Cheeseburger In Paradise

Cheeseburger In Paradise                                      2253

Monday, November 14, 2005-6:46 A.M.

I'm up early today, for no apparent reason.  Which is good, the furnace guys will be here in a few hours, and we'll have heat in our home again.  I'm glad that my previous estimate of December 1st turned out to be unfounded, but it's been pretty mild this year, even stretching into November.  I can remember when I was a little kid, it was always cool seeing if it would snow in Rochester before my birthday, November 15th, and of course, always looking forward to a white Christmas.  So far, it looks like we're just going to have to brook a bunch of fallen yellow leaves and some mud, which is actually o.k. with me, now that I primarily drive for a living.

I got home from Reading, Pennsylvania and the fabulous Reading Comedy Outlet around 6:00 Sunday night, and then accompanied Ray Salah out to the Comix Cafe, my home club, to see headliner Mark Knope and of course, the members of the staff at the club who knew me from when I worked there full time.  I went up and did a 12-minute or so guest spot, worked out some of the Amish material I was peddling this past weekend, and it worked well.  I think I want to expand the bit because it really fits well with how I feel about religion, and it comes from a point of view of tolerance.  I've been listening to a lot of Lenny Bruce in the car, specifically the Carnegie Hall Concert, which is the best recorded work of his that I've heard, and it served as the template for this work.  He's very funny in the concert, but he also makes very specific points about social issues, and I highly recommend searching it out and listening to it at least once.

While in Reading, I decided to do some housecleaning of my vehicle, and I went through the glove compartment and took out all of the condiments, plastic fast-food cutlery and straws.  I'm insane about food, and if I have to eat french fries without ketchup, I'm unhappy, to say the least.  I've always been fixated about food, even since I was a little kid, and when I was in junior high, I won a writing award for a short story using mayonaisse as a death symbol (it's true).

So I went through my glovebox, put all the condiments in a Hardee's bag, and have inventoried them, deciding that it would give me a snapshot of my habits, not that I need any clearer picture of my habits.  I eat in the car, primarily fast food, which I love dearly.  It's hot, it's ready, and it's everywhere.  You can't really drive to a part of the country that doesn't have a drive through window where they will happily exchange about five of your U.S. dollars for a tasty grilled or fried or roasted piece of meat on a fluffy, white bun or biscuit or croissant or hoagie roll, accompanied by some deep-fried potato product that's been over-salted, and a large, wax-lined cup filled with a dark and delicious, icy cold carbonated beverage.  God, I'm getting the car keys now just thinking about it!

Anyway, I inventoried the condiments, and here's what I came up with;

18 Burger King ketchups
 2 Burger King mustards
 6 McDonalds ketchups
 1 Wendy's ketchup
 1 Wendy's salt
 3 Wendy's hot chili seasoning
 2 McDonalds mild picante sauce
 2 McDonalds barbecue dipping sauces
 1 McDonalds hot mustard dipping sauce
10 Subway mustards
 6 Heinz ketchups (no designation)
 1 French's mustard (no designation)
 1 Sweet 'n Low (no designation)
11 Equal (no designation)
12 Sugar Twin (no designation)

And all packed in a Hardee's bag.  The fact that I even had a Hardee's bag shows some desperation on my part, because their food is ass to me.  The worst.  I must have been really hungry and there must have been no other choices.

So the numbers don't lie; I am a predominantly Burger King consumer.  The Subway mustards?  I picked up a bunch of them because sometimes I'll dash into a Wal-Mart after a show if I'm in a small town and there's no other food options, and I'll grab a deli sub, and they never have the little packets of condiments in with the sandwich.  I hate that.  And I'll usually use mustard, even if it's a roast beef sandwich, because I enjoy the zip of the mustard, and it keeps well.  Mayonaisse can be dodgy, especially if the car gets warm.  Now you're just asking for some egg 'n oil-based bird flu.

