Good morning, Garrison: Quite an amazing fun read this morning. We have so much in common and I do respect that. Oh, by the way, you say "you can't", I'm reminded by Zig Ziglar, the correct meaning is probably, "I won't". "Good day", Paul Harvey.
I am reminded of the "English major" problem: The English major is going about his business one morning and coming across another soul asks them: "How are you?" The person responds: "Good, thanks." The English major, a bit uncomfortable responds, "You mean you are well? Right." That person, a Rhetoric major with a minor in 19th century German philosophy specializing in Nietzsche says: "Kind sir, are you referring to the state of my competence in which case I am 'good' or my state of mind, in which case I am 'well'."
The English major, who, through four years of college always sat in the back of the class room and never spoke said, "Sir, I have not spoken this much in decades so good day to you." Where upon the Rhetoric major could only respond: "I guess it's time to go Walleye fishin' as a pretext to read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' yet again." Where one learns that Transcendental Reasoning is one of the greatest errors of the human intellect and imagination. With the word "greatest" intentionally left ambiguous. As was everything the peripatetic philosopher from Koningsborg wrote.
I seem to remember a wonderful and brilliant skit you did (there were so many they are now like dreams, jumbled in my failing memory) I think it was with Sue Scott on PHC in which you went into a pretentious coffee shop (I won't mention any names except to mutter "Starbucks") and ordered, "a coffee, black, please." The barista was unable to comprehend what you were referring too. She was accustomed to Lattes,and Mochas with wheat grass and goat milk etc. but a simple "cup of coffee" was outside her realm of comprehension and understanding. You struggled to describe to her what a "black coffee" was but she couldn't "get" it. Too funny!
Brilliantly funny in a wry, subtle way. Some people I knew had no comprehension of your type of humor. Some folks need to be hit over the head with a shovel, I guess; or shot at with an AR-16 rifle from a peaked roof top...but let's end this metaphor here. After all this is America. Like the folks in Lake Wobegon we are not a metaphorical sort of people...
Frankly, I do like a "proper cup of coffee, brewed in a proper copper coffee pot" -- (well, my proper coffee pot is actually not copper, but is definitely a percolator, though electric). And I am a proud member of "P.O.E.M." with the t-shirt to prove it. And I thoroughly enjoyed livestreaming the 50th anniversary show of PHC last Saturday. Have only been to the twin cities once in my life, except for the forays of my imagination: THANK YOU, GARRISON!
There used to be a truck stop in New Orleans that was named Elysian Fields Truck Stop. It was one of my favorite stops if I was hauling a load thru/to N.O. I would always try to get a layover there. I would get showered up and put on clean jeans and grab a $6 cab down to the French Quarter. Loved drinking some beers, eating a bucket of crawfish and listening to a Jazz band.
Cheap piety indeed. I was at first amused... and then saddened to hear the same announcement made more dramatically at the opening of each performance at Stratford. The ripping away of First Nation lands requires so much more.
Agree. At the very least, if these kind of announcements will continue to be made, they should be accompanied with self-flagellation by each audience member.
I enjoy your columns, if that's what we can still call them. You mention your age frequently, and, having seen you in Wilmington NC recently, you are clearly still a fine entertainer. I hope to be doing as well at 81, but you are not my old age standard for excellence I hope to achieve some day. You still have a ways to go before you can match Alice Gerrard, who, with the late Hazel Dickens, broke the gender barrier in Bluegrass Music in the 1960's. Last weekend here in Raleigh we celebrated her 90th birthday. To celebrate, she was joined by many of her friends on stage including Joe Newberry, Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and others. She introduced each new singer anecdotally and then led all the songs, occasionally glancing at her notes to remind her of a lyric or two, then singing from memory - for 90 minutes. It was touching and glorious. Further, I have recently been a student in her singing classes and fiddle classes, where she whips us into shape. It wasn't an exceptional moment.
I wish I'd been there. Alice is a giant. I did a show with her and Hazel once and they were an act of nature, Hazel's voice was raw southern mountain , straight out of the 19th Century.
St. Paul loves you and your artistry very much. Good to see you back home. Thank you for streaming one of the shows at the Fitzgerald. Just like in your stories; time falls away.
