Negotiating Happiness and Relaxation

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

The first time I worked The Comedy Store in La Jolla was in early 1981, shortly after my duo act, Rick & Ruby, had moved to LA from San Francisco. Back then Mitzi, owner of the Comedy Store, owned two condominiums where comics stayed for the 3 to 4 day run.

Flash forward to 2013 and close to 40 weeks of work there over that time both solo and with the duo, and we still stay at that same beachside condo in the San Diego coastal suburb of Pacific Beach.  Recently some long-needed improvements were finally made on it. Even though the shows are now only limited to weekends, so much of the whole vibe of the gig remains exactly the same.

This past weekend brought back some good and bad memories of Condo #19. The good was the perennial pleasure of the condo being right on the beach, and being awakened every morning by the sound of the ocean. The bad was the sometime inconvenience of sharing the condo with others, some of whom were good friends, but some of whom I didn’t know at all. Then there was the occasional comic who brought his entire family for a bit of a working holiday.

In 2011 I started working there again after an 11-year hiatus, and this was my 5th time there since. On two occasions, no one else used the condo but me, which was great for me and Eileen when we were there in early 2012. Now I’m in a new relationship (much sooner than I expected), and my partner rode down with me from San Francisco, where she lives. We were hoping for the sort of bliss that had happened before, but the prospects didn’t look good, as the headline act had brought his wife and three children.

This still left a room for us to stay in, but the final whammy came after we’d gone out for a light meal. When we came back, there were two more bags on the bed we thought we’d claimed, and out of the bathroom emerged a young dude in his 20’s. Turns out he was the opening act, had been told he could stay in the same room as ours, and didn’t seem to think there was much wrong with that.

The one thing I always hated about doing the road in the 80’s and 90’s was when the clubs stopped providing individual hotel lodging and opted for a comedians’ condo, where you’d become an instant roommate with someone who very possibly the one thing you had in common was your profession. Several times I was coupled with someone much younger than me whose primary interests were getting high, getting drunk, and getting laid.  Not that I would have been much different at his age, but a decade had gone by, and I had different priorities. The young man in La Jolla didn’t appear to be the budding party animal, thankfully, but not exactly what I wanted to impose on my lady, either.  His appearance meant EIGHT people sharing a two-bedroom condo, and I was visualizing what it would be like to live in India.

My partner was not happy, first saying “I’m getting a hotel room” followed closely by “or maybe just getting on a flight back to San Francisco,” which essentially meant “This relationship is in danger unless you figure something else out.”  Somehow, “This has never happened before,” didn’t seem to work as a adequate explanation, though it was the truth. The opener had always been a local San Diegan, usually someone who worked at the club, who didn’t stay at the condo. It was a total shock to me that they’d actually sent an opener/emcee down from LA.

And all this was happening only an hour before I was due to go onstage.

I decided the only option was going to the club, explaining the over-crowding, and asking if they could find us a decent local hotel. They did so rather quickly, and it was only a couple of blocks away from the condo, so we’d have no trouble finding it. We planned to check in after I did the first show, which happily was to a wonderful crowd, as would be all four shows this weekend! So there was that added boost of killing in the first show, and now I’d have my girlfriend happy and liking me again.

The hotel was a resort called the Catamaran, with exotic birds on the premises, plus beautiful views of the Pacific, an inland bay, and in the distance, the San Diego skyline.  However, when we got there between acts, neither Brian Seff nor Rick Right was on their reservation list. Oops! Turned out that in the club manager’s haste to get things done, he’d arranged the reservation for the 29th, not the 20th (probably punched a 9 instead of a 0 when typing) and there were no rooms available. Ah, but my girlfriend is a professional mediator, and used those skills to ask the Right Questions, which persuaded the girl at the counter to suddenly find us a room. I was reminded of Eddie Murphy in “Beverly Hills Cop” using the “I’m Michael Jackson’s road manager” ploy to get a suite at a posh hotel that claimed to be full.

We wound up in a full suite, albeit a handicap-accessible one, and the Store chipped in some comp tickets for future shows to the helpful and delightful hotel staff.

The next day the gods smiled on us again, as it was a lovely cloudless day in San Diego, the crowds for both shows were tremendous, and there would be more room in the condo, as the headliner’s family would be going back to LA Saturday afternoon, leaving some breathing room. And to make things even better, Young Dude also decided he was going to drive back to LA after the show, leaving one room all ours.

I’m looking forward to La Jolla again in the Spring, with the caveat that I will make sure who’s on the bill and what their lodging plans are before inviting anybody along for the ride.

So here I am back in San Francisco, mostly chilling before I go back to UK Thursday. I’m exhausted from the two days of driving back, but it would have felt like a much longer drive if I’d had to do it alone.

September 24th, 2013



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