipment for the show, ate lunch, and went to the bank to get the proper increments of currency for the money booth. After the show, the students from the Student Activities Board treated me to dinner and even gave me some burgers to go, and I hit the road. The first thing I did was to gas up, because Iowa is a long, wide and unforgiving state, and there is nothing happening between the major cities. There was some sort of windstorm hitting the area, and I pumped gas as the corrugated steel canopy above me at the gas station shook like it was about to come loose. The winds howled at me all the way east, and around midnight, I decided I'd had enough. My destination was a Motel 6 (the preferred accomodations of the Ralph Tetta national comedy and game show tour) and I found one in Cedar Rapids. Imagine my surprise when at check-in, the desk clerk punched my driver's license information into the computer and then announced that I'd stayed at that particular property before. In fact, almost two years earlier to the day. I had to think about it, and talking to my mother on the phone the next day, I realized it was the tour that killed my old Toyota Corolla back in 2007.
Tuesday, I drove back the rest of the way and managed to get home before midnight. I listened to so much talk radio I actually overdosed and by the end of the drive, I was searching frantically for a music channel that was playing something that I not only like but wasn't sick of yet. I've spent years working in radio and there's not a lot of music I can say that for. Lately I've been digging the Bruce Springsteen sattelite radio channel, but I know the day is going to come when I tell the Boss to take his job and shove it. It's probably going to take a long time for that to happen, because I have a ridiculous fascination with Bruce. I also agree 100% with his politics, so maybe I'll stay in the union for a while...and as long as the new albums keep holding up, I should be alright.
Thursday, I hosted at The Comedy Club in Webster, bringing the first group of semi-finalists for their in-house comedy contest to the stage, and finishing up by introducing Kris Shaw, a comedy buddy of mine from Indianapolis, Indiana. They asked me to do five minutes to warm up, and of course, I went over. It takes me five minutes to remember my jokes, much less tell them. Two of the four contestants tied, and will move on to the finals, Dan Maslyn and Pat Duffy. I'm judging again this Thursday, and I'm looking forward to seeing who else will advance.
Saturday, Pamela and I packed up the car, dropped Harmony over to my mother-in-law's house, and headed to the Western Ohio town of Beaverdam, for an evening comedy show on Valentine's Day. The trip got started about 90 minutes later than I had hoped, as wrangling my wife and daughter into the car is only slightly less challenging than herding cats. After much Andy Capp and Flossy fighting in the car, we made it to the Comfort Inn and I started getting ready, pressing my clothes, shaving, and getting ready for the 9 PM show. We hadn't had dinner and were trying to figure out where we could eat in a timely fashion, what with it being Valentine's Day, a Saturday, and a small town with limited options. We wound up having to go to Lima, the next largest town over, and after seeing a mob scene at the chain restaurants around the mall, opted for a Captain D's meal, which pleased my "vegetarian wife who still eats seafood" to no end (the actual term is pesce-vegetarian, but I like to call her a "pesty vegetarian"). We arrived at the club with plenty of time to spare and were pleased to see that there was a full boat in attendance.
I was working with Scott Dunn, a former Rochester home-boy (actually he worked in Batavia) who now makes his home in Indiana and he's a regular caller to the Bob and Tom radio show, and a draw in the midwest. I did my 35 minutes with relish, and had so much fun with the accomodating crowd that I had to cut set-ups and did the last 10 minutes as punchlines only. It wasn't really that bad, but it seemed like it in my head. I wound up getting a phenomenal reaction overall, the owner was pleased, and I sold a boatload of CD's and DVD's after the show. It was great.
