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