<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" (It&amp;#039;s more of a dirge, actually) Story By SCOTT RAAB The maestros make it seem easy. It&amp;#039;s the mojo, the chi, the flow. They don&amp;#039;t work the job; they work wonder. They be what they do. Plumber, barber, shoedog, chef--you know a maestro when you find one. You brag him up to all your friends: He&amp;#039;s the best. The best--trust me. He&amp;#039;ll take care of you.  A comedy maestro? That&amp;#039;s solid gold, brother. A guy who makes me laugh, I owe him somehow. I love him like sunshine and tell my friends to look for him. Everybody Loves Raymond, yo--check it out. They didn&amp;#039;t like it. Twenty million people watch the show every Monday night, millions more dig it in syndication, and I don&amp;#039;t know any of &amp;#039;em. Seinfeld? Sure--best sitcom ever. The Simpsons? Genius. Everybody Loves Raymond? Eh. Maybe it&amp;#039;s the Edge Factor, that thing HBO milks so well: It&amp;#039;s Not TV Because Someone Just Said &amp;quot;Cocksucker.&amp;quot; Hell, maybe you don&amp;#039;t love Raymond, either. Maybe you think his show, despite its Chekhovian probing of the delicious miseries of marriage and family, is a bit too Bea Arthur for a hipster like yourself. Maybe if you&amp;#039;re gonna watch any show about an East Coast Italian clan stuck in the sludge of love and hostility, it&amp;#039;ll be the stiff, gassy corpse of The Sopranos, where the mope-opera Grand Guignol bushwa is so untrue to life, it makes ELR play like a newsreel. Well, you can have the depressive brute with the cash-stuffed duffel bag and the endless string of yielding, wet-lipped women. Me, I&amp;#039;ll take Everyman. I&amp;#039;ll take the nebbish who can&amp;#039;t get laid, won&amp;#039;t grow up, and doesn&amp;#039;t want anybody mad at him. I&amp;#039;ll take the mama&amp;#039;s boy who--in real life--was still living in his parents&amp;#039; house at age twenty-nine. In their basement. I&amp;#039;ll take Ray Romano, the leading man of weenie, the maestro of morose. His show&amp;#039;s funny, but it ain&amp;#039;t pretty; it isn&amp;#039;t edgy, but it cuts deep. The most painfully poignant TV moment I&amp;#039;ve seen in years--not counting Jason Alexander&amp;#039;s first ad for KFC--came during an episode in which Ray&amp;#039;s wife is trying to get him to at least consider marriage counseling because she just can&amp;#039;t seem to nag his sorry ass off the sofa. &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t I sometimes watch TV?&amp;quot; Ray whines, pouting. And Ray&amp;#039;s TV mom, hovering nearby, tells his wife, &amp;quot;Raymond is a very hard worker and sometimes needs to relax.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Of course,&amp;quot; his wife says to Ray, ignoring her mother-in-law, &amp;quot;but why is it such a battle to get you to do anything?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I dunno.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why I want to go to counseling. I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s that you&amp;#039;re just lazy--I think there&amp;#039;s a deeper reason behind it. If we could just figure it out, you and I could be happier.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You know me,&amp;quot; Ray says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s not much deepness. I just--I like to be taken care of.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But you gotta understand, Ray, that that&amp;#039;s not a wife--that&amp;#039;s a mother.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; squeaks Romano in a ten-year-old&amp;#039;s voice, &amp;quot;maybe that&amp;#039;s what I want.&amp;quot; Everything stops dead right there. No big deal--a Psych 101 insight. But who ever admits it even to himself, much less confesses it out loud?  The actors hold the take. The studio audience laughs, but their laughter is soon buried in a long &amp;quot;Oooooh . . .&amp;quot; They actually sound frightened. And Raymond, agape at what he&amp;#039;s just heard himself say, shouts, &amp;quot;Holy crap!&amp;quot; in a dead-on impression of his TV dad&amp;#039;s voice.  