On the trip home, we were frought with pitfalls every step of the way. I stopped at a gas station in front of the hotel to repleshish the window wash fluid in the car, and the hood wouldn't close. We drove the first 100 miles with the hood rattling and looking like it would fly up in our faces at any moment. We finally pulled into a Wal-Mart in Fremont, Ohio and got an oil change, which the car probably needed anyway (my wife's car has no documentation in that respect....no window sticker, no receipts, and no memory of when the service was done last). Along with the oil change came the added service of the technician properly clicking the hood down into a fixed position. I guess we're good until we have to get under there again, hopefully it won't be too soon. Then, of course, driving through Cleveland, we hit two pockets of snowfall that looked like we were dead in the water, and then they dried up as quickly as they came. It was bizarre. We finally made it home, and I can't remember when I've been this tired. I took all day today to rest and recuperate, and luckily, I have no obligations until Friday, and it shouldn't be a bad excursion. I'm a little concerned, because next week, the college tour really starts revving up, as well as a weekend in Rhode Island. I'll also be performing for the first time in the states of Vermont and New Jersey, two close-by states to New York that have thus far eluded my grasp.
Hopefully the weather will cooperate, and it will be an uneventful tour. I'm just glad to be working, to be honest.
Thanks for reading, and be good now.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (Bruce Springsteen)
February 6, 2009-9:35 P.M.
Helldrive 2009 is officially over. Actually, it's been over for almost a week now, but I had to get out from under some things here at home before I could even sit down and write about the experience.
Helldrive 2009 is just a cute nickname I gave a two-week tour that I just completed. I always used to say that once a year, I torture myself with a routing just to keep myself honest. Now, after 5 or 6 years of doing that, I've entrusted the task to others, to make sure it gets done with no screw-ups.
Helldrive 2009 started on Wednesday, January 21st. Ray Salah and I were tapped to be the judges for The Comedy Club's "Last Comic Sitting" contest (www.thecomedyclub.us) and it was an interesting night, to say the least. I spotted stolen material from every generation of comedian from Pat Cooper all the way up to some thinly concealed Jim Gaffigan. I spotted every one of them, including evergreen theft-pots David Brenner and Lenny Bruce. I guess the rationale is that these budding comic wanna-bes are the only ones who ever listened to these records and there's no way they're gonna get nabbed. Well, they all got nabbed and none of them won.
After the show, I dropped Ray off at his house and picked up Joel Lindley for an overnight drive to Huntington, West Virginia. I'll spare you the gory details other than we got there in time for Joel to be spirited off to a radio interview and I collapsed into my sleep-number bed at the Pullman Plaza. That night, after readjusting and napping, I began my slate of shows at the Huntington Funny Bone. All I can say is "wow." What a great room, great people, great staff, perfect sound and lights and stage. It was literally perfect as far as the stage being just the right size to stalk around, just the right height to be seen from everywhere in the room without rising too lofty, just everything was exactly as it should have been. I didn't have one show the whole week that I wanted back; every once in a while, I'll say something that I just shouldn't have said, and the whole show will go to shit. This week, I was like Rumpelstiltskin, weaving gold out of straw. The room really spoiled me for every other comedy club I've had the pleasure of playing.
The Funny Bone is in a downtown mall/entertainment complex, and they have a trade-out agreement with the movie theater. I got to see Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" and I have to say that it was just excellent. The movie wasn't entirely perfect, but it surely would have gotten a nine out of 10 from me if I were asked to rate it. If you're on the fence based on reviews you've seen or your own personal judgement of the trailers and previews, go see it and tell me I'm wrong that it was an excellent performance by Clint Eastwood. If you remember the movie "Heartbreak Ridge" that Eastwood did in the 80's, where he played Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway, this is like the continuing adventures of Gunny.
At the end of the weekend, namely Sunday night, Joel and I turned in our sets for the Sunday club-goers and bid farewell to snowy Huntington, piling into the car for the ride home. West Virginia was snowy and the roads were icy, winding and treacherous, but we made it home alive. I slept about two hours (!) and then got up, showered, and left again to hit the road. I picked up Ray and the van with the Dash For Dollars game show stuff in it and we headed towards Columbus, Ohio and Ohio Dominican University. Ray had even less sleep than I did, and opted to stay at the hotel and catch up with his shut-eye while I did the show. Running on adrenaline, caffeine and a sense of duty, I finished the show and returned to the hotel where I picked up Ray and we headed out for a late dinner. We found a family-style restaurant and some country cooking, and then returned to the hotel where I managed to fall asleep mid-sentence. I woke up at 5 in the morning with my stage clothes still on and my glasses askew.
