Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 01.24.22

I think it was 1977 — I was doing an early morning drive when a guy came on the radio advertising monogramed toilet paper. That was my introduction to you. A couple of years later I was in Worthington, MN, and stopped in to buy tickets to your coming show. I got Tickets #1 and #2. Later, as a United Methodist minister, I faithfully listened to your show each Saturday night — it put me in a gentle mood for finishing my sermon. 

You mentioned in your Post to the Host that Prairie Home Companion was an expensive 20- or more-person production. I remember your saying on the show it cost more than we wanted to know. I’m curious as to how much it cost and if, as I suspected, it became an important money maker for your employer.

Ron Graham

Fergus Falls, MN

Through no fault of my own, PHC earned a good deal of money for public radio, which they never forgave me for, Rev. Graham. The money came from the sale of CDs and cassettes, back when there were cassette players, and books, and a for-profit company was formed to sell the stuff, and I went and visited it once in downtown St. Paul, an enormous plant with automated assembly lines and dozens of employees who recognized me from my picture on the front of some of the cassettes. It was a big business and it earned truckloads of money for public radio, which was not that happy about it. NPR thought of itself as a high-minded institution, like the Anglican Church except more skeptical, and in came this hillbilly show that told jokes and sang gospel songs with gay abandon, and its popularity made the vice presidents grind their teeth. The problem was that I had a great time in radio and the vice presidents didn’t; they sat in meetings and talked about inclusivity, but they were happy to disinclude PHC.

GK

(Editors Note: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/1998/03/23/rivertown-trading-company-soldto-dayton-hudson-buys-rivertown)

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Mr. Keillor,

In my 84 years I have learned not to take life any too seriously and wish others could do the same. Life is not perfect. It has its flaws as do all of us that are breathing. Flaws are a great source of laughter. Laughter creates happy people. Happy people expect and overlook flaws.

Since God does not expect perfection from us there is no point in finding fault in life … it’s to be expected.

Every fault has its humorous side. We just need to know how to find it. You do a pretty good job in the humor dept.

Blessings.

Luci Hanson in Oregon … where the weather is not predictable. Keep the faith. It has its rewards.

Luci, I wish I were as easygoing as you, but it isn’t in my nature. I love my work, writing, doing the occasional show, but am aggravated by the faults in it and have been trying for fifty years to correct them and seem no closer to success than when I started out. I thought I had finished a novel a year ago and then took another look and found wretched gaps and excess on every other page. I come off the stage after a show and I am kicking myself for what went wrong. I tend to go on too long and wish I could do a nice compact hourlong set that would make everyone happy, including myself. So I’m still trying.

GK

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GK:

I’m writing from Toronto, where we had a huge dump of snow a week ago, and most of it is still here. The children like it. I don’t.

I think you’re wrong about comics not being in the lineup for sainthood. The best thing, sometimes the only good thing, someone can do for us is to make us laugh.

Elizabeth Block

Toronto

P.S. I sing some of your cat songs.

I might make an exception for Flanders & Swann or George Gobel or Lucille Ball or Lily Tomlin, but sainthood is a special category of other-worldliness and most comics are definitely worldly.

GK

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Hello,

Is the show on YouTube? I hate Facebook and will not use it. I will not subscribe to an entity that was created out of spite, hatred, and bullying. 

Also tell GK he’s not that old and age is a number and always talking about how old he is is boring and trite. I’m over 60 BTW and know that no one cares that I’m over 60, especially people who are under 60. So it would be nice for him to stop using it as a marker for all that is right, wrong, good, or bad with the world.

Thanks,

Pam

Pam, your opinion is duly noted, and I’m sorry but I find it sort of fascinating to be the age I am. A state of wonderment. My book Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 is definitely for you.

GK

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Hi,

Just a quick correspondence to you. I was wondering what your thoughts were about someone saying they “tweeked” one of your poems and then posted it on different sites. Just curious if this is something that is commonly practiced.

Peggy Macko

Never heard this before, Peggy. Do they mean “tweaked,” as in revised? That’d be deplorable unless they’re doing a full-out parody. But the internet has loosened our idea of copyright. Things are copied and pasted and forwarded left and right. Anything humorous tends to be passed around and by the third generation tends to become anonymous. Limericks, for example: somebody wrote them, but they all wind up as Anon. So be it. I am still at work, sort of fascinated by whatever I have in the works, and I don’t take much interest in my old stuff.

