I am an orphan and an officeless man

The Column: 09.30.22

Sep 30, 2022

I miss having an office to go to. I had friendly colleagues and employees, and we were in the entertainment biz so we got to work with a lot of lulus and lunatics and we kept flexible hours and laughed a lot. I liked that we were in the business of making serious people split a gut. I also liked getting dressed up for work in a suit and tie, which you need to do when you’re involved with frivolity. Now I go to work in my pajamas at the dining room table. I don’t know if “clothes make the man” but I know that pajamas do not make the man. They make me feel like going back to bed.

I loved walking in the front door in the morning at 9 a.m., the way the receptionist straightened up and smiled, the electric anticipation among the minions that the captain was on deck, the ship was about to sail. I don’t sense that same excitement in my wife when I walk into the kitchen in my pajamas. She says, “Your hair is standing up like a rooster’s and I think you should check your left nostril.”

At the office, I was the Decider. I sat at the end of the table and I told the staff: “No more singing dogs on the show and the one tuba player who played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ is enough: no more. I think we need a midget shot from a cannon and an acrobatic couple who work with two Percherons. And I say you can never have too many cat jugglers. The guy we booked who could keep six in the air simultaneously was a genius. Pay him whatever he asks.”

My staff was a bunch of college grads who thought in terms of jazz, folk, poetry, the arts, and didn’t understand the entertainment biz. They didn’t know raison d’être from a box of raisins. Art is art. You see a woman in a tutu swanning around, you think, “Everyone is so quiet, this must be good, I should be deeply moved.” You hear a folksinger do a traditional labor ballad, you feel like there’s going to be a quiz afterward. But you hear a man recite Allen Ginsberg backward while balancing a banana on his nose, and he finishes with “generation my of minds best the seen I’ve” and his pants fall down, you are stunned and delighted. And that’s entertainment. Now the biz has been taken over by angry millennials who’re out to use entertainment to make people feel wretched about themselves for the social injustices they failed to prevent. That’s why I left.

One of my favorite acts was a full-blooded Arapaho named Joe who danced and sang and twirled ropes and for a finale, he stood looking in a hand mirror at the stooge sitting fifty feet behind and he threw a tomahawk over his left shoulder and knocked the toupee off the stooge’s head without drawing blood. People protested this as stereotyping and we had to cancel the act. How could it be stereotyping when Joe was the only guy who could do it without mishap?

I produced the show every week, sitting in a little office, no credenza, a photograph on the wall of me and Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, except he wasn’t French, he didn’t know a word of French, that’s why he was a mime, he was from Pittsburgh and he did great jokes about Unitarians but they attacked him as insensitive so he turned to mime, which was very sensitive to the deaf.

I could feel the biz changing when my staff booked a stand-up who walked out and said, “You came here to laugh and be entertained, right? Well, guess again. I’m going to talk about the plastics you people use that are making this world uninhabitable.” He spoke for twenty minutes, no laughs, and got a standing ovation at the end. I resigned the next week.

So now I sit at my kitchen table, still in pajamas at noon, and the other day I found my talent as a musical flatulenteur. I ate an onion, grabbed my ankles, and farted “Malagueña” with enough left over for a few bars of “Chopsticks,” which you could never do today because it’d be insensitive to Hispanics and Chinese, but still, it’s a gift and I’m grateful for it.

Rescheduled shows - Details HERE

October 1 Mount Tabor, NJ moved to November 12

October 11 Bellefontaine, OH moved to February 3

October 13 Champaign, IL cancelled

October 15 Iola, KS moved to February 11

Shows unchanged.

October 21 Washington, D.C

November 6 West Bend, IL

November 19 Clinton Township, MI

November 26 New York, NY

November 28 Palm Desert, CA

December 4 Fort Lauderdale, FL

Ted Kettler

I used to go to an office to do my employed work. I liked the comradery of my workmates. Playful yet productive. We joked, shared stories and opinions, laughed, listened to music or donned headphones and went into our own little world. Despite our antics, we always got our work done in a timely manner. We usually went to lunch together on payday and bitched about the work over pizza and a Coke. Old friends would resign and go to better employment and be replaced by stiff, humorless serious overzealous dolts who found our workplace antics less than amusing that betrayed the meaning of the word employment. Buzzkills, and eventually these stiff suits replaced everyone and going to the office became dreadful. I always figured if I'm going to spend 8 hours of my life every day, 5 days a week doing something I don't want to do, I may as well have fun while I'm not enjoying doing it. Damn career types ruined it for everyone.

Then the internet became a thing and the next thing you know they're telling me that I can work from home if I want. Oh, really? So at the end of 2018 I began working from home 3 days a week. Then in mid-2019 I was full time from home and to this day I still enjoy that quiet solitude in my home office. I still get dressed in something resembling southern work attire if my job was to deliver drinks to people around my pool or as a professional dog walker. Most days I'm in shorts and t-shirt that has a drawing of a motorcycle on it with the caption "Mobil Device". My co-worker now is our 4-year old golden retriever "Rosie" who lays right next to the wheels on my chair, prohibiting me from moving. She knows what she's doing, making sure daddy doesn't go anywhere.

Occasionally I'll have conversations with co-workers via Microsoft Teams and I'll entertain them with silly made up stories about crotchety curmudgeons and the Harbingers of Doom Quilting Club made up of Hell's Angels members and grandmothers from the Edmeston NY board of education. But those moments are few and far between. Ah, the good old days.

So, just get up in the morning and put your big boy pants on, fix your hair and check your nose. Make yourself and your bride feel like you have something important to do, like write another Lake Wobegon story, I sense you have a few more in you.

Expand full comment