The next morning, we headed off towards Chicago and managed to hit some of that horrible winter weather that was crushing the Midwest. We drove through Indianapolis, where they forgot what snowplows looked like, and pirouetted and sashayed all across the highway. By the time we reached Merrillville, Indiana, we bunked down for the night, figuring the next day would be easier as we were far enough north to be out of the storm. We got a good night's sleep and headed off early for Harold Washington College, which is located at the corner of Smack and Dab in downtown Chicago. To say that the city is congested is an understatement; parking is not only at a premium, it's expensive as hell. I wound up digging down for $50 (no lie) to park the van for the duration of my four hour work-day. The overhead train tracks wreaked havoc with my GPS and cell phone, and as hypnotizing as Chicago is from the skyline view you get when travelling west on the 90, I guess I wouldn't do very well living there with my sense of claustrophobia that I didn't even know I had.
The evening's dinner was Cracker Barrel, and food never tasted so good. It was damn near 5 PM and neither Ray nor I had eaten a bite since the day before. I had catfish and a loaf of biscuits and Ray had some sort of roast beef platter. Then we hit the road, traveling back through Indianapolis where I cashed in my Speedway loyalty card points and purchased gasoline for $1.17 a gallon. We headed south towards Cincinnati and finally, the highway turned to crap and we grabbed the first hotel we found, a Comfort Inn. The next day, we piloted our way through Kentucky and into Tennessee and some ice-storm ravaged country, but the roads were cleaned and salted and I guess it varies from community to community whether or not they can afford such luxuries as salt and plows, but the roads stayed clean well towards our final destination. We ate a Golden Corral buffet dinner (I know all the sweet restaurants, eh?) and had a little floor-show as a party who arrived just before we were about to leave bitched out a floor manager and a kitchen manager over an entire section of the restaurant that hadn't been bussed.....there were dirty dishes everywhere, and 90% of the patrons had tipped their server and gone. The young lady who was working point on this party of ten or more diners seemed nice at first, helping the one waitress who was working the section bus the tables and mentioning nicely that she had waitress ed before and knew how hard it was. They quickly cleared about three tables and shoved them together so that the party could sit down, and then she went into full puma mode, seeking out someone with a supervisor's name tag that she could dress down in the middle of the place. I looked down and away, and left my server another buck.
We kept moving until around midnight, and I managed to find a Motel 6 that I'd stayed at last year in Newport, Tennessee. It was just dumb luck that I stopped at that exit for gas, and started to recognize everything from my visit last summer. This was the town that I saw the first available midnight showing of The Dark Knight, and camped out two days in between engagements for The Comedy Zone in Clarksville and Johnson City, Tennessee. The Motel 6 is super clean, and offers free internet, and that's unusual for Motel 6's, they usually try to get you to pay around $3.50 for a day's use (which isn't bad, to be honest). The next morning, we chewed up the last few hours and motored towards Salisbury, North Carolina, and Catawba College, for the last date of the Dash For Dollars tour. We set up and did a "teaser" for the show in the student cafeterias, and then hung out and killed time for a couple of hours until showtime. We did the show, packed up the van, and headed for home, once again hitting horrible weather in West Virginia. It seemed that the high elevations were getting horrible snow, and then we'd come down a hill and everything was clear again. I drove until the Pennsylvania border and then pulled into a rest area for a couple hour's sleep.