Subway is good food for me, but hard to eat in the car; that shredded lettuce goes everywhere.  The secret to eating in the car is to keep it neat.  I generally hate french fries, because I get the oilall over my hands, but what are you gonna do?  Wendy's will let you get a salad, but you have to pull over to the side of the road to eat the damn thing, and driving schedules don't always allow for that.  Actually, I've never been so late that five minutes made a difference (or would have helped me, in the extreme couple of cases where I was late), so maybe I should rethink this attitude.

McDonalds is always there, but for breakfast only.  They outdo Burger King in that respect, but Burger King gets the prize for lunch.  Put it to you this way; a whopper comes wrapped in a nice piece of paper that you can fold back and it catches any stray ketchup that wants to drip out on your nice white shirt, and all the lettuce stays contained.  A Big Mac, while a completely nice sandwich to order when you're sitting down, comes in an unwieldly cardboard box that is very difficult to handle when you're shooting down state road 322 at 15 miles over the speed limit.

Wendy's is always nice, and quick, but their single burger always leaves me still hungry, and their double burger makes me feel bloated.  There's no middle ground.  Arby's is great, and delicious for a cold-cut guy like me, but it takes too long, and I always feel like I spent too much money on lunch.  The flip side of the coin is that the food is fresh and hot, but curly fries always burn my mouth, and I don't enjoy eating them because I'm not 12 years old.

Whenver I can, I'll order the fringe menu items; McDonald's breakfast burritos.  I don't usually do well with egg in the morning, but it's all wrapped up in a nice little breakfast sleeping bag and there's not much chance that it'll wind up becoming part of the pattern of my jacket.

Taco Bell is right out of the question.  It's fine at night if you've been drinking, because any gaseous emissions will happen in your sleep, but who can eat that dreck when you're awake and sober?  Messy food and flatulence?  I have more self-respect than that.  And have you ever tried eating a crunchy taco while driving?  It's like trying to put a horseshoe on a pig.  You might as well just dump the contents of the shell into your coat pocket, and then crumble the shell onto your floor mat.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is good, the sandwiches at least, but you don't see them as often as the other restaurants.  Ordering pieces of chicken, again, is right outof the question when you're driving.  It's hard enough trying to talk on your cell phone and book April 2006 dates without greasing up your steering wheel and trying to avoid careening into a ditch at 85 miles per hour.  Popeye's is the same problem, although as a sit-down option during the day, I'm the first in line.  I love the gumbo, what can I say?

I had my first Taco John's experience in North Dakota earlier this year.  I have nothing to say about them, because I never see them.  Good food, though.  And luckily I slept alone that night, although it was nice of the headliner to offer.

Sbarro can kiss my ass.  Real Italians wouldn't eat that shit at gunpoint, and shame on them for wasting nice tomatoes on their subpar marinara sauce, rubbery meat and dry cheese.  Never again.  And their meatball subs suck, too.  Worst bread I've ever eaten.

Boston Market isn't even fast food.  It's some of the best food out there, kind of a low-rent Cracker Barrel.  If there's time, and I've got a coupon, I'm in.  And if you've never been there, I'll treat (if I got a coupon).

So that's the fast-food roundup.  I know my doctor would be rolling her eyes and shaking her fists at the heavens, but short of making drastic lifestyle and vocational changes, this is the life I lead.

Pumpkin pies are two for a dollar?  Yes I would, thank you.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Teacher, Teacher

Teacher, Teacher                                      2242

Saturday, November 12, 2005-12:16 A.M. (Sunday morning)

What a difference a day makes, huh?

After last night's debacle, which was so demoralizing I was ready to quit the comedy business, I come back swinging.  And it felt good.