He knows he&amp;#039;s stuck. And you know he&amp;#039;s stuck, too, one foot in his parents&amp;#039; marriage, one in his own, half boy and half man and too half-assed to move. And it&amp;#039;s a pain in the butt to be stuck there, but it&amp;#039;s even more of a pain to do much about it, which never happens on ELR, and rarely in real life, because getting stuck right there is what we all do: Homer and Marge, Ralph and Alice, me and my wife, you and yours. Every one of us. That&amp;#039;s why, sooner or later, everybody loves Raymond--except, of course, Ray Romano. It&amp;#039;s one thing to get the boy out of the basement, another to get the basement out of the boy. He&amp;#039;s bigger than you think, six two and solid, slope-shouldered and long-muscled. He&amp;#039;s wearing the blue shirt, of course, his comedy shirt, with a twenty-dollar Casio strapped to his wrist. His shiny black hair is cowlicked. He&amp;#039;s got an oversized, old-country nose--hell, his whole noggin is huge, a big boy&amp;#039;s cantaloupe, except for the eyes. They&amp;#039;re close-set, dark, and hooded, tired after the flight from L. A., wary from forty-five years of fretting, asking the stand-up comic&amp;#039;s eternal hangdog question: &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;m I doin&amp;#039;?&amp;quot;  Ray&amp;#039;s doin&amp;#039; all right. He&amp;#039;s back home in New York City for Thanksgiving, the boy next door made good--the People&amp;#039;s Choice, the only stand-up ever to win the Best Actor Emmy, a top-ten show, a near-million bucks per episode (plus a slice of the $300 million syndication pie), a new ten-thousand-square-foot SoCal homestead with a putting green out back, four healthy children, a good marriage. The evidence is everywhere: Even the Lord loves Raymond. Which means, as far as Ray&amp;#039;s concerned, he&amp;#039;s going nowhere but down. He&amp;#039;s worried. His hands natter like a pair of peasant women at their baking, kneading and twisting, patting and squeezing, fluttering to and fro while the rest of him slouches in a cheap motel chair upstairs at The Late Show. Ray&amp;#039;s worried about Dave&amp;#039;s mood--never mind that tonight marks his sixteenth appearance on Letterman&amp;#039;s show, that it was Dave himself who, back in 1995, saw in Ray the possibility of sitcom glory, which led to Everybody Loves Raymond, which has showered gold upon CBS and Dave&amp;#039;s production company, Worldwide Pants. Ray&amp;#039;s worried that it&amp;#039;s cheesy to go out there and plug the DVD release of Ice Age, a smash kiddie flick starring Ray&amp;#039;s humpty, dweeb-outta-Queens stammer. And he&amp;#039;s worried that a bit about helping his four-year-old son wipe his tuchus is too poopycentric for Letterman, whose goyish distaste for toilet humor is legendary. But mainly, right now, Ray&amp;#039;s worried about the Turtle Guy, about wounding the Turtle Guy&amp;#039;s feelings with a new bit. Ray tries it out in the dressing room on Anna, his wife, and Rory Rosegarten, his longtime manager, and me and my tape recorder, which Ray eyes with fear.  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if this is gonna be off the record or not,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Leave it on for now--because if I do the bit, then it&amp;#039;s obviously on the record. So we have this new house--it&amp;#039;s big, blah-blah-blah--and we have a guy to take care of the pool, and a gardener, and, my wife told me the other day, we have a turtle guy.&amp;quot; Anna, small and blond and perfectly sweet--they met twenty years ago at a bank in Queens where they worked as tellers--says, &amp;quot;We have turtles.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Lemme do it!&amp;quot; Ray hollers, and then remembers my tape recorder. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t yellin&amp;#039; there,&amp;quot; he groans. The voice was definitely raised, I say. &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah, because I had to cut her off quick, before she gives it up.&amp;quot; Rory, pacing across from Ray, points down to Ray&amp;#039;s unzipped zipper. Ray zips. &amp;quot;Full service,&amp;quot; Rory beams. &amp;quot;So we have this fountain,&amp;quot; says Ray, resuming, &amp;quot;with a little concrete pool around it that has turtles, and once a week they have to be serviced. They have to be fed, whatever, so we have a turtle guy. So I tell my wife, &amp;#039;Look, do me a favor: Just don&amp;#039;t have an affair with this guy, okay? Because I don&amp;#039;t wanna have to tell my friends that my wife left me for the turtle guy.