Rance Rizzutto

This Friday I’ll be performing with The Beatbox at the Evanston Improv Festival. Hip-hop improv!

Oh boy…

So, a few days ago Deanna and I went to “a store” to get an array of supplies. One thing we needed was yellow ink for our printer. To get yellow ink you need to buy the three-color pack. This pack costs about $40. Not to bad, but $40 nonetheless.

As we get up to the cash register I’m watching things ring up on the screen. I swear I’m wrong on this, but the ink rang up as $1.19. What? I know I just saw him ring in the ink, but I don’t see the price on the screen.

I wait and check the receipt. I can’t believe it! Our $40 ink got rung up as a $1.19 soap dish! We must have had good karma!

…or not letting the store not was the start of some bad karma. Let’s find out, shall we?

Since we got the ink the gas in our sublet got disconnected. As in “the tenant isn’t paying the bill, let’s shut this down.” And yet the person we’re subletting for has been paying the bill all this time. There is a third party involve who made an incorrect address change, so our sublet-ee has been paying for the gas of his old apartment all this time. What does this mean in our sweet apartment? No heat (which isn’t that bad this time of year), no cooking, and apparently no dryer. That is all getting sorted out. And we are HOPING the dryer isn’t working because of the gas situation. If it doesn’t run on gas, that is another thing that has happened.

BUT WAIT! Also, our car leak is back. Some of you might remember our car had a leak that let water get into the sitting area. In a rain storm, that meant inches of water. We got it fixed before we left for an 8-month cruise ship stint and our car was a moldy mess when we got back. This time the car was super-clean, but after a rain storm a few day ago the carpets were wet a little again.

HOLD ON! The next fun thing is that our bank accounts (yes, plural) have been compromised. Weird charges have shown up on them both that have resulted in both ATM cards being shut-down. I suspect foul play at one of the wireless internet hotels along our road trip. Not only because we stayed at some semi-shady places, but one of our charges was from a shipping company specifically in the area we traveled.

The good news is I got out to an open mic last night and the material went really well. I have more stuff to test out, we’ll see how it goes.

A twelve-day adventure has come and gone. The trip meter on our car resets after 2000 miles, so it looks like we’ve only gone about 100 miles.

I’m tall. Sitting in cars isn’t comfortable for me and I wasn’t sure how I’d like being on the road. It was a blast! I’m sure I’ll be on the road in the future, hopefully to new parts of the country/planet.

For now, it is good to finally be back home and getting ready to get out there and perform. So, keep an eye out here for upcoming shows. I know for sure Deanna and I will be in the Dual Duel two-person improv competition with our first appearance on June 20th. The hip-hop improv of The Beatbox will be starting up soon with midnight shows at iO Chicago. You will probably be able to catch me at ComedySportz every now and then. But mostly you should be seeing me at open mics around the city. I had five months of writing with nowhere to get it in front of people. See you soon!

The FINAL day of traveling!

Deanna and I set a goal for today: don’t get up too early or leave too late. I set my alarm for 10:00am and said “If we wake up to this we have to bust butt!” Luckily we woke up at 9:00am and headed off to some quick coffee.

Today wasn’t about seeing anything at all. It was about getting home to Chicago, but not during Friday rush hour traffic.

Our stops were all about food and gas and bathrooms.

I bought a little book of logic puzzles for our flight to Hawaii back in November. I only had done one puzzle and never took it out again. As I reached into my backpack for it I remembered it being a Sudoku book, but it isn’t.

Our tactic this whole time has been to switch drivers every 100 miles. Sometimes one of us would go longer and sometimes one of us would get tired and need an early switch. Today we had 540 miles to cover and we discovered that doing logic puzzles while you weren’t driving made time fly!

We were thinking we would go through St. Louis and see the arch while we stayed on the freeway, but our route ended up taking us around the city. Guess we’ll have to go back.

Driving and driving and driving.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but our car doesn’t have AC. We have been REALLY lucky in that the temperature has been cold to moderate. Today was the opposite, and also one of our longer drives.

Luckily Deanna and I are able to do some quick over-the-phone gigs from time to time. Today we had to be up at 6:00am for one. It was over in about 30 minutes and we hit the road around 7:00am. This meant about 3 hours of okay temp.

We had from Amarillo, TX to Chicago left in our journey. Springfield, MO was pretty much the half way point. “We HAVE to at least make Springfield” I told Deanna.

I was hoping we would get there and maybe be able to get in an extra hundred miles or so. However, similar to our Grand Canyon experience, we were contacted by our friend Sarah Reule. Apparently she had been living in Missouri and would be in Springfield that night. So, we got a hotel, washed off the sweat of the road, and headed out to meet Sarah and Grant.

An extra part of the fun of this trip has been getting to see people along the way, whether expected or no.

For those of you who really know Deanna, and she’ll probably hate that I write this, she had a “moment.” She isn’t known for her knowledge of song lyrics. We were talking about that in comparison with my sister’s “pandora” as her husband calls it. When my sister gets a song in her head, everyone will probably get to hear the whole song. As Deanna and I were discussing on the drive she stated, “but when I get a song in my head it is just [humming] and then ‘oh what a feelin’! When I’m walking on the ceiling!”

That was supposed to be her singing the one line of the song she knew. If you’re familiar with the Lionel Richie song you’ll understand.

One more day to go! I think no matter when we leave we’ll hit some form of Chicago traffic.

In these last few days of our trip we’re not really stopping anywhere.

Santa Fe was the last of our “to see” list. Deanna loves it. We walked around a bit and took in the city…and a little too much sun.

I bought a flute. A wooden, native type flute. That was my major purchase of the trip.

From there we just headed straight to Amarillo, TX. Really, our high points have been sleeping and I’ve been catching up on Survivor.

As the days in our trip dwindle and the miles stay high we have to focus more on going the distance. Not to mention we’ll lose two hours on our trek home because Arizona doesn’t observe day light savings.

We didn’t really get on the road early, but not late either. Today was all about making it to the end destination.

Stop 1: Meteor Crater, AZ
Have you seen Starman, the John Carpenter movie? Well, that crater was just 6 miles out of our way so I stopped there. Turns out it was $15 per person, which makes it our most expensive stop yet. The crater was cool, but not $15 cool. Deanna was gung ho about going in, but labeled it a tourist trap as we left.

If you REALLY like Starman, and REALLY like NASA it will probably be worth your money.

We headed out from there along Route 66. We weren’t planning on following 66 exactly because many parts of the route go off the freeway through historic parts of towns. We DID do that in Gallup, NM. Kind of fun, but we didn’t really stop. We also made a quick stop at the Continental Divide.

Stop 2: Santa Fe, NM
Deanna really wanted to see stuff in New Mexico so we stopped in Santa Fe. As far as our drive is concerned, I really love their 75MPH freeway speed limit.

We ate at a restaurant called La Choza. Yelp said they had really good new mexican food. The enchiladas I had were great…spicier than I’m used to, but great.

We’ll be seeing more of the city tomorrow.