I started out my day late, slept in nice and comfy in a Sheraton Hotel bed...the most comfortable in the hotel business (Ritz Carlton is #2, but only by a little...Hilton beds are soft, but the sheets are scratchy...what the fuck, Hilton?).  After showering and mugging the hotel housekeeper's cart for extra shampoos and tissue, I went to the mall and walked around.  I got a little excercise, and then headed southwest to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to visit one Jared Horning and his lovely wife Cindy for dinner.  Jared is an aspiring standup comedian who came and visited me in Harrisburg at the Comedy Zone last month, and he knew I would be in the area this week, and invited me to his house for a sumptuous baked ziti 'n' meatballs dinner.  And as you know, no Italian can refuse a baked ziti dinner.  After a nice meal, we talked comedy and I watched his tape, and it was very good.  The young man has a flair for comedy, but is frustrated at the lack of opportunities in his neck of the woods.  I may be able to help in this instance, even with my limited connections.  I will post more as the situation develops.  He had taken a standup comedy course, and was very disenchanted with the instructor and the material that was presented, and I happen to have taught comedy in the past, so I said I would set him up with my class notes and hopefully set the young man off in the right direction.  Actually, he has good comic instincts, he just needs the repetition of regular stage time.

Anyway, after a nice conversation, Cindy sent me away with a lovely care package of food for later.  The nice folks at the Sheraton actually delivered a microwave oven to my room to heat the meal up, which I enjoyed between shows tonight.  It was truly awesome, and a welcome change from the usual fast food garbage that I regularly throw down my throat.

First show was a by-the-numbers affair, and I was pleased with my performance.  It was nice to get that hell-gig monkey off my back from the night before.  Second show was a whole different situation.  I went long, which is a terrible habit that I have, but the crowd was fertile to work and I had some new stuff to get out, and I actually called back a joke I didn't even do.  That's almost as bad as doing a joke twice, and I've done that before.  There was a guy who I called Limp Bizkit because he was a big, knit cap-wearing sumbitch, and a guy who looked like the Smith Brothers cough drop guy, but he was a Math professor of Italian descent named Phil.  I promise you I'm not making any of this up.  Then there was Terry, a nice girl sitting stage right who has the same birthday as me, next Tuesday the 15th.  I did 5 jokes and still went way overtime.  I really need to figure this standup comedy stuff out.

Anyway, whereas merchandise sales were a long sweet suck off the goose egg schwantz last night, I did pretty well this evening.  Gotta butter the toast somehow.  I'm finding that DVD's aren't necessarily the big seller I thought they were, and I'm leaning towards getting a shirt done.  I'll have to start strip-mining my act and think of something that will capture the hearts and minds of the souvenir-buying public.  Again, I'll let you know how that works out.

Nice night's sleep beckons, and a harmless (knock, knock) ride home tomorrow.  Have a good weekend.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Smokin'

Smokin'                            2233

Friday, November 11, 2005-11:31 P.M.

Just when I think I have this computer stuff nailed down, they change it on me.

I'm staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania, home of the Reading Comedy Outlet.  It's a very nice hotel with a nice weekend comedy room in it, and I enjoy working it because it's a short drive from home, and the accomodations are superb.

So when I got here today, I wanted to hook up the ol' laptop computer and do some answering of e-mails and business stuff, to decompress from the five-hour drive.  I first tried to connect to wireless internet...I figured the Sheraton's gotta have a broadband connection.  No dice.  So then I tried to connect to AOL with a dial up connection.  Still no love.  I look at the in-room dialing guide, and see that you have to dial the 610 area code, even for local calls.

After the show, I got back to the room and tried to wrestle with the AOL start-up screen.  Long story short, the Sheraton has a thing called Data Valet, which basically is a high-speed connection in the room.  There's a cable hidden under the table with a big fat connector that looks like a phone cable, but bigger.  I hooked it in to the laptop (while Sanji the tech support guy talked me through it) and logged right on.  Technology's great, I just wish I didn't have to be Chuck Yeager every time I wanted to check my e-mail.

Tonight's show was a car-wreck.  Jay Warren, the usual mc, was out, and I got a solid 4 minutes of silence right at the beginning of my act.  I didn't do anything unusual, I just got no love right out of the gate, and at one point, a woman interrupted me and chided me for my use of the "F" word.  Instead of telling her to fuck herself, I cleaned up the set, figuring that she wasn't alone....I was getting rounds of coughs and treated them like they were standing ovations.  I got off at the end with some of my dignity intact, but not all of it.  It was by far a substandard set, and even though it was still pretty good for a feature act, it was not the kind of set you want to have when you're trying to prove to clubs that you're good enough to close.