St. Paul is its own self and you're not a true St. Paulite unless your grandmother was born here. My mother and her family were from Minneapolis and St. Paul always was aware of that. But I don't belong in New York either, so it's all the same to me.
You can not declare that, sir! To say you are not a New Yorker (or a New Yawka' if you're from my part of town) is like Proust saying he is not a Parisian. Sacre bleu!
I guess I meant ‘back home’ as in back at the Fitzgerald. I will always associate that beautiful theater with PHC, you and the whole crew. And St Paul does love your artistry. I guess we are all home when we are with the people we love and who love us. Anyway, all my thanks. ☮️
I came to the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis last night to hear Erica Rhodes and my wife laughed harder and longer than I'd ever heard before in my life and it was so utterly beautiful and rather musical. I felt at home in my wife's happiness. Erica is a phenomenon.
It was Dayton, Ohio, before I left for Washington, DC, where my cousin, Jen, took me to a hometown (can it be when run by immigrants who chose it? Yes I think so.) Chinese restaurant to teach me to use chopsticks that keep me grounded. Now each use here in a restaurant, 46 years later, I think of my grounding when Jen said “no one from our family will embarrass us in the big city [DC isn’t; never was] by not being sophisticated enough to not use a fork in a Chinese restaurant.” We Midwesterners all have this, don’t we.
I love this piece this morning, Mr. Keillor. We watched your 50th Anniversary PHC show from this past Saturday on Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed it. It took us back to the time decades ago when we listened every Saturday evening when we lived in a lovely little brand-new apartment in Prescott, Arizona, when we both worked in a candle factory there before I went and ruined everything by going to law school at age 30.
I dreamed last night that my old mother who made it to 87 came back from the hospital to tell us that our Mom had died peacefully in her sleep there and as we hugged her and cried I was so glad that the last time I'd seen her she was at our church earlier in the week where she saw our family perform in the Christmas pageant, and the last thing we had said to one another was, "Merry Christmas!"
None of that had happened in real life. In real life, our Mom died in a hospice from pneumonia with my big sister there with her. Our family had just seen her in a hospital ICU a few days before in August the morning after I had spent the night with her and had sung to her and had put lotion on her tired old feet like the nurse showed me how to do for her. Our Mom had asked her doctor to remove her respirator tube so that she could either recover and go home or pass away without further medical interventions. The real last thing that I told my mother in real life as she lay in her bed looking into my eyes was, "I'll see you at home, Mom, or in Heaven," and she nodded her head "Yes" as we said our goodbyes.
I woke up this morning wondering where I would tell this story. I'm glad it was here.
Thank you, Gene. That’s very kind of you. My mother died in 2005, but she came to me in my strange dream last night. It was both weird and beautiful all at the same time . . . much like life itself, huh?
Garrison. I’ve been a fan for a long time, but I found your judgmental, ad hominem dismissal of the announcements before the Tchaikovsky ballet to be mean spirited and gratuitous. Indeed, doing so whilst decrying sanctimonious bullying does not seem to me to be “avoiding irony.” The woman was merely doing her job and deserves better than to be made the personification of sanctimony.
Sorry but you're wrong. Are you saying that before each "APHC" broadcast I should've said, "I wish to acknowledge that powerful corporate interests have condemned millions of persons to inferior education and medical care?" This could turn into an extensive list of wrongs. I'm sure my ancestors profited in some way from cheap immigrant labor, perhaps from slavery itself, and surely from U.S. takeover of Caribbean islands and the Philippines. And shouldn't I acknowledge the inequality of women through most of the country's history? You're right, my remark was judgemental, I do make judgements. And you're barking up the wrong tree.
You appear to have missed my point, sir. It was your attacking the individual, about whom I assume you knew nothing, in order to make your point. I always thought of you as being kind. Apparently I was mistaken
Thank you for this article, it was heart-warming and…wonderful.
I was born in 1940, lived mostly in the inner city where everything was torn down. Sigh! Even though I had a 2x divorced mom I grew up feeling that God was good and Democrats too. When I married my HS sweetheart in a ceremony at the Cathedral (he lived a block off of Rondo), he didn’t have a job and we had to pay for our own wedding. Yet we had hope that things could change…and change they did. It took tons of years but we loved one another and could wait it out. The beauty of being a midwesterner I suppose.
"At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, 'We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,' and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety. There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card."