By the time I woke up, it was daylight, and off we headed again. We stopped for gas at a Sheetz and grabbed some breakfast and dog-legged it the rest of the way home, pulling in at maybe 1 o'clock or so. But it didn't end there, because Ray's driveway was full of snow and we had to shovel a spot to stow the van. I don't know what energy I was tapping because I cleared the space out in what felt like about five minutes. I transferred all of my luggage into my waiting Camry and headed home. Pam and Harmony had gone out for some children's event, story time or some such thing, I can't really remember and to be honest, when she told me what it was, I was a zombie. I tried to sleep, but that wasn't happening. I laid in bed until the alarm rang, twitching with caffeine, Red Bull and coffee, and several dark cola drinks. I showered and dressed and headed to my evening engagement, two shows at a restaurant called Patti's Pantry.
Patti's Pantry is located on Dewey Avenue in Rochester, just minutes from where I grew up. I did two 50-minute shows to a mostly middle-aged group, and had a great time doing it. There was an added bonus as a few of my friends came out to see me; the first show, Jon "Lumpy" Dubner, his wife, and a couple of friends surprised me. Jon was a mainstay at Yuk Yuk's, the first full-time comedy club that Rochester ever had. He was always and continues to be a good friend and a person who is filled with the stuff that good karma is made out of. He took some pictures with his digital camera and posted and tagged them on Facebook and with apologies from the source material, they were pretty good.
Second show, my good friend Mark Block came out. Mark is a former co-worker of mine in the Great Lakes Entertainment productions of Joey and Maria's Comedy Wedding, Joey and Maria's 25Th Anniversary, and the Soapranos. He is also my tax preparer, and the first and only person who has ever invited me to Passover supper. We had a good time hanging out backstage, which was really just a smaller dining room away from the main dining room, and while I wished I could have spent more time with him, I was coasting on fumes after 10 days of running myself like a dog and had to get home. I was telling my wife how things went, when apparently I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and woke up at 5 in the morning with my stage clothes still on and my glasses askew.
All day Sunday I felt like hell, bones aching, dry mouth from all the caffeine, and of course, hating the snow and the cold which feels like it will never end. I drifted in and out from the Super Bowl, not really caring to watch Pittsburgh outgun the Cardinals. It was like watching a schoolyard bully push around a kid with asthma, only in this story, the kid with asthma actually put up a decent fight towards the end. At the end of it all, my team won......THE E-STREET BAND.
Yesterday, the cycle ended as it began, Ray and I judged another week of the competition at The Comedy Club, and today, I finished compiling paperwork for my health insurance. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders, but the big machine starts up again on Saturday, where I do two shows in Rochester at PeRe (it's a club) and then hit the road to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. More of the same, but in a different order this time.
I hope the weather's good.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
Helldrive 2009 is officially over. Actually, it's been over for almost a week now, but I had to get out from under some things here at home before I could even sit down and write about the experience.
Helldrive 2009 is just a cute nickname I gave a two-week tour that I just completed. I always used to say that once a year, I torture myself with a routing just to keep myself honest. Now, after 5 or 6 years of doing that, I've entrusted the task to others, to make sure it gets done with no screw-ups.
Helldrive 2009 started on Wednesday, January 21st. Ray Salah and I were tapped to be the judges for The Comedy Club's "Last Comic Sitting" contest (www.thecomedyclub.us) and it was an interesting night, to say the least. I spotted stolen material from every generation of comedian from Pat Cooper all the way up to some thinly concealed Jim Gaffigan. I spotted every one of them, including evergreen theft-pots David Brenner and Lenny Bruce. I guess the rationale is that these budding comic wanna-bes are the only ones who ever listened to these records and there's no way they're gonna get nabbed. Well, they all got nabbed and none of them won.
After the show, I dropped Ray off at his house and picked up Joel Lindley for an overnight drive to Huntington, West Virginia. I'll spare you the gory details other than we got there in time for Joel to be spirited off to a radio interview and I collapsed into my sleep-number bed at the Pullman Plaza. That night, after readjusting and napping, I began my slate of shows at the Huntington Funny Bone. All I can say is "wow." What a great room, great people, great staff, perfect sound and lights and stage. It was literally perfect as far as the stage being just the right size to stalk around, just the right height to be seen from everywhere in the room without rising too lofty, just everything was exactly as it should have been. I didn't have one show the whole week that I wanted back; every once in a while, I'll say something that I just shouldn't have said, and the whole show will go to shit. This week, I was like Rumpelstiltskin, weaving gold out of straw. The room really spoiled me for every other comedy club I've had the pleasure of playing.
