Nashville, Tenn. – Early 70’s, Opry’s final-Ryman-days-inspired, radio, variety program, A Prairie Home Companion, performed at mutual, area-mother church, Ryman Auditorium, January 11, 2024, to not only turn host, Garrison Keillor’s newly found opportunities to lead full Ryman Auditorium audiences in hymn, patriotic, and secular harmonies, back into tradition, but to celebrate America’s staple-wholesome, A Prairie Home Companion‘s 50th Anniversary a year-and-a-half after their last Ryman appearance at age 48 1/2. It was a bonus the show included the rejuvenation of an estranged American Manhood, learned to us through such literary thinking, as well as much needed for a while. An esoteric, Emmylou Harris’ “Calling My Children Home,” from the 1992 album, At the Ryman closed the evening’s show, before encore.
First, area News:
Local Rockabilly/Country & Western musician, Chuck Mead, formerly of BR5-49/currently Chuck Mead and His Grassy Knoll Boys, is working on a musical taking place in 19th c., release TBD.
Formerly of Nashville’s lower Broadway’s BR5-49 responsible for what it is, now -as well as Chuck Mead and His Grassy Knoll Boys, Nashville songwriter/guitarist, Chuck Mead, recently disclosed intention to produce a musical based in the eighteenth century, while onstage at Ryman Auditorium, January 11, 2024.
Keillor, gesturing to stage left: People wondering what that band was doing coming out. They saw that steel guitar. They saw that drum kit back here, and they were wondering when that guy with those black framed glasses; the intellectual with the black hat, was going to come out and start doing some entertainment, out here.
“Mr. Chuck Mead and His Grassy Knoll Boys, out here. Thank you.” introduced Keillor.
Keillor: We have brought back, and added to, the rockabilly tradition in Nashville, TN, following in the footsteps of Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, and Waylon Jennings, and all sorts of other worthy people. And, now, I found out that Chuck Mead and I are both working on a Musical, but not the same one. His is back in the 19th century, and mine is in the 1950’s. When I was around. So, which of us will finish first? And, which of us will be on the cover of Rolling Stone?
Chuck Mead: You.
Keillor: Yes, of course (crowd laughs) …
Keillor: …Do you talk as well? I’m
Mead: Yes, I do (audience laughs)
Keillor: Yes, you do! Okay.
Mead: Absolutely. I… I’ve been in Rolling Stone magazine, but not on the cover.
Keillor: Well, all right, all right. Well, I’ll race ya. I’ll race ya. We’ll see who gets there first. -Maybe we should work on a musical together?
Mead: We could go to the Tonys together. I have a tux. -Not tonight.
Keillor: No, no. All right. Well, we could do a musical in the 19th, -I’m closer to the 19th century than you are, so you may want me as a reference.
Mead: I’ll call you.
Keillor: Thanks. Give me a call. -What’re you gonna do for us there?
Mead: We’re gonna do a little song about the river that’s right outside where I grew up.
Chuck Mead and His Grassy Knoll Boys play, “Knee Deep in the Wakahusa River” (killer lap steel).
[…] Chuck Mead: Thank you very much! That’s Adam “Ditz” Kurtz on the steel guitar; that’s Martin Linds back there on the drums, and Mark Andrew Miller on the bass, too.
Mead: I was in a band, years ago, called BR 549 (some audience woots) -Thank you. These are my people. We started out right across the alley in Robert’s Western… I see some of you have had a drink over there. But, when I first moved here, my goal was to work at Tootsies Orchid Lounge, -and I did! I got a gig there. And one night I was working in there and this weird thing happened that doesn’t happen every day, and instead of telling you the story, I’m going to tell you the story with a song…
Determined, Folk & Proper time-travelled to one of the last “Honky Tonk Tuesdays” at Inglewood, Nashville’s American Legion Post 82, July 16, 2024, (just shy of Honky Tonk Tuesday’s nine-year anniversary at the Legion Post) to check on the progress of Chuck’s musical, seven months after he and Keillor mentioned it at the Ryman:
F&P, pops up at the American Legion Post 82’s Tuesday night, honky-tonk/ Country Western-themed dance night, July 16, 2024, at the end of Chuck Mead and The Stalwarts set. Chuck’s standing in front of the stage, after the show.
