Loving Rita

I’m trying to think of the first time I saw comedian Rita Rudner. Alas, I missed her performances on Broadway as a dancer in the casts of Follies and Mack and Mabel and as Lily St. Regis in Annie. I lived in Missouri at the time, and I don’t think Nellie Pearl Jones was going to let a pre-teen Randy hop a Greyhound and head to the Big Apple. 

Known for her epigrammatic one-liners, Rita Rudner most likely first caught my eye as a guest on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, where, no doubt, she hit her comedy goal by getting me to laugh “three times a minute.” She has had my heart - and my admiration - ever since. 

But here’s the kicker. I sorta, kinda know Rita Rudner now. At least, she knows me well enough to remember that I go by “Randy” and not “Randall,” so I’m choosing to parlay that into characterizing our relationship as that of “close friends.”

Well, at least the marvelous Rita Rudner has agreed to appear on my feel-good podcast, not just once but twice. And though there’s an enthusiastic audience situated at the other end of my podcast audio feed, I always feel like Rita Rudner is there for the sole purpose of entertaining me. AND I LOVE IT!

In preparation for “An Evening with Rita Rudner” at Artis-Naples on March 23, Rita wowed me again, with the finished episode available at www.Jones.Show or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rita had me laughing about marriage, sniffing dogs, and bank robbers before we dissed my pal, Siri, alongside Bill and Melinda Gates. Then there’s the one that made me snort - about her new dog, a rescue she “found on the streets of Hollywood with a broken leg and an unproduced screenplay.”

I also know I loved her live and in-person in Las Vegas in 20XX. I’m not sure of the date because the house-filling favorite opened as one of the hottest tickets in town in June 2000. Over the course of a multi-year run, she sold almost two million tickets, grossed over a hundred million dollars, and became the longest-running solo female comedy show in the history of Las Vegas.

And now she’s coming here. And I’m going to be there, anxious to hear whatever Rita Rudner has on her mind.

But what I really love about Rita Rudner is that, despite everything that is going on in the world, she continues to look for the funny. She chooses to view every person and scenario through a gloriously unique Ritafied lens, and we, the fans, are the lucky beneficiaries of her humor-imbued peripheral vision.

Simply said: Rita Rudner - what a sight!

For tickets go to https://artisnaples.org/events/.

For more on author, podcaster & speaker Randall Kenneth Jones, visit RandallKennethJones.com. For the JONES.SHOW Podcast, visit www.Jones.Show or search for Jones.Show wherever you get your podcasts.