At home, the furnace repair people finally came, andblew a Kilimanjaro of ancient ash out of our duct work.  Installation of the new furnace begins tomorrow, and we should be ready to power up and have heat by Monday.  I'm excited because I can get into some of the other things around the house that I've been putting off because the cold has just been unbearable.  I was sick most of yesterday, because I have one room in the house that's actually warm, and it's actually too warm because the heat doesn't get evenly distributed, and I don't handle temperature changes very well.  I think I might be part lizard.

In other horrible, depressing news, my father called me and let me know that he has cancer.  He had a malignant tumor removed from his lung about three years ago, and the most recent offending member was a boil that formed on his index finger which he had infected last year while working in the garden without gloves.  They removed it and did a biopsy, and it was indeed malignant.  Now, my father was a heavy smoker for many years, and so was my grandmother, and my grandmother died of cancer back in 1994 at the age of 82.  My father, a three-year cancer survivor, refuses to quit smoking.  It's obviously a personal choice, and I understand that cigarettes are highly addictive, but I'm resentful that he won't completely quit.  If he dies even a few years early because he refuses to quit smoking, that's a few years of his company that his family and friends will be deprived of, and I lament that.  My daughter Harmony still hasn't met Grandpa Tetta, and I want her to see him at least once before he shuffles off this mortal coil.  I need to schedule some work down in Florida this year so I can take Pam and Harmony down there and my daughter can meet her grandfather.  It's important, I think.

O.K., sorry to be such a bummer, but it's on my mind and I feel a lot better writing about it.  Keep ya head up and keep smiling.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Reason To Believe

Reason To Believe                               2194

Monday, November 7, 2005-5:43 A.M.

I just scared the shit out of Derek Richards.

Derek has a 6:00 A.M. flight this morning.  Feature act Pete Lee left right after the show last night to go bunk with a friend in Chicago, about 90 minutes from here, and Derek had a 5:00 cab waiting.  I heard him get up, but thought he was gone.  I got up and used the bathroom, and when I came out, Derek was rolling his suitcase towards the front door of the apartment, and I think I gave him a stroke, standing there in the dark.  We said our goodbyes, and off he went.

We had a good time here at the Funny Bone in South Bend, Indiana, or Mishawaka, Indiana, to be truthful.  Notre Dame won this weekend over Tennessee, so everyone was happy.  I mc'ed for Derek and Pete, my second such week at this club, and hopefully I'll get to come back as a feature act.  This market is a goldmine for after-show merchandise, unless you're in the mc spot, in which case there's no place to set up and you get lost in the shuffle.  I made money this week, but not much, and certainly not enough to live on.  I'm going home about $80 better than when I came here, but the week was an investment.  I'm not going to worry about money this week, though.  I have a tough month coming up with some low-paying work, but I believe that we'll be o.k.  I continue to have faith that God wouldn't reward me with a beautiful wife and child and then not allow me the means to provide for them.

I got a chance to pal around with some of the local talent, but not as much as if I'd worked the full week.  Taking the two road gigs seemed like the right thing to do, but I wonder if I'd been better off if I stayed put and tried to build up some chemistry with the staff and regulars at the Bone.  No matter, what's done is done, and it's always better to regret something you've done than something you haven't done.

Show-wise, everything went well, I think.  I haven't mc'ed in a long time, and certainly not outside of my home club in Rochester, NY.  It felt a little strange, and I stuttered and stammered a few times, but nothing life-threatening.  I wrote some Amish material based on my lunch experienceon Saturday, I sat next to a big group of Amish folk at Old Country Buffet.  I usually roll out the Amish material when I'm in Pennsylvania, but there seems to be an Amish community of substance here in North Central Indiana.  I listened to Lenny Bruce's Carnegie Hall concert on the road trip this week, so I was copping some of his rhythm, taking it slow and really letting the crowd digest what I was saying instead of doing the rat-a-tat-tat delivery that I usually rely on.  It gave me fewer laughs per minute total, but the laughs were heartier and more applause breaks.  I need to explore this and see where it takes me, and I have three shows in Pennsylvania this weekend at the Reading Comedy Outlet to give it a shot.

