Those Shoes 8808 (2018)
Saturday, August 25, 2007-2:10 A.M.
It feels pretty gay to tell a shoe-shopping story, but I'm gonna do it.
I'm in Ocala, Florida, home of Jokeboy's Comedy Club (www.jokeboys.com) and nestled snugly into the two bedroom comedian condo with comedy buddy Steve Burr, my partner in crime this week (www.steveburrcomedy.com). Steve's been complaining that his MySpace page is far outgaining the hits on his regular site, so be a friend and look at his website today...it will cheer him up.
When last I wrote, I had one more show to do in Reading, PA at the Reading Comedy Outlet, and I'm happy to report that the show went fine, even though the crowd was overly happy to respond to every joke I attempted to tell with a little addition of their own. I eagerly finished my set and turned the stage over to Auggie Cook (www.AuggieCook.com) and went back to my hotel room to pack. I must have misjudged the time, though, because I started back to the club to try and sell some merchandise, and wound up walking through the crowd as they were leaving the club. I still managed to move a few pieces, which was encouraging. It's hard, I think, to enjoy a comedy show when others in the crowd are heckling and making the show a living nightmare for the comic. It's like assholes who sit up near the projector at the movie theater and keep sticking their hand in front of the lens...you just want to slap the shit out of them.
I drove home in the evening fog, courtesy of a hot day and a cold night. I wound up taking a strange detour to Allentown, PA, a little out of my way but a nicer, more well-lit road home. I stopped by my brother's house and dropped off a comic book for my nephew, which he enjoys quite a bit. It was 4:30 in the morning when I hit Syracuse, so I killed my headlights, rolled quietly up the driveway, and dumped the bag with the comic on my brother's enclosed front porch. I called him the next day and he collected it along with themorning paper, and I was glad that it didn't just get trampled over as they left the house.
So what about the shoes?
Sunday was a sleep day and Monday was a packing and preparation day for my Tuesday morning flight to Florida. I was rocking the new contact lenses and they were dried out as hell by the time I landed in Orlando. I met Steve at the airport as we were lucky enough to coordinate our flights so that his plane from Los Angeles and my plane from Rochester landed within half an hour of each other. We rented a car and started off north to Ocala.
Steve had very little sleep, having been in the air since 10 o'clock the night before, and I was pretty red-eyed with only about four hours of sleep under me, and we were heading up the 441 when Steve decided to pull a little trick on me. We were stopped in four lanes of traffic at a light, and Steve honked the car horn and used his driver's controls to roll my window down. Needless to say, I looked over and caught the glare of two Hispanic girls who were none too amused. The driver, a hard-faced young lady who looked like she just got off shifts flipping mattresses at the EconoLodge, rolled her toothpick to one side of her mouth, bobbed her head and said "What do you want?" Actually, she only said two of those words, connected by the word "chew." Ah, you gotta love the Latinas.
I tried to scavenge as much dignity as I could in the situation, and I said "Sorry, my friend thought you were someone else" to which the girl replied "Yeah, well you look like Peter Pan" which I didn't completely understand. Then she rolled her window up and back down and then said "You look like a big polar bear" which I guess is a crack at me being big and white, or maybe a comment on the salmon that I was eating that I had just flipped out of the river with my paw. I sheepishly turned to Steve and said "You can roll my window up now" which made him laugh, because obviously I was too tired to realize that I could have done that anytime I wanted to. Cute little prank, eh?
We stopped for some lunch and made the drive the rest of the way to Ocala, and stopped by the club to get some directions to the condo, and the keys. We got the envelope with the keys and directions, but the directions might as well have been a recipe for blueberry muffins, because all they did was make us lost, sweaty and mad. We finally figured out where we were supposed to be and got settled in, and after unpacking, showering and getting into clean clothes, we both definitely felt better.
O.K., so what about the shoes?
The next morning, we shipped out for Destin, Florida. It was about a 5 1/2 hour trip, but we traveled up onto the panhandle of Florida, and gained an hour by virtue of passing into the Central Time Zone. I was so happy to pick up that extra hour, though, because it meant I was able to have a nice nap. We met early at the Sportsbook Grill and bar, right across the parking lot from the Best Western, and had a little dinner before the show. Or, I should say, we had dinner before the little show. The audience was cobbled together from a small amount of folks who had actually come out for the show, members of the restaurant's softball team who elected to stick around, and some folks that were in the bar that the manager decided to comp. It wound up actually being a very good show, but it was clear that with shabby turnouts like this one, the venue isn't going to be doing comedy very long, and that's a shame, because it was a nice place with a good stage, lights and sound.