(First Round) F&P, getting attention: Mr. Mead, I’m about to ask you a quick question.
Chuck Mead: What’s that?
F&P: I caught you back at A Prairie Home Companion in January.
Mead: Oh, wow.
F&P: I’m wondering how your musical is going?
Mead: It’s great. It’s still happening.
F&P: Yeah? Been pressing along, and getting in some good writing? Stuff like that?
Mead: Wellll, I’m trying. -More songs.
Mead: Thanks for asking. It’s good to see you.
(Second Round) F&P, outside: Sorry to attack you a second ago.
Mead: Oh, you didn’t.
F&P: Just really curious about the stage show…
Mead: It’s all good. I’m glad you asked.
(Third Round) (Mead, Stalwarts bassist Mark Andrew Miller, and Nashville country and punk singer/songwriter showcase, Erica Case, are talking at Am. Leg.’s back bar, a little later) .
F&P: I’m so sorry to interject one more time. I’m writing about both of you. Erica…
Erica Case: Good to see you, again.
F&P, nodding hello: …You have a show coming up with Malibu Blackout, and Justin’s band (Justin Web and the Noise),
Erica: Yeah! [I mean, not ‘exclaimed!’ -but said happily, y’know].
F&P, turning to Chuck: -and You have a musical coming out, and I need a quote, if you don’t mind.
Mead: It’ll be a long time before that happens.
F&P, to Erica: Y’know he’s got a musical coming out (to Chuck) -set in the in the 1850’s, or 1950’s?
Mead: Uhhhh….
F&P: It’s a pretty big deal, man [little known fact about Chuck, he’s spent time working with theatre groups from Tennessee to Chicago over the course of his influential honky-tonk/rockabilly career, as well].
Mead: Yuuuhhh, I dunnooo.
F&P: -He’s playing with Garrison Keillor, and stuff.
F&P, headbangs back into the square dance.
Closing act, that night, the Cowpokes-led “Honky Tonk Tuesday Nights,” at Inglewood’s American Legion Post 82 will move to Madison’s Eastside Bowl by August, 2024, to accommodate the growth and popularity of the, now, old Nashville-cultured staple. Check out both these places’ instagrams -and other socials- for up-to-date events and hootinannies.
“In 2019, Mead released Close to Home, an album he recorded in Memphis. According to Rolling Stone, the album’s title track mixes ‘a groove that’s part T. Rex stomp and part outlaw country swagger,’ according to Freeman, John. “Hear Chuck Mead’s Cosmic New Song ‘Close to Home’”. Rolling Stone. Retrieved 23 August 2020/Wiki.”
Chuck Mead’s next appearances include the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend, Saturday, April 20, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada before he jumps to Switzerland for the Trucker & Country Festival 2024, in Matten Bei Interlaken. Dates and updates can be found at CHUCK MEAD (chuckmead.com).
A Prairie Home Companions, News from Lake Wobegon
January 11, 2024.
–As a reminder, the first half (or first hour) of the A Prairie Home Companion weekly, radio broadcast airing from 1974 to 2016 on Minnesota Public Radio, and broadcast out through National Public Radio (NPR) (locally WPLN, 90.3fm) are traditionally sketches/radio comedy-dramas, whole-production songs and humorous advertisements, while the second half of the shows airs a longer segment, A Prairie Home Companion‘s “News from Lake Wobegon,” the weekly update from Keillor’s “my hometown,” in Minnesota.
A past round up emphasizing the first half of a Prairie Home Companion can be found at A Prairie Home Companion American Revival: Garrison Keillor Leads Ryman Auditorium in Hymn – Folk & Proper News (folkandproper.news)
News from Lake Wobegon, January 11, 2024
Keillor: Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown. A little [ways?] from the way from the prairie. It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. My cousin, Janice, tells me they’re waiting for some real snow. Something just doesn’t feel quite right. They got through Christmas vacation, and none of the kids could do any serious sliding or skiing, and, -and nobodys been out skating on the lake, and the ice fishing houses are still waiting to be put out there, so it just seems kind of, -just some kind of unreal.
I have some time to talk about Hometown because I moved to New York City, years ago, and I did it for the very best reason one could possibly choose, -because my wife wanted to live there (audience laughs), and she’s been very, very happy.