A bit harsh, don't you think? We can all do with reminders like these. And people do what they can, as the jobs they have allow them to. A Qantas pilot who tells us which indigenous peoples lived on the land where we've just touched down near Sydney isn't devoting his life to Australia's impoverished people, but he is making all of his passengers aware of a major aspect of Australian history.
I disagree. The Qantas pilot is providing interesting information. The woman reading the line off the index card is simply striking a pose. If she wants to be informative, she could deliver a lecture on how Tchaikovsky suffered as a gay man in Czarist Russia and how transgender people struggle today. Skip the first half hour of the ballet and give the crowd a good sermon. Why should we sit an enjoy a ballet when other people are suffering? Maybe what I do, stand and talk and tell stories and amuse mostly Caucasian people is immoral in a world in which Palestinians are dying, the oceans are warming, 5% of the population is hauling in truckloads of wealth while children go homeless. I was brought up with a healthy sense of guilt. I should've turned the Fitzgerald Theater over to Dakotah people and I should've worked as an usher. I didn't.
Your healthy sense of guilt doesn't justify excoriating someone as "a sanctimonious bully...simpleton" just because you disagree with their politics (or that of their bosses.) Bitterness and cruelty don't become you.
And it's not too late to turn the Fitzgerald over to the Dakota. Or become an usher.
Good morning, Garrison: Quite an amazing fun read this morning. We have so much in common and I do respect that. Oh, by the way, you say "you can't", I'm reminded by Zig Ziglar, the correct meaning is probably, "I won't". "Good day", Paul Harvey.
I am reminded of the "English major" problem: The English major is going about his business one morning and coming across another soul asks them: "How are you?" The person responds: "Good, thanks." The English major, a bit uncomfortable responds, "You mean you are well? Right." That person, a Rhetoric major with a minor in 19th century German philosophy specializing in Nietzsche says: "Kind sir, are you referring to the state of my competence in which case I am 'good' or my state of mind, in which case I am 'well'."
The English major, who, through four years of college always sat in the back of the class room and never spoke said, "Sir, I have not spoken this much in decades so good day to you." Where upon the Rhetoric major could only respond: "I guess it's time to go Walleye fishin' as a pretext to read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' yet again." Where one learns that Transcendental Reasoning is one of the greatest errors of the human intellect and imagination. With the word "greatest" intentionally left ambiguous. As was everything the peripatetic philosopher from Koningsborg wrote.
I seem to remember a wonderful and brilliant skit you did (there were so many they are now like dreams, jumbled in my failing memory) I think it was with Sue Scott on PHC in which you went into a pretentious coffee shop (I won't mention any names except to mutter "Starbucks") and ordered, "a coffee, black, please." The barista was unable to comprehend what you were referring too. She was accustomed to Lattes,and Mochas with wheat grass and goat milk etc. but a simple "cup of coffee" was outside her realm of comprehension and understanding. You struggled to describe to her what a "black coffee" was but she couldn't "get" it. Too funny!
Brilliantly funny in a wry, subtle way. Some people I knew had no comprehension of your type of humor. Some folks need to be hit over the head with a shovel, I guess; or shot at with an AR-16 rifle from a peaked roof top...but let's end this metaphor here. After all this is America. Like the folks in Lake Wobegon we are not a metaphorical sort of people...
Frankly, I do like a "proper cup of coffee, brewed in a proper copper coffee pot" -- (well, my proper coffee pot is actually not copper, but is definitely a percolator, though electric). And I am a proud member of "P.O.E.M." with the t-shirt to prove it. And I thoroughly enjoyed livestreaming the 50th anniversary show of PHC last Saturday. Have only been to the twin cities once in my life, except for the forays of my imagination: THANK YOU, GARRISON!
Might you be related to the great American Marxist economist Richard D. Wolff? If so you are among those in the Elysian Fields.
No, I am not. At least not to my knowledge.
Thank you for your reply.
There used to be a truck stop in New Orleans that was named Elysian Fields Truck Stop. It was one of my favorite stops if I was hauling a load thru/to N.O. I would always try to get a layover there. I would get showered up and put on clean jeans and grab a $6 cab down to the French Quarter. Loved drinking some beers, eating a bucket of crawfish and listening to a Jazz band.