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Rory laughs. I&amp;#039;m laughing. Anna&amp;#039;s not even smiling.  &amp;quot;My thing is,&amp;quot; says Ray, &amp;quot;is it insulting to the Turtle Guy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Come on,&amp;quot; Rory tells him, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s in fun.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah--but am I demeaning his thing, you know?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, it&amp;#039;s funny. What, he&amp;#039;s gonna poison your turtles? It&amp;#039;s funny. I think it&amp;#039;s great, and I&amp;#039;ll tell you something--he&amp;#039;ll love the bit, and he&amp;#039;s gonna know it&amp;#039;s him, and he&amp;#039;ll tell all his friends.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Maybe I can say afterward, &amp;#039;By the way, I know the guy, he&amp;#039;s a good guy, he&amp;#039;s a decent man.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Just listen to what you&amp;#039;re doing,&amp;quot; Rory pleads, throwing up his hands. &amp;quot;Just listen to what you&amp;#039;re doing here.&amp;quot; Maybe Ray&amp;#039;s worried that the Turtle Guy might take offense and quit. A Turtle Guy has to be tough to replace--how many could there be, even in L. A.?--and Anna will be pissed at Ray if he goes. Or maybe Ray&amp;#039;s a really sensitive guy himself. Or neurotic. Or all of the above. Ray looks over at me. &amp;quot;I have negative grandiosity,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what my therapist said.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s absolutely fine,&amp;quot; sighs Rory, &amp;quot;and it&amp;#039;s gonna get a huge laugh.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Ray splutters, &amp;quot;but, but, but, but, but . . .&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s slamming the Turtle Guy,&amp;quot; says Rory. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fine.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;All right,&amp;quot; says Ray. He pulls out two sheets of paper, notes for what to cover out there with Dave. He looks up at the monitor in the corner of the room when Letterman starts talking about him after the monologue. &amp;quot;Great guy,&amp;quot; Letterman&amp;#039;s saying. &amp;quot;What a nice guy, what a nice man, couldn&amp;#039;t be more successful, and it&amp;#039;s all well deserved.&amp;quot; Ray winces. &amp;quot;He don&amp;#039;t mean a word of it,&amp;quot; he says.  Out in the hall, the ganja fumes wafting from the dressing room of tonight&amp;#039;s musical guests, Jurassic 5, smell like trouble to Ray. &amp;quot;Jesus. I gotta get outta that--I don&amp;#039;t like that. I&amp;#039;ll be more paranoid. Believe it or not, I can get more paranoid. Dave will become the Turtle Guy.&amp;quot; Ray does fifteen minutes with Dave, his hands and his uh-uh-uh nasal drone working the whole while. He plugs Ice Age, leans over to the desk after the Turtle Guy bit to add, &amp;quot;By the way, he&amp;#039;s a great guy,&amp;quot; and tells the poopy story without curling Letterman&amp;#039;s lip. Afterward, back in the dressing room, a producer assures Ray that Dave seemed to be enjoying himself. &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah, yeah,&amp;quot; Ray moans. &amp;quot;But was he forcin&amp;#039; it, though?&amp;quot;  Nebbish. Dweeb. Mama&amp;#039;s boy. I say these things with utmost respect. With love. With awe, even. Because it takes a certain greatness of soul to be Any Guy, to work a clean act, to connect with our collective Inner Weenie, the archetype of every man addled by his mom, busted by his wife, commanded by his toddler to the john to help wipe ass. He must let their songs sing him. He must keep close his doubts and fears. He must be fucking nuts. Here, too, the evidence is everywhere. Just check out the metal storage cabinet across from his desk in his office out in Burbank and you&amp;#039;ll see a dozen or more uncracked economy-size bottles of Scope filling three shelves--mouthwash enough to float a yacht and freshen Andy Rooney&amp;#039;s bung. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m very nervous about my oral hygiene,&amp;quot; he confesses. &amp;quot;We eat a lotta sushi. We come back from lunch, I don&amp;#039;t wanna smell like halibut all afternoon. I got tongue scrapers in there, too. One year, I gave everybody tongue scrapers. I got Letterman a tongue scraper.