She’s put up with my being on the road for years, and she’s raised our daughter back in Saint Paul, and then she decided New York was the place for her, and I wanted to be with her, so… (audience laughs) off she goes.
She goes for a walk in Second Park. She walks for six miles a day through the park, which is kind of her church. And then she goes over to the Met Museum where she can look at the Monet, and she can look at Koffer and Kandinsky, and go down to the MOMA, and Guggenheim Museum and see the Degaust, Rothco, and the Picasso; all of this great art that you and I look at in books, she loves to stand in front of it, and she just inhales the form and beauty of great art. I don’t understand any of it (audience laughs), but I could tell you this: A happy one is a wonderful person to live with, so whatever you need to do, -whatever you need to do, it would be wise to do it.
I’m a writer, and so I live in my head. Y’know, I get on the C-train, I go downtown, down to 42nd St., and I get out, and I walk over to the library, and I walk up between the two big stone lions, and I go up to the Rose reading room, up on the third floor, and I sit there at a long table with green lampshades just like I remember from college, and I am surrounded by people who are one-fourth my age. Most of them are Asian. I’m thinking the children, and grandchildren of immigrants, and they’re all very intense, and I hope that some of their ambition, and some of their concentration may… may… may come to me. I’m 81, and I’m not done yet. I just am not done (audience applause).
I love doing the show all these years, and singing duets with those women, but I am not happy with my work, and I feel that I have something better -Something better, ahead. I just have this feeling that I never really got Lake Wobegon down. I feel like I did okay by the Lutherans (crowd laughs), and I did okay by the schoolteachers, and Dorothy down at the Chatter Box Cafe, although I never could find a way to say on the radio that she’s black. I mean, she’s black (audience laughs). She’s always been black (some clap), so why would I need to point this out? Everybody in Lake Wobegon knows that she’s black, so? -I’m white because my parents were. I mean, what does it matter (folks laughing)?
She is able to fix her own version of our beloved hot dishes that own grandmothers made, and that brings tears to our eyes. She can make a tuna fish casserole that just makes you… It’s like looking at a Monet, really. It’s like a work of art.
I never could bring a way, -find a way to say on the radio Pastor Liz is gay, because it just doesn’t make any difference. And because I have republicans in my audience, and if I said that, they would think (Keillor as Republicans), ‘Okaaay, here he is. The liberal is going to give us his speech, now, about inclusivity, and so forth, and all of that.’ No! I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that -People loved her when they first met her. She came into audition for the pastoral job. They didn’t think, ‘we’re gonna hire a woman pastor,’ but then she came in, and she came the week after this smart master’s degree from Luther College came and delivered his sermon, which was 45 minutes long (audience laughs) about transcendentalism (audience laughs) and the gospel of Mark (audience laughs and claps), and they could not see him go out the door.
She came and she gave a sermon that was, about, 12 minutes long (audience laughs).
It was about growing up on a sandy farm with this drunken and abusive father. She had to protect her mother and her younger siblings from this man, this horrible man, who one day was in a drunken furor, was driving the manure spreader, and whipping the horses, and it overturned, and suddenly, there he was covered in cow shit (audience laughs). He pulled himself out and went and bathed himself in the pond and was a new man (crowd laughs) after this.
He’d gone as far down as he possibly could (crowd laughs). There was nowhere further to go, and when he came back, he had changed, changed, changed. It’s possible.
She gave this sermon about redemption in a story that everybody could understand -and maybe even think of a relative it applied to (crowd cracks up).
They love her. They love her. She’s a farm girl. She knows how to handle a rifle. She can fix her own pickup truck engine. She knows wh…. oh, I don… -she’s a good fisher person. She’s the only woman who goes ice fishing every year. And, when she went off on a Lutheran retreat on Maui, and she met this woman and brought her back home, and obviously she was attracted to this woman…. well… we weren’t looking for a lesbian pastor (crowd laughs). But this was Liz. This was Liz. People loved her for who she is, and so there she is.