The furnace at home is still broken as we are at the tender mercies of the heating and cooling companies.  We went through some folderol with one company, asking them to come in and clean our heating ducts, only to wait on them and wait on them, and then finally be told, "Oh, we thought you were still shopping for estimates."  I think they don't want to do the work.  It's 47 degreees in Rochester, and not scheduled to get much warmer today.  Pam has been sick, and Harmony is starting to show signs of sniffles.  I feel so helpless being eight hours away, but I'm getting an early start this morning.  I don't know how smart it is to drive on five hours of sleep, but I've driven with less.  Derek left three cans of sugar-free Red Bull energy drink in the fridge, so I'll cop those for the ride home, and use the caffeine boost if I start flagging.  I brought oatmeal with me, so I'm having breakfast right now, and I'll be showering and packing soon, and hitting the road.  My goal today was getting out by 8:00 A.M., and making it home by 4:00 P.M., so I'll beat that in a rare instance.  If we're still furnace-less by Friday, maybe I'll take Pam and Harmony to Reading, given that Pam doesn't have any shows herself this weekend.

My car is really starting to show it's age and wear.  I have some sort of an alignment issue, probably in the back, and the car shakes when you get it going up over 65.  My passenger side seatbelt thing is broken, so you can't click the belt down, and the lights on my radio don't work.  The radio itself works, but at night, you can't see the readout to know what station you're listening to.  That's not such a bad thing, you're not supposed to be looking at the radio at night, you're supposed to look at the road.  Also, the back driver's side door is mechanically frozen shut.  The lock goes up and down, but the door won't open.  If a car door is going to be frozen, you want it frozen shut.  I had a Chevy Malibu years ago where the driver door would close some of the time, not all of the time.  I was a student at Monroe Community College, and one day came out of class to find my door hanging open in the parking lot.  Praise the Lord and pass the bungie cord.

O.K.  Yesterday, I wrote about my heroes, and I can't believe I didn't mention Bruce Springsteen as number one, or at least in the top three.  I discoved Springsteen exactly when I should have, when his "Born In The USA" album came out.  I was just out of high school, and I remember gradution night, I went home while everyone else was partying because I had to work the next day.  I put the album on and listened to Bruce sing about working class hopes and dreams, redemption, mistakes made and never corrected and everything that I was feeling at the time.  I worked cutting crew at Tops Friendly Markets, by which I mean that when all of the boxes of product came in, the cutting crew would display cut the boxes so that they could be stacked and still shopped from.  We'd cut the lids 3/4 of the way, so they'd hinge, and cut the front off, leaving a small lip at the bottom to hold the product in place.  And when I say the crew did all this, I mean it was me; the store would receive 13 or 14 pallets of merchandise for the front disply, and I would go in on Saturday and cut and price all day long, getting it ready for the night crew to have it in place for the new ad week which started Sunday morning.  I brought in a boom-box radio to listen to while I cut boxes, priced bottles of cooking oil and boxes of cereal and gallon jugs of bleach, lifting them off the stack, down to my buscart and then down on to the empty pallet at the end of the line.  When "Dancing In The Dark" was a radio hit, I remember hearing it five times in an eight-hour shift, and wondering if there was anyone else listening at their job who heard the song all five times.

Anyway, I didn't realize it at the time, but Bruce was quite the populist, and a champion of the working man, and never lost touch with his blue-collar roots.   I wound up working at the radio station that played Bruce's song five times in one day, and while I was there, the music director gave me a cassette copy of an unreleased Bruce Springsteen concert, recorded in Detroit.  At the time, the Detroit newspaper worker's union, the men and women who roll in the paper and the ink and get the papers printed overnight so they can be delivered in the morning, was on strike.  It was an ugly strike that lasted a long time, and the union's fund to support it's members had run dry, and newspapers had to be lifted by helicopter off the roofs of the newspaper's offices because the strike line was getting ugly and violent.  Bruce announced to the people in attendance that he was donating the money from all four nights of shows to the union's general fund to help out the workers who were striking for fair pay, and then later, we found out that he not only gave the money, but matched it out of his own pocket.  It made me happy to know that I was throwing my adulation at a performer who also had a conscience, and did the sort of thing that I wished I could do, ride in on a white horse and help people who were scared, tired, hungry and hurting.  This was a guy who was arguably the biggest rock star in America, and he still found time to perform on "We Are The World."  Do you think that was a mistake, a momentary lapse of personal taste, or a full-fledged effort to help hunger and homelessness?  I think it was the latter.