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s wearing the blue shirt. Not the exact same blue shirt anymore--that was in the old days, twelve years of stand-up to make the mortgage and feed his first three kids; he&amp;#039;d go from club to club polishing his act, come home in the wee hours, and Anna would wash and dry and iron the blue shirt. Now he&amp;#039;s got blue shirts for Letterman, blue shirts for the six-figure weekend stand-up gigs in Vegas, blue button-downs, blue plaids, and blue T-shirts for Everybody Loves Raymond.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s my color,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Richard Lewis has black. And Johnny Cash. Rip Taylor has everything else. My wife--if she had her way, she&amp;#039;d have me in Armani shirts. What she doesn&amp;#039;t realize is that it has to be conducive to comedy--and by that I don&amp;#039;t mean it has to be a funny-looking shirt. If I wore a red shirt and I had a bad set, I&amp;#039;m not gonna blame the shirt, but I&amp;#039;m not gonna thank it, either. It&amp;#039;s not superstition--it&amp;#039;s just a matter of, I can&amp;#039;t be funny in this shirt. I&amp;#039;ll fight anyone who tries to disprove that. Blue just works for me.&amp;quot; Down the hall from his office is the writers&amp;#039; room, where Ray and a chorus of wits warble his song. It is empty now--after five on Friday evening--but you can feel their joyful agony as they punch up and stamp out episodes, twenty-four weeks per season, year after year. Well, you can&amp;#039;t feel it, not really, but you can read it on the walls, up on the big marker boards they use for inspiration, one jammed with Raymondese--rows of words Ray has misused or mispronounced (Kimono dragon, premeate for permeate; the classics, like Inesteen for Einstein, are in red)--and a less crowded board listing the difficult or obscure words (epiphany, hypnagogic) he has used or pronounced correctly, shocking his more literary teammates.  &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; says Ray, who flunked out of two high schools, dropped out of two colleges, pumped gas until he was robbed, twice, at gunpoint, and left the bank job to deliver futons by day while he found his feet as an open-mike stand-up, &amp;quot;these Ivy League fucks like throwin&amp;#039; their educations around.&amp;quot; There is a third board, a weirder board. &amp;quot;I have to have sex with my wife,&amp;quot; reads one of the phrases written there. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the only way I can come.&amp;quot; And, &amp;quot;The point is, poorly drawn Ray likes to suck even more poorly drawn penis.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You shouldn&amp;#039;t see that board,&amp;quot; says Ray. &amp;quot;Those are things that&amp;#039;ve been said that people find quotable. You gotta remember, you&amp;#039;re in a writers&amp;#039; room. You have to encourage all these things. Nothing is sacred.&amp;quot; Nothing sacred, no holds barred, nobody&amp;#039;s hurt feelings truly matter--not the wife&amp;#039;s, not the weenie&amp;#039;s, and surely not the Turtle Guy&amp;#039;s. The sole sacrament is the laugh. Ray Romano is a sweetheart, but you don&amp;#039;t become a comedy maestro without leaving a spoor of blood. Twelve years of trudging the stand-up trail takes no less a battler than those bulvans with their scrota stuffed into spandex tights, crushing skulls to win the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Without the laugh, you don&amp;#039;t kill: You die.  &amp;quot;I was never goin&amp;#039; for a treasure chest,&amp;quot; Ray says. &amp;quot;I just dreamed of being a stand-up comedian--that was the treasure. I used to go into the city and do seven shows on a Saturday night; each club would give me $50, and I&amp;#039;d come home with $350 cash in my pocket. I was doin&amp;#039; what I loved to do, and I had the money to buy the kids sneakers. I&amp;#039;m nostalgic for that. I want that feeling again.&amp;quot; A stand-up warrior, impervious to pain, a Star Search also-ran--in 1990, he lost to some yutz named Geechy Guy--he soldiered on, bellied his way up to the middle, or maybe a notch above. In &amp;#039;91, a spot on Carson, then Leno, an HBO special, and, yeah, he was a name, a headliner, but there he stuck; at a time when every stand-up with a pulse had a TV pilot, Raymond was still gigging weekends in Atlantic City.  &amp;quot;This guy was getting a development deal, that guy was getting a development deal&amp;quot;--even now, he can&amp;#039;t mouth the phrase without sneering. &amp;quot;Someone would see &amp;#039;em at the Montreal festival and sign &amp;#039;em. &amp;#039;Here&amp;#039;s a hundred thousand--we&amp;#039;re gonna come up with sump&amp;#039;n.&amp;#039; Left and right, comics that-.-.-.- ehhhhhhh&amp;quot;--this ritardando, too, is part of Raymond&amp;#039;s song--&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been around twelve years, and these comics that&amp;#039;d been around three, four, five--all right, so what? They&amp;#039;re entitled to get what they can get. But I had done all you could do--all the things you do to get seen. Nobody was knockin&amp;#039; on my door.&amp;quot;  He had a wife and three kids and a small house in Queens. He was making, in a good year, $90K. Doin&amp;#039; okay. But when the sitcom suits would hit the clubs to roust stand-ups for the next casting call--lemme see him, him, and him--Romano would blow the audition. &amp;quot;We would go in and read, and I would be horrible, and that would be the end of it. The auditioning thing--I was really bad at it. I would be really good in my bedroom, and then I would clam up with five people sittin&amp;#039; on a couch.&amp;quot; His big break appeared to come in 1994, when he was cast for NewsRadio. Eight thousand dollars an episode, national exposure every week.  &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t believe it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I was gonna be on a TV show, and I knew the show was gonna make it, knew it was gonna get picked up.&amp;quot; The show made it. Raymond got the old heave-ho before the pilot was shot. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s gonna sound like bullshit, but I was a little relieved when I got fired--because I knew I wasn&amp;#039;t cuttin&amp;#039; it. It&amp;#039;s like if you were plopped into the PGA tournament, and you know, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m gonna get exposed soon, it won&amp;#039;t be long till I shank one.&amp;#039; I felt it during the rehearsals. It wasn&amp;#039;t as devastating as it sounds. I lose that job and I&amp;#039;m still doin&amp;#039; what I love to do and makin&amp;#039; a living.  &amp;quot;Plus, failure--it centers me. Too much success has me thinking, All right, what&amp;#039;s goin&amp;#039; on? The only thing that saves me now is it&amp;#039;s so hard, the creative side of it. One show is over, the next one&amp;#039;s gotta be written, and that is so fuckin&amp;#039; hard that you can&amp;#039;t even sit back. Ya gotta be funny, ya gotta write it, ya gotta create funny stuff. You&amp;#039;re consumed by that.&amp;quot; Ray&amp;#039;s not complaining--he yells this into the tape recorder: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not complaining!&amp;quot;--about the reality that actual failure is many years and tens of millions of dollars behind him. Any schmuck can fail without succeeding: That&amp;#039;s easy to do and to explain. Failure after success--that&amp;#039;s scary. Success gives you lots of things to worry about losing and plenty of time to stoke your fear into an aria of sniveling terror. That&amp;#039;s the tune he carries from the writers&amp;#039; cage back to an editing room, where he&amp;#039;s at work on a tape he&amp;#039;s putting together for a friend&amp;#039;s fiftieth birthday party back in New York.  &amp;quot;I really wish I could be there, Harry,&amp;quot; Raymond says on the tape, staring at the camera, &amp;quot;so we could swap antidepressant stories, share rashes, and exchange talcum-powder recipes.&amp;quot; Suddenly, watching himself on the monitor, he shrieks, &amp;quot;Turn that off for a second! One of my eyes is bigger than the other. Just look at that--look at the left eye and right eye. That&amp;#039;s probably the beginning of that drooping disease--what&amp;#039;s it called? Look at my left eye! Look at my right eye! Lisa Lopes--Left-Eye Lopes! Christ!&amp;quot; As happy as a man alive in misery can be, miserable as any happy man alive: Sing, maestro, sing.  