I never was able to talk about this on the radio show. There’s a big Boom in Lake Wobegon. I never could explain this boom, the American Triumph Tomato Company, which was started by Roger Heflin’s great-nephew, Brent, this genius geneticist who developed a breed of tomato, Euphoria. The Euphoria tomato, a tomato that retains its tomato brilliance, even after processing (crowd chuckles). It became the talk of the tomato industry. And so 5000 acres that used to be in coffee and soybeans, now in tomatoes, and they brought in Latino workers –skilled workers- from the truck farms of California to harvest this stuff, and so, now, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility [a Lake Wobegon Church] has a Spanish language Mass on Sunday morning, and we can hear the “Sontis of Benedicta,” sung to a Samba beat (audience laughs).
And all the young people now have jobs where they can stay in town and impress their parents, and 21, 22-year-old people who know how to handle a computer can get a perfectly good job, and so, now, the contemporary gaining in numbers, and the traditional 11 am service is losing …losing. So, we have all these young people at nine o’clock in the morning who’re singing Christian pop song, “I’m dancing/for the Love of God/ I’m dancing/for the Love of God/ He taught me to Love myself/ I’m dancing for the love that…,” Keillor sang.
Songs of this sort, -and they consider Bach to be boring, and “Mighty Fortresses of God,” they have no time for, and so Tippy, -Tippy Marklin, the organist, is fighting a losing battle. The traditional Lutheran service is dying out because these young people come in. -No, the town is absolutely, absolutely changing to all of this because young people are growing…. Thanks to sex (crowd chuckles). And old people are dying… Thanks to mortality (crowd chuckles). That’s how it is.
No, I did that show for all those years, and I did it for a public radio audience, God bless them, but it’s an audience with a very high proportion of social workers and social justice advocates and unitarian activists, and watercolor artists, and wellness counsellors, and it’s kind of a leftward leaning audience, -what some people call, ‘woke,’ and, uh…(audience laughs).
The sensibility just does not allow them to take an interest in the hard realities of life, like hunting. Like deer hunting, which is popular in Minnesota, not in San Fransisco, where I stood and did a show at the Masonic Hall (a couple clap), and I was talking about Oscar Peterson, -not the jazz pianist, but our Oscar Peterson. He was out deer hunting, and he took a plastic bag, and when he got out to his deer stand, he took off all of his clothes and he put them in the plastic bag, and he put on the clothes he keeps out at the deer stand so the deer could not smell him, and he scattered fox urine around, and then he waited there with his gun, and I could sense the audience in the hall very uneasy (audience chuckles), and they thought that Bambie was going to get her brains blown out (audience laughs).
And so, I couldn’t continue with the story. I had to bend to the will of the audience.
And so, I had him put away the deer rifle. It just disappeared (crowd laughs). And I had him pick up a bow and arrow for, y’know, the connection with indigenous people (crowd laughs). He looked up and saw waterfowl flying, and the mergansers, and the mallards, then, and all in flight, but it still -the audience was still very, very uneasy, and I did not dare …have him shoot (audience low laughs). And, besides, with a bow and arrow, what’re your chances of hitting a high-flying merganser, either? I don’t know. I don’t know. …So, I just, -I had him in the deer stand remembering a Mary Oliver poem (crowd laughs) from high school:
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, it calls to you over and over, harsh and exciting like the wild geese announcing your place in the family of things,” and, then he walks to his car (audience laughs), and then he goes home (audience laughs). End of story.
And the audience just sat there, stunned (audience laughs) …thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ (audience erupts, white people Def Jam).
…’I don’t understand how he goes out into a deer stand, and he remembers a poem? (audience laughs).’ [They’re like,] ‘Sheesh. We paid money to come and see this? (crowd laughs).
No. No. I, I… -it’s always scurrying the boundary of good taste, another ‘eat shit,’ once (audience laughs) when I was talking about Clint and Irene Bunsen, and they were out looking for their cat –their lost cat- and she was weeping, and they were calling the cats name, over and over and over, and Clint just regretted that they had named the cat Pussy (crowd gasps and cracks up). There were people who were deeply hurt by this. They had thought I had betrayed their trust. They could no longer allow their children to listen to this…to this show (crowd laughs). I remember, I got in trouble with that.
I lean toward comedy. It’s just my natural… -Had you’d grown up evangelical, you would have, too (audience laughs), so I talked about the town for all those years, and nobody ever died! I just didn’t know how to do it (crowd chuckles)!
