21 Comments

We always welcome you in Nashville at the Ryman, anytime. It’s my hometown & you keep us “ Cheerful “! 😇 ❤️

Expand full comment

All through the 80s my good pal and wit Ern Beeler and I would listen to PHC together in my old pickup while out carousing around the Central Valley of California on Saturday afternoons.

If we were playing pool in some country watering hole we would always break to go out to the truck and listen, adjust our attitude, and always laugh.

I miss Ern alot and listening to your archives of PHC always brings him back.

Thank you.

Expand full comment

I'd love to go to one of your shows just for the Sing Along during intermission. I had a project during Covid where I sent out a song each Monday morning. Did it for 2 1/2 years. Loved doing it and got often some nice feedback and memories regarding the songs.

Expand full comment

Alas, Harlan Oates, all you're going to get here is disappointment when an auditorium of aging Californians won't sing "Amazing Grace." The election is surely going to be decided by voters under 30 if older voters abandon concern for social justice so they can cheerfully grin while singing sentimental old hymns.

Expand full comment

It's not a sentimental hymn: "I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see" is not sentimental. It's what needs to happen in 2024.

Expand full comment

Hi GK. I've seen two movies, in movie theaters, alone. Just me, the screen, and 200+ empty seats. Those movies were Woody Allen's Manhatten, and Robert Altman's Prairie Home Companion. I just couldn't find any friends who wanted to pay money to see them. For the record, PHC was way better. I liked Woody Allen's early work, before his later troubles. "Sleeper" was one of my favorites. And how many of us didn't secretly wish we had an "orgasmitron"......

Expand full comment

In slight solidarity with the embarrassed but cool Californians: singing the doxology with you in the Pelham TN cave was a bit uncomfortable for me too. But I just channeled the inner six-year old who still remembered the words from his Southern Baptist childhood and got through it. It's more a matter of conscience than cool, it being uncool to utter words you don't mean (back then I had no idea what it meant to attribute the flow of all blessings to an invisible Super Being, don't know now either, but now I know I don't know). But the singalong was fun, mostly.

Expand full comment

The point of it was to have a communal moment with people who you may well disagree with and to sing in harmony and hear the choir. If you refuse to sing anything you don't personally believe, then you're on a lonesome road.

Expand full comment

I turn 80 this August. I have noticed young women smile at me. I thought that they were smiling becasue I still got it as a hansom man. Then I released they see me and that is a reminder for them to call their grandfather. Have you noticed that from young women. Glenn

Expand full comment

I have not. I have a solemn face and when women look at me they quickly look away.

Expand full comment
founding

I snortled twice at the limerick for Casey. The storm allusion for a man named Gale was particularly brilliant

Expand full comment

That Seekers song is great! What a wonderful voice she has.

I was a student at Augustana when the debate team crashed and went looking for that plane.

Expand full comment

Per chance, did you know Joyce Estwick? Joyce was from Milan MN and her father managed my father's lumber yard.

My father took a crew with a bunch of snowmobiles to Nebraska looking for the wreckage.

Her funeral was at Kvitesed Lutheran in Milan and Pastor Pete gave the eulogy.

What a horrible accident!!

Expand full comment

I did not know her. It was a horror, indeed. All those young people, the terror they suffered.

Expand full comment

I was from Roslyn, S.D. before moving to Sioux Falls. There were some Estwick's near Roslyn where my father owned a hardware store. Frayne's daughter, Vicki, was a class behind me in high school and at Augustana I think.

Expand full comment

Nancy, see my reply to you below.

Expand full comment

The daughter of the debate coach, Frayne Anderson, was in touch with me. So long ago but still what a tragedy.

Expand full comment

This is for Heidi Emanuel,

Was your father on the plane carrying Augie students that crashed in Nebraska in 1969?

Expand full comment

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Just wondering what decade in the past you're stuck in...I Can't quite pinpoint where I'm stuck but I think it's somewhere between the early 1990s to 2019. (I'm still trying to avoid the whole COVID fiasco and so far I'm doing pretty good.

Wishing you many pleasant dreams and escapades whatever time period you are in and I'd recommend that you take your time coming into 2023.

Thanks for sharing,

Pame Roscoe -Author- 2394 ‘Mirrors of the Past’

Trailer link below: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zhqdffubd559smg/2394%20Book%20Trailer%20v2.mp4?dl=0

2394 ‘Mirrors of the Past’ by P. Roscoe

Expand full comment

Garrison,

If you can’t remember the last time you heard someone quote Ulysses Grant, I’ll give you one. Grant to Victoria Woodhull in February 1871, shortly after she became the first woman to speak before a committee of Congress and told the House Judiciary Committee that the Constitution already gave women the right to vote. President Grant invited her to the White House and gesturing to the presidential seat said, “Some day you will occupy that chair.” [Quoted in my book A Dirty Year: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in Gilded Age New York.]

Bill Greer

Brooklyn, NY

Expand full comment