GK

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Sir,

It’d be wrong to say I “enjoyed” the show tonight in Las Vegas; what do you say when one finally faces his old ghost? And when you open, pinning the audience to their seats by facing THEIR mortality, what else would I call you?

I only was sorry not to hear anything about your sculpted likeness “behind bars” on a cross somewhere in this city. And regret I couldn’t introduce you to your newest old Red Guard Chinese fan. Yes, I came in the company of a “sent-down” girl who once swam to freedom in HK disguised as a melon. Along the line somewhere she’s glommed onto a couple of my good habits: ”Rammstein” and you, which should not be too surprising from the man once introduced as the Midwest’s “Luminous Darkness!” You ridiculed that man in a black robe; but now that you’re older and wiser...? Thank you for the decades. Thank you for the faith.

Kurt Sackman

The sculpture, by my old friend Joe O’Connell, has me behind bars, not on a cross, and it’s at Christ the King Catholic Church in Las Vegas, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet your friend. Anyone who swims to Hong Kong disguised as a melon is high on my list of potential friends. I liked the show in LV but the stage was so huge and I am just one guy with a microphone. For the audience’s sake, there should’ve been a dance line of ladies in jumpsuits doing the merengue.

GK

“Just as you did for the least of my family you did for me. I was hungry, you gave me food. Thirsty, you gave me a drink. A Stranger, you welcomed me. Naked, you clothed me. Sick, you took care of me. In prison you visited me.”

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Just wanted to thank Garrison Keillor for his “The Future of Escapism as I See It” article. I am 61 years old, not sure where I’m going to land after cleaning up, clearing out, and selling my dad’s house after his death on December 21. I haven’t had time to process the 12 years of caregiving for my dad and mom (Mom passed in 2012 on the Summer Solstice 2012, Dad passed on the Winter Solstice 2021). My dad was a television Director for 35 years with ABC-TV and won an Emmy award for the 1984 Olympics for an obscure commercial that he wrote and directed. The Emmy was delivered by mail to him in 1987, the same month as his granddaughter (my daughter), Emily (aka Emmy) was born. He said, proudly, “I received two Emmys in one month.” He was 91 when he died. He played chess online (with an incredible rating) just days before he died, composed, and played music, cooked, cleaned ... a quite proud man, born on May 16, 1930. He and my mom introduced me to Mr. Keillor’s radio show, and we listened together. And so where was I going with this? I’m 61 years old, and yes, there is life to be lived after caregiving for two people I loved and still love immensely. Perhaps on Lake Street? My folks had hootnannies every Saturday night, my mom baked bread, and they saw the production of Hair when it came out in Los Angeles … and it was, quite literally, “rained out” when the sprinkler system went off. And oh, by the way, my dad, Ron Bacon, played chess with Marlon Brando after a Good Morning America segment that he did with Marlon. Just weeks before my dad died, I thought to ask him who won the match. And he told me. Thanks for an article that I saw at a perfectly timed moment in my life.

Summer Bacon

I’m in awe of people like you, Summer, who have the resolve and discipline to put aside your own business and tend to ones you love. Sometimes I hear people say, “I don’t have the caregiving gene,” but I see it more as a discipline than a natural tendency. I’m older than my wife but I hope that if she should need me to care for her, I would put everything else aside and accept the privilege.

GK

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GK,

“… and sainthood is not available to people in my line of work.”

I’m Jewish but support Sainthood for the humorists who make us laugh at ourselves, at the world’s foibles, the various dilemmas we face — softening our attitudes by a good belly laugh or even a chuckle. Amen.

Lila Suna

Washington, D.C.

I can see sainthood for S.J. Perelman. I loved his stuff growing up and the term “Perelmanesque” stands for a definable style of Yiddish wit with the plink plink plink of weird wonderful vocabulary.

GK

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Mr. Keillor,

Please allow me to address your response to the post from a Sun City, Texas, resident about the name of our retirement mecca. For your edification, “Sun City” was the name that Dell Webb chose 25 years ago to attract snowbirds from the arctic region of the U.S. to come down and enjoy warm, sunny days year-round where we can live the dream in retirement. It seems that the name alone has attracted 12,000 retirees to flood into this snowless haven from bleak places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California. Billed as a community for “active seniors,” we have three golf courses, amenity centers with swimming pools, fitness centers, and hot tubs for aching bones, along with first-class facilities for woodworkers, tennis, and pickleball players, and those who indulge in the visual arts. The central gas station on campus has more wine and beer than you could find in all of Iowa, and we now have a new Panda Express nearby for our culinary delights. Yes, the Texas politics are as goofy as Florida’s, but we don’t have the humidity or the pale-looking old geezers strolling around aimlessly in plaid shorts with dress socks up to their knees. Along with all the sunshine there is plenty of culture close by in Austin. Whoops, I just noticed that I have a senior university class on J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor that I need to get to. So, ya’ll come to visit if you can and bring your sunglasses. 