And so, they kept -…Myrtle Krebsbach was 77 years old, about 30 years (audience laughs). I just didn’t know how to extinguish them.
I almost did it once. I think I was in Moorehead, MN, and I talk about Granpa Tollefson, and the whole family was there for, maybe, Thanksgiving. And he went down the basement to get frozen peas, and he came up the stairs, and he was supposed to die of heart attack on the stairs. And I had him stumble, and cry out… and then I saw how old the audience was (crowd laughs), and they did not want this (crowd laughs), …so I had him recover (crowd cracks up), and he came up.
Instead of the EMT’s being called, and the ambulance, and going to the ER, and the family grieving –There was never any grief in Lake Wobegon, as I described it.
Life without grief is very shallow.
No, you just put the peas, and they put’m in the tuna salad, and then (audience laughs) … That was supposed to be the story was he would -They were supposed to come back from the hospital, after he died, and they would serve up the tuna salad, and the daughter would see the peas in it and say, … ‘are these the… the death peas?’ (audience laughs). […] -It was shock, but it was also. sort of, a symbol of reincarnation, or something (audience laughs). No, I just couldn’t -I couldn’t go all the way on this –on this story. No, instead I just had Grandpa sit around the table and tell the joke, ‘Oh, you know how catch wall eye using peas for bait? You put the peas around the holes in the ice, and wait until the wall eye comes up to take a pea, and then you grab him. (crowd erupts).
“Oh, what is that? Oh? (Bass voice) Oh, my Gah….” Keillor said, as the wall eye.
Now, one person died. One person. My aunt Evelyn died, and I talked about her. She was an insomniac, and she died in her sleep (crowd laughs). She’d broken up with her husband, Jack, who’d gone off to live in the woods, and she had found a boyfriend, Raoul, and was in love, and she died, and her wish was that her ashes would be put in the green bowing ball that Raoul had given her. So, they carved a hole out of it, and they put the ashes in, and this was supposed to be dropped into the lake by her grandson, Kyle, who would be flying on a parasail towed by a speed boat out on the lake. This was the day that Debby Detmer was supposed to come back from Santa Barabara where she worked as a veterinary, aroma therapist (audience laughs), and she was to marry an actor named Brent, and they were going to get married on a pontoon boat, but this was canceled because they wanted to have a ceremony of commitment where they would pledge to love and support and liberated each other, but without legal commitment, and so it all cooled off and the Detmers donated the pontoon boat to the Lutheran Church, which was being visited by 22 Lutheran pastors from Chicago who had signed a petition to mandate that the church ordain people whether they accept the divinity of our Lord, or not –in other words, Lutheran Unitarians (crowd laughs). And so these 22 pastors go on this pontoon boat for a little trip around the Lake, and they had a flaming barbecue on it, and Kyle was on his water skis, and his friend was at the speed boat, and the towed him up high in the air, carrying the bowling ball, and the speedboat swerved suddenly to avoid the pontoon boat and had lost speed, and Kyle dropped into the water and then was towed at high speed, underwater, which tore the green bowling ball from his hand, and also, his red Speedos (audience laughs). He was naked into the air (audience laughs), and then a hot air balloon carrying a gold, [?-made] Elvis (audience laughs) came. He was there for the wedding, and singing can’t help falling in love (audience cracks up), and they never found the bowling ball.
People think I invented the town (crowd bursts), but people of Lake Wobegon know better.
They know that I tell stories about them, and that’s why when I walk into the Chatter Box Cafe and I say hello to Dorothy, I notice that the room gets very quiet because they don’t want me to talk about them on the air, even now that I’m no longer doing the show. Somebody is angry in… -says, ‘y’know somebody, -I opened a package that came for my daughter -my fourteen-year-old daughter- and it was a two-piece bathing suit, a thong bottom with a strand that would go down her glutes, 1/8 of an inch wide, not even wide enough to cover her anal embrasure (audience cackles), and then they look up and they see me, and they say, ‘you put that in your monologue and your ass is grass (audience laughs).’