The Funny Bone is in a downtown mall/entertainment complex, and they have a trade-out agreement with the movie theater. I got to see Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" and I have to say that it was just excellent. The movie wasn't entirely perfect, but it surely would have gotten a nine out of 10 from me if I were asked to rate it. If you're on the fence based on reviews you've seen or your own personal judgement of the trailers and previews, go see it and tell me I'm wrong that it was an excellent performance by Clint Eastwood. If you remember the movie "Heartbreak Ridge" that Eastwood did in the 80's, where he played Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway, this is like the continuing adventures of Gunny.
At the end of the weekend, namely Sunday night, Joel and I turned in our sets for the Sunday club-goers and bid farewell to snowy Huntington, piling into the car for the ride home. West Virginia was snowy and the roads were icy, winding and treacherous, but we made it home alive. I slept about two hours (!) and then got up, showered, and left again to hit the road. I picked up Ray and the van with the Dash For Dollars game show stuff in it and we headed towards Columbus, Ohio and Ohio Dominican University. Ray had even less sleep than I did, and opted to stay at the hotel and catch up with his shut-eye while I did the show. Running on adrenaline, caffeine and a sense of duty, I finished the show and returned to the hotel where I picked up Ray and we headed out for a late dinner. We found a family-style restaurant and some country cooking, and then returned to the hotel where I managed to fall asleep mid-sentence. I woke up at 5 in the morning with my stage clothes still on and my glasses askew.
The next morning, we headed off towards Chicago and managed to hit some of that horrible winter weather that was crushing the Midwest. We drove through Indianapolis, where they forgot what snowplows looked like, and pirouetted and sashayed all across the highway. By the time we reached Merrillville, Indiana, we bunked down for the night, figuring the next day would be easier as we were far enough north to be out of the storm. We got a good night's sleep and headed off early for Harold Washington College, which is located at the corner of Smack and Dab in downtown Chicago. To say that the city is congested is an understatement; parking is not only at a premium, it's expensive as hell. I wound up digging down for $50 (no lie) to park the van for the duration of my four hour work-day. The overhead train tracks wreaked havoc with my GPS and cell phone, and as hypnotizing as Chicago is from the skyline view you get when travelling west on the 90, I guess I wouldn't do very well living there with my sense of claustrophobia that I didn't even know I had.
The evening's dinner was Cracker Barrel, and food never tasted so good. It was damn near 5 PM and neither Ray nor I had eaten a bite since the day before. I had catfish and a loaf of biscuits and Ray had some sort of roast beef platter. Then we hit the road, traveling back through Indianapolis where I cashed in my Speedway loyalty card points and purchased gasoline for $1.17 a gallon. We headed south towards Cincinnati and finally, the highway turned to crap and we grabbed the first hotel we found, a Comfort Inn. The next day, we piloted our way through Kentucky and into Tennessee and some ice-storm ravaged country, but the roads were cleaned and salted and I guess it varies from community to community whether or not they can afford such luxuries as salt and plows, but the roads stayed clean well towards our final destination. We ate a Golden Corral buffet dinner (I know all the sweet restaurants, eh?) and had a little floor-show as a party who arrived just before we were about to leave bitched out a floor manager and a kitchen manager over an entire section of the restaurant that hadn't been bussed.....there were dirty dishes everywhere, and 90% of the patrons had tipped their server and gone. The young lady who was working point on this party of ten or more diners seemed nice at first, helping the one waitress who was working the section bus the tables and mentioning nicely that she had waitress ed before and knew how hard it was. They quickly cleared about three tables and shoved them together so that the party could sit down, and then she went into full puma mode, seeking out someone with a supervisor's name tag that she could dress down in the middle of the place. I looked down and away, and left my server another buck.