Bill Spectrum

Sun City, Texas

Bill, this is such a wonderful commercial for Sun City that I think you must be putting your condo up for sale and heading north. Hope you get a good price and good luck when you reach the frozen tundra.

GK

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Mr. Keillor,

Don’t know if you’ve built stone walls, or been a carpenter in your life, but you’ve done something equally distinguished. Thank you.

From an evening’s perusal of Wobegon Boy.

Brian Bickford

My great-uncle Alfred was a stonemason, and he built a wall along Ferry Street in Anoka that has now lasted almost 140 years. My dad built a house in 1947 that I grew up in and his grandson Will and wife, Sonya, and their four children live in it now and apparently it is enduring well. (Alfred built the fireplace.) Glad you liked the book. I’ve never read it since I wrote it and I doubt that I will, for fear of finding passages in need of rewriting.

GK

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Speaking of the theft of Indian lands, you established your bona fides on that score some years ago when narrating The Dakota Conflict, about the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 (better called the So-Sick-and-Tired-of-Getting-Screwed-There-Was-Nothing-to-Do-But-Fight-Back Conflict). I have written Twin Cities Public Television several times questioning why this never made the jump from VHS to anything more durable. The State of Minnesota had a lengthy commission that examined events and came to the same conclusions you had.

The Dakota Conflict is such a quintessential story of our whole history toward Indian nations! Couldn’t you cast around among your contacts and get it taken up by some streaming service? I myself would be happy with DVD, but I’m old-fashioned. My three VHS copies are wearing out.

Richard Ashford

Chevy Chase, MD

Richard, I have no contacts, believe it or not. I’m just an old retired guy walking around the Upper West Side of New York. You’re so right about the Uprising of 1862 and it is a blot on Lincoln’s legacy that he allowed 38 Sioux to be hanged in Mankato after commuting the death sentences of 264 others. The nation was engaged in a civil war and Lincoln couldn’t afford to lose Minnesota’s support for the war, and in Minnesota anti-Sioux feelings were fervid. It is a shameful story and needs to be taught carefully in our schools and not brushed away. The depredations against the Dakota linger on today.

GK

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I’ve long read The Writer’s Almanac and don’t remember if you’ve published this William Stafford poem, which is a favorite of mine. I feel it is particularly relevant to the times we live in, and perhaps you can help share it widely.

Betsy Beyler

Fairfax, VA

A Ritual To Read To Each Other
By William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

A great poem, Betsy, and I’ve read it on TWA several times. Thanks for sending it.

GK

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Dear Garrison Keillor,

I just read your letter about escapism for us of a certain age. I’m a shy retired pediatrician who doesn’t speak much in groups of more than four people.

Anyway, in the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to perform. I was thwarted early on when my middle school drama teacher told me my scary witch seemed more like a used car salesman. (It still burns after almost 50 years.) Also, of course, I was usually consumed by stage fright. I gave it up early on.

Lately, I’ve had visions of playing the piano or guitar and singing for an audience. (When I sit behind others in a group and sing, the person in front of me compliments my voice.)

Well, I can’t play the piano but maybe it’s not too late to learn a few chords on the guitar. I know I’m not a great singer but wonder if I could make something interesting with phrasing and emotion. (At least one guy from Minnesota, Hibbing specifically, did that. Though I’d say he was a poet too … so maybe not.)

Well, I could learn the guitar and try not to be shy. Maybe I will. If you ever see a notice for Katie singing at a coffee shop (where I’m pretty sure people will not pay too much attention) on Lake Street, please come … but don’t look directly at me.

Katie

This is what Minneapolis, the new Las Vegas, will offer people like you, a place in the spotlight, and you should not try to be the judge of your own talent. Let others guide you but put yourself out there where they can get a good look. When you take a big chance, you may surprise yourself at how you rise to the challenge. Your failure to be frightening back in middle school isn’t the last word on your artistic ability.

GK

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Why has Garrison started saying “be in touch” instead of “keep in touch.”

Dean Hulse

“Keep” implies that we’re already friends. “Be” opens the door to new possibilities.

GK