Louisville Slugging

Friday June 11th, 2010 - Louisville, IL

I’m really enjoying Louisville. I’ve always liked it here for some reason. If I had to pick a town along I-65 to live, this would be it. It’s got a friendly vibe and I can feel a sense of civic pride from the people who live here. It’s not the inbred toothless place people think.

It’s in a great location for road work too. I’ve always heard the ’magic triangle’ for road work is Louisville, Cincinnati and Indianapolis because over 60% of the population of the United States is within an eight hour drive of those three cities. There’s opportunity here.

Had I stayed with comedy only and not ventured into radio, I could see myself spending at least a couple of years here on my way up the comedy ladder. People used to move to a city and establish connections, and then move somewhere else and do the same thing over again. Then they could come back and work the places they used to live. It’s very smart.

Unfortunately for me, my radio places weren’t very exotic. My first job was in Lansing, MI but I was already working there so it didn’t make any comedy contacts. I did pull it off in Salt Lake City. I’d never been there before I worked radio there, and now I still go back and do comedy there all these years later. That’s what I should have done just for comedy.

Boston had a great scene during the boom years, as did San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle. It wouldn’t have hurt to move to any of those places, and Louisville too, but I just didn’t get around to it. I was too busy doing whatever I was doing and that’s how it went.

I had lunch today with my old friend pro wrestler Bull Pain. Bull used to wrestle as one of The Texas Hangmen with my other friend Mike Moran. They wrestled in the AWA for a while and did pretty well, but eventually split up. Bull moved to Louisville and has been here for twenty years. He moved here for the same reason I would have - location of gigs.

Bull still wrestles and has paid more than his dues, just like I have. We talked about that as we sat at a Hooters joking about how nobody recognized either one of us, despite all of our attempts to become famous for a lifetime. Part of it is very funny, but another part had us both wondering what the hell we were doing with our lives. We agreed we had no clue.

Neither one of us could have handled a day job, and both of us made more than our fair share of mistakes along the way in our business pursuits. With just a little break along the way, both of our life stories could have had a completely different twist. But they didn’t.

Still it was great to see him, and hopefully he can come out to a show on Sunday. When I first started, he and his then wife would come out to see me in Milwaukee and they were big fans. We figured that was about twenty years ago now, so hopefully I’ve gotten better.

Tonight’s shows were very good, especially the dreaded late show Friday. These people were very into it and it was a pleasure to work for them. It was the best show of the week so far, but the whole week has been a lot of fun. I’m glad I got the chance to come back.