We kept moving until around midnight, and I managed to find a Motel 6 that I'd stayed at last year in Newport, Tennessee. It was just dumb luck that I stopped at that exit for gas, and started to recognize everything from my visit last summer. This was the town that I saw the first available midnight showing of The Dark Knight, and camped out two days in between engagements for The Comedy Zone in Clarksville and Johnson City, Tennessee. The Motel 6 is super clean, and offers free internet, and that's unusual for Motel 6's, they usually try to get you to pay around $3.50 for a day's use (which isn't bad, to be honest). The next morning, we chewed up the last few hours and motored towards Salisbury, North Carolina, and Catawba College, for the last date of the Dash For Dollars tour. We set up and did a "teaser" for the show in the student cafeterias, and then hung out and killed time for a couple of hours until showtime. We did the show, packed up the van, and headed for home, once again hitting horrible weather in West Virginia. It seemed that the high elevations were getting horrible snow, and then we'd come down a hill and everything was clear again. I drove until the Pennsylvania border and then pulled into a rest area for a couple hour's sleep.
By the time I woke up, it was daylight, and off we headed again. We stopped for gas at a Sheetz and grabbed some breakfast and dog-legged it the rest of the way home, pulling in at maybe 1 o'clock or so. But it didn't end there, because Ray's driveway was full of snow and we had to shovel a spot to stow the van. I don't know what energy I was tapping because I cleared the space out in what felt like about five minutes. I transferred all of my luggage into my waiting Camry and headed home. Pam and Harmony had gone out for some children's event, story time or some such thing, I can't really remember and to be honest, when she told me what it was, I was a zombie. I tried to sleep, but that wasn't happening. I laid in bed until the alarm rang, twitching with caffeine, Red Bull and coffee, and several dark cola drinks. I showered and dressed and headed to my evening engagement, two shows at a restaurant called Patti's Pantry.
Patti's Pantry is located on Dewey Avenue in Rochester, just minutes from where I grew up. I did two 50-minute shows to a mostly middle-aged group, and had a great time doing it. There was an added bonus as a few of my friends came out to see me; the first show, Jon "Lumpy" Dubner, his wife, and a couple of friends surprised me. Jon was a mainstay at Yuk Yuk's, the first full-time comedy club that Rochester ever had. He was always and continues to be a good friend and a person who is filled with the stuff that good karma is made out of. He took some pictures with his digital camera and posted and tagged them on Facebook and with apologies from the source material, they were pretty good.
Second show, my good friend Mark Block came out. Mark is a former co-worker of mine in the Great Lakes Entertainment productions of Joey and Maria's Comedy Wedding, Joey and Maria's 25Th Anniversary, and the Soapranos. He is also my tax preparer, and the first and only person who has ever invited me to Passover supper. We had a good time hanging out backstage, which was really just a smaller dining room away from the main dining room, and while I wished I could have spent more time with him, I was coasting on fumes after 10 days of running myself like a dog and had to get home. I was telling my wife how things went, when apparently I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and woke up at 5 in the morning with my stage clothes still on and my glasses askew.
All day Sunday I felt like hell, bones aching, dry mouth from all the caffeine, and of course, hating the snow and the cold which feels like it will never end. I drifted in and out from the Super Bowl, not really caring to watch Pittsburgh outgun the Cardinals. It was like watching a schoolyard bully push around a kid with asthma, only in this story, the kid with asthma actually put up a decent fight towards the end. At the end of it all, my team won......THE E-STREET BAND.
Yesterday, the cycle ended as it began, Ray and I judged another week of the competition at The Comedy Club, and today, I finished compiling paperwork for my health insurance. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders, but the big machine starts up again on Saturday, where I do two shows in Rochester at PeRe (it's a club) and then hit the road to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. More of the same, but in a different order this time.
I hope the weather's good.
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
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