Lunch In Chicago, Dinner In Milwaukee

Thursday August 2nd, 2007 - Chicago, IL/West Allis, WI

Lots of running around today. My friend Todd Hunt was speaking at a lunch meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Skokie and invited me to attend. He started his speaking career doing gigs like this and thought I might want to observe in case I ever wanted to start a speaking career myself. He was doing it as a thank you for letting him get started way back when.

It started at noon with lunch and then Todd was to speak afterwards. When I got there I counted fourteen people besides Todd sitting around waiting for salads to get passed out. It was held in a small meeting room at the Holiday Inn Skokie and I knew that this wasn’t how I needed to be getting started in the speaking business. I am past this point already.

Todd had never been in front of audiences so he needed to get his feet wet this way but I have spent my life in front of comedy club and honky tonk and hell hole crowds, if you can call them that. Many times it wasn’t enough to call it a crowd and many other times it was an angry mob or a drunken bunch of idiots. Fourteen Kiwanis eating lunch in a small room at the Holiday Inn would be easy. Todd only had to speak. I’d have to make them laugh.

The guy in charge was an older guy named Sid and he walked with a cane. He was not a bad guy at all but at lunch I had to sit and listen to his ‘jokes’ and try to be polite but I was seriously contemplating whacking him with his own cane about six jokes into his routine. I got a meal out of it and I didn’t have to pay money for it but this was NOT a free lunch. It cost me a lot more than money to have to sit through Sid’s soliloquy and stay smiling.

I learned a lot by watching Todd speak. They only wanted about twenty actual minutes of his speech that usually lasts 45 minutes. He cut and pasted and had to work around lots of distractions like a waitress cleaning up plates and a guy’s cell phone going off and even a guy just getting up and leaving for no reason. It was humiliating and Todd wasn’t happy about it when he got off but that’s how it goes. He has grown and doesn’t need these gigs anymore because he does bigger talks that pay. I don’t need to start doing these at all.

What I need is to get marketing going to avoid having to start out like this. I know I will have to pay dues like everyone else but not these kind. I’d rather do less speeches than get stuck working in front of a dozen people for no pay. I can do that in comedy clubs and get the satisfaction of at least doing what I really love. Today was a real eye opener and I’ll be careful before I accept any offers to come out and speak to ‘luncheon meetings’ like this.

After the lunch I swung by and visited the new office of one of my former radio partners Spike Manton. Spike is the one who recommended me for the Loop job and I told him I’m still trying to find a way to get even with him for that. He laughed but he’s struggling too.

Neither he nor Max nor I wanted to have to start all over again but that’s exactly what it boiled down to. We all were sent scampering and all these years later it’s still a struggle. If I knew how much of a world rocker that would have been I’d never have taken the job but none of us knew and we all rolled the dice and ended up crapping out. That’s the gamble.

But like me Spike is a survivor and a hustler and is always trying new things. He and his new business partners are doing some kind of a marketing thing and just rented an office a few blocks from the Edens Expressway on the north side of Chicago. I got there just as he was leaving but I wanted to give him a big box of sports stuff for his son whose birthday is this week. I had some programs and pictures and posters left over from my collecting days and I wanted his son Mickey to have them. He’s a great kid and I know he’ll enjoy it all.

After that I drove up to Milwaukee to have dinner with my cousin Brett. I hadn’t gotten together with him in a while and it was good to see him. He’s really swamped with his job as a carpentry instructor for the union and we’ve been drifting apart lately. He has his own life and is building a good one despite having a lot of similar dents in his can just as I do.

We had a nice meal and talked about a lot of family stuff and he and I both agreed that it will never change and we got what we got and now the only thing we can do is try to have a decent life and not dwell on it. If we second guess we will both drive ourselves insane. It isn’t fair that other people get the love and support from their family and both of us didn’t.

It affects us but it also motivates us to be better at what we do. We’re both similar in that we have our share of vocal detractors who think we’re nuts but also a strong following of those who love us for our honesty and candor. He has to fight the politics in his job also.

After dinner I started driving back home and mentally started laying out my plan for how I am going to attack what I want to accomplish with the rest of my life. I have a lot of new recordings to edit and that should lead to two or maybe three CD projects but I had to put a lot of the money I had saved for that into my dental bills. But I still want to be able to do it in the near future so I can keep getting my name out and have something to sell also.

The bottom line is that I need to keep developing PRODUCTS. That’s the key. Whether it’s jokes or a movie script or a book or a CD or a comedy class I need to keep creating an even flow of products that can be sold. Thinking about it and talking about it are fine but I need to DO it. Not only that I need to do it in the right order and also be careful not to get burned out as I work on many projects at the same time while still trying to make a living.

I am up for the challenge because I have to be. Nobody is going to give me anything and I have to do it myself. It sure would be nice to get a little starter cash from somewhere but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. All I can do is my best and that’s what I will focus on. I have enough to keep me very busy for the next little while and none of it has anything to do with money. I have to put my ideas into action before it’s too late.

On the way home from Brett’s I drove past my father’s old house. I don’t know why but I felt I should. They must have finally sold it because it looked like a whole new place. The siding was replaced and they were in the process of giving it a new paint job. The old man is finally dead and life is moving on. Hopefully some new family will move in and have the happy life together that we never had. They won’t know all the pain and ugliness that was in that house for so many years. A home is not a building it’s a spirit. We never had that in that building and if it can’t be burned down at least they can repaint it and start over again.