Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 11.05.23

In a Post to the Host recently, you responded to someone who asked you not to toss your memorabilia, “maybe you can bring a couple of trucks to load up the papers, Rhubarb Pie sign, stage sets, etc.” Leo Sand, Albany Jaycees, (whom you gave permission to name the Wobegon Trail) said he’d like to do just that for future plans of preserving the Lake Wobegon legacy in the Albany area. Interested?

Roger Paschke

Very interested. I’d donate boxes of books to put in a niche in the library and a jukebox with Prairie Home tunes on it and I’d write a four-page history of Lake Wobegon that you could give away to anyone interested. The Rhubarb sign is now in our kitchen in New York but I’d donate that too. And if I ever get on a bicycle again, I’ll ride the Lake Wobegon Trail. GK

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Dear Garrison,

A recurring theme in your recent musings is your irritation with those who claim to be woke. It is a distaste that you share (though you share little else) with allies of a certain businessman-politician-indicted fraudster with strange orange hair.

You oversimplify. Being woke is a bad trait when it motivates self-righteous posturing and whining, yes. But it’s a virtue when it motivates real efforts to advance racial equality and economic justice, not merely mouth such phrases now and then.

You overlook the principal failing of the woke, however: their disregard for the immutable rules of grammar. Some of us are awakened. Some of us prefer to slumber on. But none of us is woke. 

Perhaps if we were all more attentive to the difference between preterite and participle we would not have time to squabble over everything else.

David Hoekema

Green Valley, Arizona (my winter home)

Thanks for making your point, David. I do think that most Americans have an ear for b.s. whether it’s Mike Johnson saying Halloween is the work of the devil or academics proposing that the word “field” no longer be used because it is traumatizing, reminding the descendants of slaves that their people used to pick cotton. There’s a lot of this in academia and in the arts, and it’s our duty to scorn it. I live in New York City, which was weary of the fraudster long before he decamped for Florida. The progressive left has given him a great many gifts. GK

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If you ever cut a chunk of text and then cut another one without pasting the first chunk again, press CTRL-Z as many times as necessary to bring back the lost chunk.

Mike O’Leary

Thanks. My digital guru did tell me that but it didn’t work. Probably my mistake. Anyway, being forced to recollect the lost chunk wound up improving it. GK

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Hi,

I’ve been a big fan of yours and love reading your weekly musings. I’m in my mid-70s and for some reason, my kids are starting to ask me questions about my life. Perhaps they think I’m on death’s door; they’re asking me to write things down. In addition to asking me intensely personal questions, which I won’t share here, they asked me about my favorite childhood toys and games. How would you answer this? I hope it’s not too personal.

Barbara Dorsey

We boys invented games, like Cowboys & Indians and Cops & Robbers, improvised big scenes, went galloping around until suddenly, around the age of ten, we realized we were too old for that, and then we flooded a backyard rink and played hockey, we made a baseball field in a vacant lot. We played a sort of ball game in which one boy threw a tennis ball at the steps of school and other boys had to field it. There was Pom-pom-pullaway, of course, and Prisoners’ Base. I don’t recall adults getting involved in any of this. We lived without much supervision. But we felt safe in our world. My fellow Democrats make a tragic mistake when they refuse to take up the issue of crime and try to “contextualize” it. Children have a right to feel safe, just as they have a right to a good education. That’s basic, in my book. GK

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Hi, a longtime fan since listening to your show in the mid-’80s while going to UW and living out there.

Happy to hear you have shows scheduled, but I can’t make them! Do seriously hope you have some way to stream the shows as many of us miss listening to you!

Please let your fans know if so, and if not, please consider!

Thank you, and Happy Holidays.