The next day, Steve and I hit the road good 'n' early, courtesy of a schedule from hell. Steve was booked to open for Josh Blue from Last Comic Standing at the auditorium in Ocala for a 7:30 show, and we had the six hour journey, a missing hour courtesy of crossing the time zone, and the basic creature need of getting back home to shower, iron clothes and maybe eat something. We hit the road early and drove into the sun, and before long, my left contact lens started drying out and basically did everything except shrivel up, jump out of my eye and stick to my cheek. I drove into a hurricane-spawned severe thunderstorm with one camera on standby...you ever drive a car 80 miles per hour with one eye closed? It's a treat, let me tell ya.
The thunderstorm was so severe, the radio station we were listening to actually cut away from the song they were playing to go to the Emergency Broadcasting System. I'm 40 years old and I've never heard anything other than a test from them. The sky darkened and it rained, but the worst of it was south of us, and I sped down route 10 as fast as possible, and once I hit 75 south, the skies were sunny and clear.
We got home, and everything went off without a hitch. Our mc, Chase Holliday, opened the show and I guess he upset some of the seniors from the Villages retirement community that came out (in a big bus, no less) for the show. He asked if they were drinking and they said yes, and he said "Go ahead, the AARP is paying for it" and even though it got him a round of boos, I didn't think it was that offensive. But some tight-ass called in, and that's a shame, because he was definitely not deserved of such harsh criticism.
Great....how about the damn shoes, already?
Steve got back before I hit the stage, and we both turned in our sets, and did the basic after-show hand-shaking and product-hawking that has become the norm in our business. Josh came over from the auditorium to take a look at the club, and we chatted for a few minutes. He was nice enough, but didn't have much to say. He was heading to Atlanta, and I'm sure after winning LCS, he's probably had his fill of fawning comics, comedy clubs and everyone else that wants to kiss his ass.
Friday was beat, except for the shoes (I'm getting to it, hold on, OK?). Steve and I set out for radio, early, early in the morning. We literally had to get up at 7 AM and drive to Gainesville, which is a full hour away. We got to the Buzz 100.5 FM studios and did about 20 minutes on the Mojo and Leigh Scott morning show, and they were pleasant enough and the spot went well. After getting back home, we unwound for a few hours (I slept, I don't know what Steve did), and then we went back out looking for lunch and to run some errands.
Well, suffice to say that we continued our lousy trend of getting lost on the winding streets of Ocala and their highways and state roads that all seem to run concurrent of each other and then split off like they were diagrammed by a dyslexic electician. Steve wanted to get a pair of Converse sneakers, but he was looking for the old-style white ones, not the black Chuck Taylor ones that are fairly ubiquitous. So we happened into Shoe Carnival, and while Steve was looking around, I headed back to a rack marked "Clearance" to see what they had. I take a size 13, and they had a pair of Rockports, brown, and a nice looking pair of shoes, I might add. They were originally $89.99, and I've never paid that much for a pair of shoes in my life, and I never will. But they were marked down to $49.00, and that's a $40.00 savings.
Now, I'm generally a frugal man when it comes to such things. I don't make a lot of money doing standup comedy, but I know a deal when I see one. And I had to think hard on this purchase. I flipped a coin, measured the weight in my mind, and finally picked them up and headed to the sales counter. On the way, I noticed that one of the shoes was missing a lace. A brown lace, for a brown shoe.
I met Adam, the store manager, and I said "Adam, I am interested in these shoes from your clearance rack, but I notice that one of 'em is missing a lace. What can we do about this?" I figured Adam would conjure up a pair of laces, hand me one, toss out the spare and chalk it up to the cost of doing business. But I guess that must have been ruled out when the price was slashed so severely on June 1st, 2007, the date of the first clearance sticker on the box.
Adam looks at me, looks at the shoes, and with the soul of a used-car dealer says, "Listen here. I don't have any brown laces, but I will mark these down to $29.99 and you can get yourself a pair somewhere else, Wal*Mart or somewhere, deal?" $30.89 later, your pal Ralphie is walking out of Shoe Carnival with some kickin' waterproof Rockports. So now the fun begins. We headed over to Wal*Mart, and no brown laces in stock. We headed to the Paddock Mall, and hit every store that had shoes, but no brown laces. The first shoe store actually had an "orphan" box of laces, and I asked the clerk to hold on to a pair that were flat, not round, but just a little shorter than the original laces. After a day's walk through the mall, Steve had acquired a pair of white Converse All-Stars and I headed back to Shoe World or whatever the name of the store was to retrieve my brown laces. The clerk, a strawberry-blonde-haired beauty, handed me the laces, and I said "What's the damage?" to which she replied "Take them. They don't have a bar code so I wouldn't know what to charge you anyway."
I wore them on stage tonight, and they looked and felt great. $90.00 Rockports for $30.00. I doubt that even my lovely wife, Pammey "Discount" Davis, could have done a better job. And she'll try running a coupon through a Coke machine if nobody's looking. And that's the first and last shoe story that you'll ever get out of me, I promise!
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