The thing that I regret is that I could never get The Sidetrack Tap right because it was radio, and there were limitations on language. And also, I grew up evangelical, so that I am unable, unlike any other grown man I know, I am unable to curse even when necessary. Or to use obscenities. I am unable to swear. It just sounds pitiful. When I do, I can make the “F” sound, but my tongue will not click against the pallet to make the “k,” and so it just sounds foolish. I sit and I have a big cup of coffee at Starbucks. I sit, and I spill the whole thing (audience giggles) in my lap, …and I don’t say what a man should say. I say ‘Goodness gracious’ (audience laughs).
My wife is a swearer. And she does driving her car up the westside highway in Manhatten, and she looks over at the car, over at the right, and she says, ‘you move your fat ass over, asshole,’ (crowd laughs) and she says that word –Well, she was raised Episcopalian (crowd laughs). I guess that’s whole other deal.
The Sidetrack Tap is not my crowd. I quit drinking 20 years ago, but I wish –I wish I could talk about them or talk like them, because I like the talk of the Sidetrack Tap. Because its Men. It’s Men talking about their own experience. Things they did.
Not something the read in the newspaper yesterday. No. They’re talking about trucks. They’re talking about machinery, and farming, and guns, and livestock, and they’re arguing about competing automobiles and pick up trucks, and the hardship of military service, and all of these things –Hands on Experience- talking from their own life.
When Russ talks about horsing this big semi, in reverse, around this tight corner and bringing it in this narrow gap between the loading dock and the other semi-trailer, and getting it in right without embarrassing self in front of other truck drivers, he’s talking about something he Did. Something he Knows about.
Not -not –It’s not like writers. Writers sit around, and its all second-hand, third hand, and what somebody wrote in a review about somebody else’s book and –who need’s that? I Love the Sidetrack Tap. Has this high, ornamental tin ceiling in the long bar that goes from the front to the back, and –and –and, these booths along the sides, all beautiful, dark wood. And the high partitions between each one, so it’s made for conversation. It’s made for people to have a private conversation, that you walk along and the guys in one booth are arguing about tomato seedlings and the next booth, its cars: the e-cars vs. Chevys vs. The Ford Mustang, and another, it’s about ice skating up on the boundary waters where you can skate frozen lakes for miles and miles and miles, and wear this windbreaker that also works as sail, and they’re complaining about gen x’rs who just text and don’t know how to talk. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place.
Wally fired the band. It was his ex-brother-in-law’s outlaw band, and their outlaw-ness was getting, sort-of, thin, and so were their –so were their –so was there hair getting extremely thin. Their –Their –their ponytails looked like little clothesline coming out the back, there (audience laughs).
Yeah, so out they went, and talkers resume there at The Sidetrack Tap, talking. Men who’ve seen the rough side enough so that they can appreciate the sweet side, and there’s nothing so sweet as ooold friendship, which you realize when you’ve been doing a show for so long, those people that you run into are not fans. They’re friends. They’re friends. They know you better than you know yourself, and when you’re with your friends, you can confess your sins, which is what I’m doing, right now (audience laughs).
And in the next booth, they’re talking about plywood and sheetrock, and which lumber yard you can barter with, and which not, and what’s the price you could get. Its talk about real things.
And when you get onto religion, which is football (audience laughs) , then, y’know, I slip away and I go next door. It’s a men’s world. Men’s world, at the Sidetrack. I’m just an alien there.
I was 14 years old when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and when you become a writer, you are entering into women’s world. Women are the readers. They’re the teachers. They’re the librarians. They’re the editors. You’re separated from the people of your own gender. Women are the authorities, and men shrivel up at the authority of women […] -the power of The Eye Roll (audience laughs).
Just a powerful, powerful thing.
My closest friends are women, and when they roll their eyes, the whole room spins (audience laughs)
So, I couldn’t talk about the Sons of Kanuut on the 17th of May, Syttende Mai, Norwegian Independence Day, and they would gather, get drunk down at the Sidetrack, they would make this plank bench there in front of the Unknow Norwegian [Lake Wobegon, town monument] (audience laughs), and they have their butt pinch contest in which the contestants drop their trousers and see who can pick up a silver dollar (audience laughs) using only their cheeks (audience cackles)…
Oh, it’s not so hard (audience cackles again). How do I know? I know. Anyway… (audience howling).
-And then they go to the half-dollar, and then they go to the quarter, and the quarter was what separates the men from the boys. If you could pick up a quarter, you’re a winner.