As a transplant in Boston, 6/1979, I learned that when ordering 'a cup of coffee,'
I would be asked, 'Regular coffee?' To my Texas ears the correct answer was, 'Yes'
(but the Boston Coffee Code Council kept secret that the word 'regular' is used
in place of 'with a boatload of cream'). So then when explaining that I did not ask for
cream in my coffee, I learned both what 'regular coffee' means, and how short the fuses
were with my Boston friends.
Cheap piety indeed. I was at first amused... and then saddened to hear the same announcement made more dramatically at the opening of each performance at Stratford. The ripping away of First Nation lands requires so much more.
Agree. At the very least, if these kind of announcements will continue to be made, they should be accompanied with self-flagellation by each audience member.
I enjoy your columns, if that's what we can still call them. You mention your age frequently, and, having seen you in Wilmington NC recently, you are clearly still a fine entertainer. I hope to be doing as well at 81, but you are not my old age standard for excellence I hope to achieve some day. You still have a ways to go before you can match Alice Gerrard, who, with the late Hazel Dickens, broke the gender barrier in Bluegrass Music in the 1960's. Last weekend here in Raleigh we celebrated her 90th birthday. To celebrate, she was joined by many of her friends on stage including Joe Newberry, Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and others. She introduced each new singer anecdotally and then led all the songs, occasionally glancing at her notes to remind her of a lyric or two, then singing from memory - for 90 minutes. It was touching and glorious. Further, I have recently been a student in her singing classes and fiddle classes, where she whips us into shape. It wasn't an exceptional moment.
I wish I'd been there. Alice is a giant. I did a show with her and Hazel once and they were an act of nature, Hazel's voice was raw southern mountain , straight out of the 19th Century.
St. Paul loves you and your artistry very much. Good to see you back home. Thank you for streaming one of the shows at the Fitzgerald. Just like in your stories; time falls away.
St. Paul is its own self and you're not a true St. Paulite unless your grandmother was born here. My mother and her family were from Minneapolis and St. Paul always was aware of that. But I don't belong in New York either, so it's all the same to me.
You can not declare that, sir! To say you are not a New Yorker (or a New Yawka' if you're from my part of town) is like Proust saying he is not a Parisian. Sacre bleu!
I guess I meant ‘back home’ as in back at the Fitzgerald. I will always associate that beautiful theater with PHC, you and the whole crew. And St Paul does love your artistry. I guess we are all home when we are with the people we love and who love us. Anyway, all my thanks. ☮️
I came to the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis last night to hear Erica Rhodes and my wife laughed harder and longer than I'd ever heard before in my life and it was so utterly beautiful and rather musical. I felt at home in my wife's happiness. Erica is a phenomenon.
Sir, you are a masterful writer & humorist. This is a classic work of artistry.
“ I have nothing to offer, I’m a child at the grown-up table.”
Aren’t we all? Brilliant!
It was Dayton, Ohio, before I left for Washington, DC, where my cousin, Jen, took me to a hometown (can it be when run by immigrants who chose it? Yes I think so.) Chinese restaurant to teach me to use chopsticks that keep me grounded. Now each use here in a restaurant, 46 years later, I think of my grounding when Jen said “no one from our family will embarrass us in the big city [DC isn’t; never was] by not being sophisticated enough to not use a fork in a Chinese restaurant.” We Midwesterners all have this, don’t we.
Thank you for this grounding today.
I love this piece this morning, Mr. Keillor. We watched your 50th Anniversary PHC show from this past Saturday on Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed it. It took us back to the time decades ago when we listened every Saturday evening when we lived in a lovely little brand-new apartment in Prescott, Arizona, when we both worked in a candle factory there before I went and ruined everything by going to law school at age 30.
I dreamed last night that my old mother who made it to 87 came back from the hospital to tell us that our Mom had died peacefully in her sleep there and as we hugged her and cried I was so glad that the last time I'd seen her she was at our church earlier in the week where she saw our family perform in the Christmas pageant, and the last thing we had said to one another was, "Merry Christmas!"