Next season will be ELR&amp;#039;s eighth and, odds are, its last. Worried he has overstayed his TV welcome and grown fat on a diet of studio laughs, Ray will take a shot at fresh failure as a movie actor. Already, he has read many scripts and taken meetings with names even more freighted with intrigue and stardust than &amp;quot;Raymond,&amp;quot; names like &amp;quot;Milos&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Winona&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Dustin.&amp;quot; Romano has become a very good actor, an actor of range and nuance, but he has brought along his dread. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very scary. There&amp;#039;s a lot goin&amp;#039; against you when you come from a sitcom and you&amp;#039;re doin&amp;#039; a movie. People are watching--&amp;#039;All right, well, who are you to think you can play with the big boys?&amp;#039; You gotta be careful, man. You do that first one and--God, I don&amp;#039;t know. I don&amp;#039;t know what the right choice is, but if you make the wrong one? There are so many sitcom actors who did that--one movie and that&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot; This, too . . . &amp;quot;You can look at it from a box-office point of view, and if you choose a project which you know is gonna make good money, then you will have an opportunity again to maybe choose what you wanna do after that. Or do you go for something that isn&amp;#039;t gonna be a box-office success? There may be critical acclaim, but if you fall on your face, it&amp;#039;s hard to recover from.&amp;quot; . . . is . . . &amp;quot;This movie thing is new to me. When you wanna play a character, you need to explore the back story--you have to go in knowin&amp;#039; where this guy grew up and how he lived and what makes him what he is. I remember Dustin askin&amp;#039; me, &amp;#039;Why&amp;#039;s this guy livin&amp;#039; in this town? Why d&amp;#039;ya think he isn&amp;#039;t married?&amp;#039;--and I hadn&amp;#039;t even explored that. I thought, Dustin&amp;#039;s dealin&amp;#039; with an amateur. It&amp;#039;s not negative grandiosity--it&amp;#039;s just negativity. He seemed like he liked me, but so do you.&amp;quot; . . . Raymond&amp;#039;s song. . . . &amp;quot;Next I heard, a week later, Dustin&amp;#039;s out. In this business, you never know what the reasons are: He pulled out cuzza money, cuzza his schedule. You don&amp;#039;t know. He&amp;#039;s not doin&amp;#039; the movie. I swear to God, I think it was me. I&amp;#039;m sure they didn&amp;#039;t offer him what he wanted, but he would&amp;#039;ve fought a little harder had he thought this has a chance of working with Ray Romano.&amp;quot; Misery ages; we die a little more each day, and yet our songs remain the same. Still, we can&amp;#039;t leave Raymond--not yet, not out in Burbank, where the storm clouds spritz tinsel and even failure drives a Hummer.  No, let&amp;#039;s leave him in Queens instead, where Raymond&amp;#039;s song began, down in his folks&amp;#039; basement. His mom and dad, Lucille and Albert Romano, live in the same small Cape Cod--&amp;quot;That house I grew up in,&amp;quot; Ray had told me, &amp;quot;is as big as my bedroom and my wife&amp;#039;s closet&amp;quot;--where they raised Raymond and his brothers.  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re just content here, you know?&amp;quot; Lucie says in a voice inflected just like Ray&amp;#039;s. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s more comfortable now than it was with three boys running around, so why should we move?&amp;quot; Lucie, a Juilliard grad who still teaches piano, is the lively, outgoing one; Albert, a retired civil engineer who now works, when he feels like it, as a real estate broker, has the wry and stoic crust. Her eyes dance; his roll.  Sunlight pours through the kitchen window. A fresh dozen from Dunkin&amp;#039; sits on the table--Albert had a coupon--and the coffee is just ready to pour. Nice people, good people, proud of Raymond--it&amp;#039;s always &amp;quot;Raymond&amp;quot; to Mom, although you get the feeling that when they&amp;#039;re together, she calls him &amp;quot;Ray&amp;quot; once in a while--and proud of Richard and Robert, their other boys, too. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re very lucky with our sons,&amp;quot; Lucie says. &amp;quot;The three of them are dolls, yeah. They are.