I've never seen Bruce perform live.  I've either been too busy or too broke to see him (money and time....I never have them together), even when he was touring around stumping for John Kerry in the last election.  But he's staunchly Democratic, even though you would imagine that would operate to the detriment of someone of his financial status, and yet he is...and he's not an ignorant man, he knows what the policies of the Left would mean.  It would mean he would have to pay his fair share, perhaps an unfair share, to support policies and programs that would benefit the less well off.  And yet, he's cool with that.  Maybe because he grew up blue collar, working class, and knows what that means...he understands the struggle of people trying to live their lives, provide for their children as best they can, and try to maintain their dignity when they can't provide, taking what the folks on the Right call an "entitlement," like somehow the poor simply justask for money and services to be forked over, as if all the while they aren't being eaten up inside, looking at the ground, wrapped in the cold reality that sometimes their best efforts aren't good enough.

I've got eight hours of blacktop in front of me and a family waiting, so I'm going to go now.  Thanks for stopping by, and taking the time to allow me to share my thoughts with you.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

 

Heroes

Heroes                                                                  2186

Saturday, November 5, 2005-5:13 P.M.

I'm alone in the Funny Bone comedy condo here in Mishawaka, Indiana.  My partners in mirth this weekend, Derek Richards and Pete Lee, have probably gone out to excercise or some other pointless health-based activity.

I chose to get up, shower, and head out foraging.  I started out at Old Country Buffet, my home away from home.  I eat there all the time, not because you can have as much as you want, but because you get to sample and choose from a lot of different items.  I also get an opportunity to integrate more vegetables into my diet that way; today I had green beans, carrots, a broccoli 'n' cheese casserole, delicious mashed potatoes, baked chicken, salisbury steak, chicken noodle soup, and for dessert, some low-sugar key lime pie.  It was a nice break.

I screwed up and didn't pack enough underwear.  So I had two choices; decide to go do laundry, just to have clean underwear for the ride home, or buy some.  Actually, I could have worn dirty underwear home on the drive on Monday, but that's eight hours in itchie skivvies, and I'll pass on that.  I found a Meijers store, kind of like a Super Wal-Mart, and bought a three pack of cotton boxers.  They were not very expensive, and I felt like a real smart guy.  I got some pears, too for later.  I rung them up by myself at one of the self-serve registers, and wondered who got laid off in the name of this magical piece of equipment.

I went by the Mishawaka Public Library, and found some paperbacks they were selling for 25 cents each.  I bought four, and one of them turned out to have a pretty decent resale value.  The other three were duds.  One of them, however, I didn't purchase with the idea of reselling it; it was"Rum Punch" by Elmore Leonard.  "Rum Punch" was made into the movie "Jackie Brown" starring Samuel Jackson, Pam Grier, Robert Forster (of my hometown Rochester, NY), Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Robert DeNiro, Chris Tucker, and directed by Quentin Tarantino.  Makes you want to run right out and see it, huh?

So it got me to thinking about my heroes.  We all have them, and I thought I'd share you a short list of mine.

Edgar Allan Poe.  Master of the short suspense story.  I've written a few of them in my day...maybe I'll share some in a journal entry one of these days.  Actually, I have my portfolio with me, so check in tomorrow and I'll put one up and you can tell me what you think.  Anyway, Poe didn't really make a name for himself as a novelist, sticking instead to short fiction.  I enjoy the format, because you can pound out a story and make as much of a point in a few words as other authors do in hundreds of pages.  Plus, I'm basically lazy.