Kerry Brosnan

I’d love broadcasting them but public radio has gone around the corner of correctness and DEI and so humor is no longer allowed except (thank goodness) for Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me. Anyway, I love doing these shows — did Emory University in Atlanta Saturday, 700 people, and it was more fun than an old man has any right to expect. I’m 81, I just want to enjoy myself, and I leave public radio to go wherever it wishes. GK

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Mr. Keillor,

I recently finished your book That Time of Year, and I was deeply moved by it but you were wrong when you disparaged the movie A Prairie Home Companion. Your movie was fantastic. My wife and I watched it, and she found it very funny, and I found it poignant and profound. She loves the penguin joke. I married up.

Sincerely,

Chris Capozzoli

I loved the making of the movie. Robert Altman was a very sick man when he came to the Fitzgerald in St. Paul to direct it but he swore he’d never retire, would die with his boots on, and it was it was fascinating watching him work. The project attracted a magnificent cast because everyone felt it’d be his last movie and so there was Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones, and I, the fledgling screenwriter, felt overwhelmed, but we got it done. It was amazing watching a dying man having a wonderful time. He adored actors. Anyway, I’ve agreed to talk about the movie to a movie club in New York so I’ll sit down and watch it again and see what I think now. Glad you liked it. GK

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Hi, Garrison, my 97-year-old mom passed away this summer. She was a big fan of yours, originally from Minnesota, very liberal. When I was visiting in July, (the last time I saw her) she recited a limerick. I said, that sounds like Garrison, she said it was. I would love to know the words; she was sharper than I am. It was something about having sex in a phone booth. She was a lot of fun; do you recall it? Thanks.

Tracy Schlegel

I have a wisp of a memory of a joke about sex in a phone booth but I don’t remember it as a limerick. Anyone else remember this? I’m sorry we lost your mother. Mine lived to be 97 too so now that’s my goal. GK

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I first heard you in 1993 when my new boyfriend popped in a CD and said, “Have you heard of this guy?” I listened to a commercial for Bertha’s Kitty Boutique and was hooked. That new boyfriend and I will chalk up 30 years of marriage the 20th of next month. We are celebrating that event by traveling from Fort Worth, Texas, to see your Holiday show. So,

We’re off to Wabash, Indiana
To delight in some real Mericana
By that Cheerfulness dealer
Mister Garrison Keillor 
Of whom we are both happy fana

I look for your posts in my email every morning and finding one makes a brighter day. Keep campaigning for kindness, wisdom, and simplicity. God bless you. 

Sincerely, 

Carla Keatley

P. S. I am a wordsmith of sorts. Some of my writings are at storykeatley.com. I would be honored should you take a peek. Bird recently placed in an international poetry contest. 

I’ll look you up, Carla, but that Wabash show is November 29 so I don’t think it’s exactly a holiday show. I get to sing duets with Heather Masse and do other stuff, which feels like Christmas to me but not literally. I don’t want you traveling all the way from Fort Worth to Indiana hoping to hear Angels We Have Heard On High and instead hearing I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. We’re doing shows in Galveston and Austin in early 2024, if that suits you. Good luck with the writing. GK

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I’m excited that you’ll be coming to Wilmington with your 50^th anniversary show! I remember listening to APHC in the old days when Tom Keith was the sound-effects man. I’m wondering what Tom was like to work with and how you found him; did he audition for the show? It seems like he had to be a great guy. Fred Newman is also great and is so talented! Do they just improv these sound effects, or you do tell them what sounds to use? What’s the process like?

My wife and I are looking forward to the show!

Jerry Stang

North Carolina

You’ll get to see Fred in action in Wilmington and you’ll see how much improvisation is involved. I love to go off script and toss in beluga whales, loons, rockets, turtles, singing mummies, anything that comes to mind. Tom Keith was the engineer of a morning show I did at KSJN in St. Paul in 1972 but I didn’t need an engineer so I made him the sportscaster Jim Ed Poole and when PHC came along in 1974 he started doing SFX. He’d been a sergeant in the Marine Corps so he had a keen sense of responsibility, he had a theatrical streak in him, and he was extremely happy to be onstage and not sitting at the mixing board.

It’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts, like this recording of That Time of Year read by Garrison Keillor (11 hours) with music by Richard Dworsky.

Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio.

CLICK HERE to buy now.