&amp;quot; On Monday nights, they sit in the den that doubles as a dining room for holidays and watch their son, and Lucie catches him six nights a week in syndication at 11:30. Other than that, and the trips to Los Angeles for the Emmys, life hasn&amp;#039;t much changed.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like it&amp;#039;s the most normal thing in the world,&amp;quot; says Lucie, &amp;quot;but I think about it once in a while. My friend said to me, &amp;#039;You just don&amp;#039;t realize the enormity of it.&amp;#039; Maybe not, I dunno. It still hasn&amp;#039;t all dawned on us. Raymond is Raymond still--he hasn&amp;#039;t changed. He hasn&amp;#039;t changed at all.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He bought us a car the first year,&amp;quot; Albert says.  &amp;quot;The one outside,&amp;quot; says Lucie. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a Malibu, Chevy Malibu, brand-new.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m upstairs,&amp;quot; Albert remembers, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;m lookin&amp;#039; out the bedroom window, and I see a car, and it&amp;#039;s got a big red ribbon on the top of it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was crying,&amp;quot; Lucie says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a consolation to know I&amp;#039;m not gonna have to worry about my old age, ya know?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Ya know,&amp;quot; says Albert, &amp;quot;he makes in one episode what it took me twenty years to make in salary.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We never expected it,&amp;quot; Lucie says. &amp;quot;When people used to ask me, What does your son do? I would burst out laughing. It was unbelievable to me that my son is this stand-up comedian.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He had a variety of jobs,&amp;quot; says Albert. &amp;quot;He used to wash trucks, then he was at a gas station.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;This was when he had quit college.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He got held up a couple of times at a gas station.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, the second time, we said, &amp;#039;Out!&amp;#039; &amp;quot; The basement has changed. Nobody&amp;#039;s living down there anymore, of course, and when I ask to check it out, it turns out to be a battleground.  &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a pack rat,&amp;quot; says Lucie. &amp;quot;We cannot sell this house. You know why?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh, boy,&amp;quot; Albert says, grinning like an angel.  &amp;quot;Because when we went down once to clean out the basement, he can&amp;#039;t part with a rubber band. He&amp;#039;s taken over the garage, the basement, and the front bedroom. Every box from every office he worked at, he&amp;#039;s got.&amp;quot; Lucie&amp;#039;s smiling, too. They&amp;#039;ve sung this song a few million times. The door to the basement stairway is off the kitchen, just behind my chair at the table. Albert walks me down; Lucie stays put. &amp;quot;It was fixed like a studio apartment, you know,&amp;quot; Lucie shouts down at us, &amp;quot;with a little couch.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s some of their trophies yet, over there,&amp;quot; says Albert. The old softball trophies, the rusting Exercycle, the autographed photo of William Shatner still hung on one wood-paneled wall--I&amp;#039;m sniffin&amp;#039; weenie. And there it is, over by the washer-dryer: the water heater. This was one of Raymond&amp;#039;s early bits, about living with his parents and bringing his date back to this basement lair: &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d brag, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s the hot-water heater--right there. Anyone wants to take a shower in this house gotta go through me.&amp;quot; Upstairs, Lucie instructs Albert to give me a lift to the subway and tells me to catch the E train back to Manhattan. &amp;quot;I tell a lotta my pupils&amp;#039; parents,&amp;quot; she says before I go, &amp;quot;not all children go home and do their homework and get beautiful grades. I tell &amp;#039;em, Don&amp;#039;t give up. Some have to be worked with, ya know?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1155/esq0503-may-romano-rev/>