Personal Life
Giraldo was married twice. His first marriage was at the age of 23, and lasted for two years. In a 2005 interview, Giraldo stated that he had been married for seven years to his second wife, a former Caroline's comedy club waitress, and that they had three sons, ages five, three and nearly two. Giraldo had a tattoo on his right bicep, which read "Maryann 1-23-99," which was his second wife's name, and the date they were married. Giraldo and Maryann separated in 2008. At the time of Giraldo's death, he was divorced.
Giraldo had a very distinctive tattoo on his left forearm, which was in a tribal design and contained the numbers "525." He was reluctant to discuss its meaning, but implied that it had to do with his sobriety struggle. Giraldo had been to rehab several times, and stated that he had once been so intoxicated that he broke four bones in his hand, when he had punched something, while performing at Gotham Comedy Club.
Giraldo was extremely candid about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, and the challenges of life on the road, stating in 2005: “I would go on the road and live like a fucking maniac, that’s just the way it was. And then eventually it starts bleeding into your regular life. At first, it starts out on the road and it’s no big deal. So you keep denying that you’re about to destroy your children’s lives because it’s happening in Phoenix as opposed to home. Slowly but surely though, it starts impacting everything and then you have decisions to make. There’s part of me that wants to be an uninhibited, unrestrained lunatic doing whatever I want. Frankly, that was a lot of the fun of it at the beginning. You hear people make grand artistic statements about why they love stand-up. But really, you’re choosing to tell dick jokes in a nightclub for a living. So if you go on the road and get fucked up all the time, you have to take everything that comes with that. You can’t have it both ways. You have to be a reasonable adult or a maniacal party road machine.”
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Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)