They eliminated the dime, because Bernie Christiansen managed to pick up a dime, once, and strained so hard to hold it that his bowels exploded. That’s something you don’t want ot do in front of an audience. In 1958. Yeah (crowd laughing)
It caused such –and the Kanuuts did not notice- in all of the excitement of this happening, there was a dar want you to know it happened, there was a dark cloud. There was a dark tornado cloud coming down the street, and it picked up Bernie Christiansen, and it carried him two and a half miles out into the country and dropped him in a field of Holsteins, and there he was. He’s never been the same person (audience laughs) ever since –and neither would you after dealing with that black funnel cloud picking him up and taking him for a ride.
So many things I was unable to talk about on the show because I could feel women’s eye’s rolling.
“Grow Up,” “Grow up,” they would say (audience chuckles).
And so, I failed to –I failed to get it right, but I’m still trying.
I think I have some work ahead of me.
-I get on the subway because, when you come from the Midwest, riding on a train on a train is a great privilege, and a joy. Even if it’s only down to 42nd St. Go down to the library, and somewhere around 42nd St. -maybe in the Times Square Subway station, like every other day, or so, someone will walk up to me and say, ‘I’m from Minnesota’ (audience giggles).
-They never did that when I lived in Minnesota (audience laughs).
They walk up, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Where’s he you from?’ ‘Brookhaven, [Kookitchie?], somewhere.’ We sit and talk. They’re friends. They’re friends. What can I say? -Somebody stops me, there, on the subway? What can I say walking up 5th Ave., between the lions to say, ‘I used to listen to your radio show.’ And they’re not fans. They’re friends. They’re friends. That’s what its all about.
It’s all about Friendship.
I have no idea what they found interesting or amusing in that radio show, because I could never listen to it. I could never listen to my own show because I’d only hear what went wrong (audience, ‘oomph’), but they found something. And so, I inherited the friendship of strangers, and, to me, this is what it’s all about. It’s what friendship is about. That’s what it’s always been about. And that’s you. And I just want you to know I appreciate you.
That’s the news from Lake Wobegon where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average (audience erupts, whistles and woo’s).
A Prairie Home Companion‘s 50th Anniversary Tour is currently running through July 21, 2024, at the Chicago Theatre, in Chicago, IL. Dates between then and now include April 18 in Bethesda, MD; April 20th in Burlington, VT; May 24th in Scranton, PA; the 26th in Akron, OH; and a big three-show weekend at A Prairie Home Companion‘s own home, St. Paul, Minnesota’s The Fitzgerald Theatre, July 12-14. A more detailed schedule can be found at Events | Garrison Keillor (www.garrisonkeillor.com/schedule).
All archival efforts can be found at Home | Garrison Keillor(garrisonkeillor.com); Garrison Keillor and Friends | Substack (garrisonkeillor.substack.com); Garrison Keillor | Facebook facebook.com/PrairieHomeCompanion), and www.prairiehome.org.
A reemergence of Keillor’s former, little, mid-daily, literary radiobroadcast day-calendar, Writer’s Almanac, has made its way back (including unedited versions of past Writer’s Almanacs) to be found at TWA | Garrison Keillor (garrisonkeillor.com/radio), as well as a close equivalent to Writer’s Almanac at Keillor’s Substack, Garrison Keillor and Friends | Substack (garrisonkeillor.substack.com).
Keillor’s latest novel (before the musical) is Boom Town: A Lake Wobegon Novel, was released April 11, 2022, and can be found through these websites, as well.
Again, to encompass the entirety of the show’s structure, as well as the first half of A Prairie Home Companion‘s traditional layout, visit/include A Prairie Home Companion American Revival: Garrison Keillor Leads Ryman Auditorium in Hymn – Folk & Proper News (folkandproper.news).
A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor has been covered by B.E. in Keillor’s 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s -for the show’s 50th- all well before the B.E’s 40th. It was also the 30th anniversary of Emmylou Harris’ Live at the Ryman, January 10th, which to area-locals, is The Nashville Country Music album that solely saved the old, vacant gospel tabernacle of B.E.’s Nashville-of-the-90’s.
Folk & Proper Thanks You for reading.
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