Elmore Leonard  Crime fiction novelist.  Elmore Leonard is 80 years old, and is still working, and is still popular and viable.  His novel, "Killshot," is being made into a motion picture as we speak.  He has dozens of novels to his name, and works hard, despite his advanced age.  I would like to work as long as possible, too...I don't even think of retirement.  It's the first stage of death, as far as I'm concerned.

Henry Rollins.  Author, singer, actor, publisher.  Henry Rollins made his name as the snotty, angry lead singer for Black Flag back in the 80's.  Since then, he's written poetry and otherwise, toured as a speaker/standup comic and acted in films, as well as published books and music that he considers important work from other artists through his 2.13.61 label.  His spoken words stuff is funny, poignant and powerful.  As he approaches 50, he continues to work, tour and inspire.

Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister.  Bass player, Motorhead.  Lemmy is the reason I picked up a bass guitar in the beginning, and my love of heavy metal music was basically due to his intelligent lyrics and hard-charging style, not to mention that whiskey rasp of a voice.  He gave a young and mostly unattractive guy hope that you didn't need pretty-boy looks to make it in music, just a never-say-die attitude and the willingness to kick the door in if they didn't open it when you knocked.  Denim, leather, warts and sweat and scars.

Billy Sheehan.  Bass Player.  Billy was a "flash" bass player, bringing jazz chops to metal.  I saw Billy givea clinic and answer questions from the crowd the same week I saw Henry Rollins give a three-hour spoken word show.  It was a truly remarkable time.  Billy wasn't a musical genius, he made his bones the old fashioned way; he learned on stage while he was playing.  His early band, Talas, opened for Van Halen, and he caught the eye of David Lee Roth, so when Roth left Van Halen and started his own band, Billy was the first guy to get a phone call.  Not only could Billy play the pants off any other bass player, if an amplifier broke down or a rack effect shit the bed, Billy could fix it, because he learned how to do that stuff out of necessity, getting in the van and playing town after town.

Bill Hicks.  Standup comic.  I got a chance to work with the dearly departed Mr. Hicks back in 1991 at Hiccups Comedy Club in Rochester.  I hosted two shows on a Friday night, and watched Bill get less than stellar response from the audience.  One table wanted to fight him on the second show.  The bottom line was that Bill sometimes said things on stage that were true that people didn't want to hear.  Now, there are differing opinions about whether or not a comedy stage is an appopriate stump to be passing off social and political opinions, or whether you should just seek to entertain and let people not have to think for that time, but Bill chose the former.  Unfortunately, he succumbed to pancreatic cancer before he could realize his true potential.  And yet, there are hundreds of comics alive today who hold him in high regard.  Including me.

Bob Dylan.  Singer, songwriter, anti-war activist, poet, living legend.  He never played at Woodstock, but he wrote "Blowing In The Wind," "Masters of War," and hundreds of other songs that are an indelible part of the rock lexicon.  "All Along The Watchtower" is so good, it doesn't matter who sings and plays it, it still feels like a moment with God.

That's enough for now.  I could also talk to you about Al Pacino, Bruce Springsteen, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Sinatra, Mario Cuomo and others, but I have to get ready for a show in a little bit.  I'll write some more tomorrow.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

Gimme Some Water

Gimme Some Water                         2180

Friday, November 4, 2005-5:09 P.M.

Well, I'm back at my home-away-from-home, the comedy condo in Mishawaka, Indiana.  I worked the second of two detour gigs last night in Lafayette, Indiana (home of Perdue University) with Lansing, Michigan's Fred Potter in the opening slot.  The gig went way better for me than the Sportz Zone Wednesday night in Decatur...I had the pleasure of humiliating a drunk older broad and her hippie boyfriend so much that they left the bar.  They were interrupting Mike the mc and Fred all during their sets with nonsense and gibberish.  At one point, I asked her if she'd ever done a roadside sobriety test.  She replied that she had, and when I asked her what tests they made her do, she started spouting out random, drunken words, with no rhyme or reason, and I told her that she was coughing out refrigerator magnet poetry and that I really didn't understand.  This may be a drunken heckler line that I keep....I was really proud of myself for thinking on my feet.

