Welcome to Adamsville: Population One... except of course when Adam is performing at a comedy club and then the population increases to the capacity of the room. Exactly where is Adamsville, you ask?... it's a place inside Adam Ferrara's head, the place he always goes to when he's working the comedy club circuit. And although he says, "On the road all you have is you and lately I've been getting on my nerves," he sure hasn't been getting on his audiences' nerves. They always seem to love going along with him on these trips inside his head.

He was back home for a friend's wedding when I caught up with him for this interview, but consummate comic that he is he used the time in town to play the Manhattan clubs and test out new material before taking to the road again. "One of the things I love about Manhattan," says Ferrara, who now lives in LA, "is I can do five, six spots a night at different clubs. You start with an idea and by the time the evening is over, you either have a nice new bit or you have a bunch of pages in your note book you're going to rip out."

The new material, which I saw him working on at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, was fitting in seemlessly with his tried and tested routine. After Manhattan he's off to play a week in Vegas at Harrah's Improv, then it's Denver and then back to Nevada for another week, this time in Reno. He'll be in Chicago August 25th through the 29th playing the popular club Zanies. "That's Adamsville time," says Ferrara, "when you're on the road it's interview, lunch, nap ... interview, show, Denny's, sleep ... wake up, interview. You get robotic after awhile. When you get off a plane you've gotta look at the license plates to know where you are. 'Oh, I guess I am in Michigan.' You get drifted away. You're, like, in your own head 'cause you're alone and reality kinda hits you in the face." Ferrara has said in the past that sometimes he feels like he just comes back to reality to pick up his mail.

"I've always loved comedy," admits Ferrara, "I just didn't know I could make money doing it." He first stepped onto a comedy club stage, back in his hometown of Huntington, at an East Side Comedy open mike night back on July 13, 1988. His performance impressed an agent at Long Island's Omnipop so much that he actually got an offer for paying work right afterwards. "It was funny," relates Ferrara, "this guy Tom, from Omnipop, called me up after my first open mike and said 'Are you open next week?' ... And I was like, 'Yeah, you want to go bowling or something?' I didn't know what he wanted." Omnipop was offering Adam the chance to do his act at a little bar in Bayville. "And I went, 'I have an act? Okay.'" So he played Bayville the following week, and he's been performing stand-up professionally ever since. His first real break came not long afterwards, when he decided to participate in the Long Island competition for the National Lampoon/Gel Comedy Contest. "I just went down to do the show," says Ferrara, "I didn't think I would win or anything." But he walked away with the top prize which included a trip to Vegas to tape the contest's special for Showtime. From then on his career has been on a steady upward climb. He branched out into acting early in the '90s after landing a guest-starring roll on the Fox series Flying Blind.

Since then he's had a recurring role on NBC's Caroline in the City as well as stared in the UPN sitcom Social Studies. These days he can be seen in a series of commercials for the Olive Garden. And, although he has been popping up more and more on TV he still says he loves doing stand-up. "That's a world where I control everything," says Ferrara, "I write, I produce ... here are my thoughts, here's the way I do them, and here's what the audience thinks about them. It's all very immediate. When I'm on the road I can write something in the afternoon and try it out that night. Oh yeah, I still love stand-up."

To those who haven't had the chance to catch a live performance of Adam Ferrara's and join him on one of his many trips inside his own head all I can say, now that I've been to Adamsville is ... "having a great time, wish you were here!"

For those who would like to take the trip to Adamsville more often then Adam Ferrara's visits to your local comedy club will allow, you can purchase a copy of his recent CD "Have Some" by calling 323-876-5566.