None of that had happened in real life. In real life, our Mom died in a hospice from pneumonia with my big sister there with her. Our family had just seen her in a hospital ICU a few days before in August the morning after I had spent the night with her and had sung to her and had put lotion on her tired old feet like the nurse showed me how to do for her. Our Mom had asked her doctor to remove her respirator tube so that she could either recover and go home or pass away without further medical interventions. The real last thing that I told my mother in real life as she lay in her bed looking into my eyes was, "I'll see you at home, Mom, or in Heaven," and she nodded her head "Yes" as we said our goodbyes.
I woke up this morning wondering where I would tell this story. I'm glad it was here.
So sorry for your loss, truly!
Thank you, Gene. That’s very kind of you. My mother died in 2005, but she came to me in my strange dream last night. It was both weird and beautiful all at the same time . . . much like life itself, huh?
I love your writing and your audio presentation of your musings so much. Thank you
Garrison. I’ve been a fan for a long time, but I found your judgmental, ad hominem dismissal of the announcements before the Tchaikovsky ballet to be mean spirited and gratuitous. Indeed, doing so whilst decrying sanctimonious bullying does not seem to me to be “avoiding irony.” The woman was merely doing her job and deserves better than to be made the personification of sanctimony.
Sorry but you're wrong. Are you saying that before each "APHC" broadcast I should've said, "I wish to acknowledge that powerful corporate interests have condemned millions of persons to inferior education and medical care?" This could turn into an extensive list of wrongs. I'm sure my ancestors profited in some way from cheap immigrant labor, perhaps from slavery itself, and surely from U.S. takeover of Caribbean islands and the Philippines. And shouldn't I acknowledge the inequality of women through most of the country's history? You're right, my remark was judgemental, I do make judgements. And you're barking up the wrong tree.
You appear to have missed my point, sir. It was your attacking the individual, about whom I assume you knew nothing, in order to make your point. I always thought of you as being kind. Apparently I was mistaken
Ciao.
God bless you.
Sending you a smile for this. . .and a hug.
Thank you for this article, it was heart-warming and…wonderful.
I was born in 1940, lived mostly in the inner city where everything was torn down. Sigh! Even though I had a 2x divorced mom I grew up feeling that God was good and Democrats too. When I married my HS sweetheart in a ceremony at the Cathedral (he lived a block off of Rondo), he didn’t have a job and we had to pay for our own wedding. Yet we had hope that things could change…and change they did. It took tons of years but we loved one another and could wait it out. The beauty of being a midwesterner I suppose.
YOU ARE AMAZING, GK, FROM THE COFFEE SHOP ON! AND THE GREETINGS, TOO., AS A MID-OCTOGENARIAN. ME TOO.....CHEERS, TOM, THE WEST-ST.PAULITE.
"At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, 'We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,' and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety. There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card."
A bit harsh, don't you think? We can all do with reminders like these. And people do what they can, as the jobs they have allow them to. A Qantas pilot who tells us which indigenous peoples lived on the land where we've just touched down near Sydney isn't devoting his life to Australia's impoverished people, but he is making all of his passengers aware of a major aspect of Australian history.
I disagree. The Qantas pilot is providing interesting information. The woman reading the line off the index card is simply striking a pose. If she wants to be informative, she could deliver a lecture on how Tchaikovsky suffered as a gay man in Czarist Russia and how transgender people struggle today. Skip the first half hour of the ballet and give the crowd a good sermon. Why should we sit an enjoy a ballet when other people are suffering? Maybe what I do, stand and talk and tell stories and amuse mostly Caucasian people is immoral in a world in which Palestinians are dying, the oceans are warming, 5% of the population is hauling in truckloads of wealth while children go homeless. I was brought up with a healthy sense of guilt. I should've turned the Fitzgerald Theater over to Dakotah people and I should've worked as an usher. I didn't.
Your healthy sense of guilt doesn't justify excoriating someone as "a sanctimonious bully...simpleton" just because you disagree with their politics (or that of their bosses.) Bitterness and cruelty don't become you.
And it's not too late to turn the Fitzgerald over to the Dakota. Or become an usher.
"Excoriate?" Really? Cruel? Lord help us.
There once was a man from Lake Wobegon,
Whose radio show was well-known.
He met Jenny Lind,
Their hearts soon were twinned,
To New York City they've flown
There once was a host from the prairie,
Whose tales were both witty and merry.
Though Twain he's not quite,
His words still delight,
With humor that's sharp and contrary.
Are you the best of self deprecators or what?