I did an hour, and it was easy, versus the 45-minute drowning set I perpetrated in Decatur.  Then, today, I was getting ready to leave the Knight's Inn (where all the high-powered showbiz types get to stay when they're in Lafayette, Indiana), and the water was magically turned off.  Unfortunately, I had just perpetrated an act of personal evacuation, and was now unable to relegate it to the town's wastewater plumbing system.  The guy at the front desk told me that it would be o.k. for me to stay in the room until the water was turned back on (there were workers fixing a water main and had to turn it off for a few hours) so I could take a shower before leaving, and thusly, I wound up sitting on the bed watching Comedy Central while my princely remains circled the porcelain bowl.

Planning for a Noon checkout, I actually wound up hitting the road just a little after 1 PM.  I made the country road journey up to South Bend, about 150 miles and taking about 3 hours total, and along the way, I stopped off at a library and purchased some of their old books they were getting rid of, speculating for possible resale.  I purchased a reference volume of state constitutions for $1.00, figuring I'd roll the dice and see what it was worth.  Come to find out, it's out of print, and carries a brand new shelf price of $120, and the cheapest version to be found online was $175.  Jackpot!  I should be able to sell that baby and finally clear a profit on one of these 2,000 mile roadtrips.

Hi-Diddley-Dee, indeed.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY

So Tired

So Tired                                      2171

Thursday, November 3, 2005-1:40 A.M. CDT

Wow, I didn't expect to be here today.  I'm in Decatur, Illinois, the very gig I canceled three weeks ago.

I'm scheduled to be working the South Bend, Indiana Funnybone, and I did indeed work the gig on Tuesday night.  Tonight, I'm filling in for Steve Burr, formerly of Rochester, NY, now residing in Los Angeles, California.  He had no transportation to the gig tonight and in Lafayette, Indiana tomorrow, so he passed the gig off to me.

Tuesday night was a low-key affair at the Funny Bone, with Derek Richards and Pete Lee both turning in great sets in front of the 42-odd people who showed up.  I was happy doing a shorter set, but I haven't emceed in a long time, so I forgot how to kill time while the other acts were on stage doing their thing.  I managed pretty well, and after the show, we all went out for drinks and socializing with some of the local talent, who were entertained by my chicken-wing eating style; namely, biting the chewy part off the end of the bone.  I guess they never saw that sort of thing before...I've been eating wings that way for years.

Before hitting the road today, Derek, Pete, Steve Burr and myself all went out to lunch, and we had a nice Max & Erma's meal...I'd seen the chain before, but never ate there.  It was a luxury I could have ill afforded, because I wound up not getting moving toward Decatur until 2:00.  Even with picking up the extra hour, I was looking at driving through Gary, Indiana, which is the Nexus of Sominus for traffic...cars and trucks go in, and they fall asleep.  One of my big problems as well was that I left not one but both of my road atlases at home.  At one point, I had to call the lovely Pamela Ruth to navigate me out of South Bend, Indiana.  I had gone online for driving directions, but they didn't take construction detours into account, and I wound up going nowhere fast.  It wasn't until 3:30 that I really felt like I was on my way and knew where I was.

Decatur is a gig I've worked about 3 or 4 times in the past, and I've never really killed here.  Tonight, I thought I was really behind the 8-ball because I got here just a little before showtime, I hadn't eaten a proper meal, and I had to follow a strong feature act, Fred Potter of Lansing, Michigan.  Fred and I knew each other from my time in Rochester managing the club there, and I was familiar with his high-energy style.  I got laughs, but in the closing position (which is still pretty new to me), I wasn't as effective as I wanted to be.  Tomorrow in Lafayette should be better, it's a different type of a room, a college pub instead of a sports bar.

I just got back from Wal-Mart, where I ponied up and purchased my 2006 Rand McNally road atlas.  It was time, anyway, and now I don't feel so helpless.

This is going to be a long week, I can tell.  Every day so far has promised a long drive with not much rest and less than desirable audiences, and have delivered on all three counts.  It can only get better from here.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY