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Monday May 3, 2004 Volume VI Number 18

ake Wobegon is an imaginary place, but not really.

It’s the little town that time forgot way up north where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children above average.  It’s home to the Chatterbox Café and Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church and Pastor Ingvist and the Norwegian Lutheran bachelor farmers where the tomatoes grow fat in the summertime and the men poke holes in the ice to fish from inside a hut out on the frozen lake in winter.  And when I hear that rich baritone voice open with the familiar line, “Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town…” well, my blood pressure goes down, stress level diminishes, I kick off my shoes and settle back and through the medium of radio – the theater of the mind – I go back to my own home town, a place that time also forgot, and grow nostalgic for those simpler days.

I suppose the first thing that got me back when I first heard it, was the name itself.  Lake Wobegon.  It’s pronounced just as it should be – Woe-be-gone.  It’s a wish that comes true when you go there. 

I remember the first time I saw the name – Garrison Keillor.  He appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine (1985), a dubious honor, I suppose – but that’s how I became aware of him.  His image on that cover propelled the burgeoning popularity of his weekly radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, to new heights.  A shy person, who depended on the medicinal properties of Powdermilk Biscuits to help a man do what a man must do, was launched into a stellar orbit the likes of which he never imagined.  It opened new levels of introspection – and professional opportunity – which included a move from his Midwest home in St. Paul to the Big Apple.  New York City.

In American life, for nearly a century, to appear on the cover of TIME Magazine is akin to winning the lottery or an Oscar or the World Series.  It means that anonymity is gone forever and that your story is familiar to legions.  But the blessing can also be a curse.  It creates expectations you may not want to even try to deliver.

Such was the case for Keillor, who wasn’t really prepared for Stardom.  He was, for certain, ready for a change in scenery.  So he moved to New York.  He renamed the show to give it a broader appeal, “The American Radio Company.”  But it didn’t last long.  While Keillor had tastes that went beyond the mandarin orange jello salads and tuna casseroles of his native Minnesota, even the sophisticated cuisine of New York’s finest bistros could not hold him.  It was Lake Wobegon that pulled him back to St. Paul.

It’s hard for me to imagine a job I’d like better, if I could trade.

Keillor spends his weeks writing (every morning at 4:30, he’s at the keyboard).  He’s written best selling novels.  One of my personal favorites is a spoof on the Governor of his home state diffidently entitled “Me.”  It’s a thinly veiled fiction about a young illegitimate boy named Jimmy Valente who runs away and eventually serves his country in the jungles of Vietnam, becomes a body builder and is elevated to a coveted position as a Navy special operations commando (a Navy Walrus – get it?), and after his military service, pursues a lucrative career as a professional wrestler.  He becomes enormously popular, winning such a following that he ultimately becomes Governor of Minnesota.  The real Governor, Jesse Ventura, couldn’t help but notice – he wasn’t pleased.  So ever since the novel hit the best seller list, Keillor and Ventura have engaged in a highly public verbal sparring contest, to the wild amusement of Lake Wobegonians everywhere.  The brawny governor, time and again, has proven himself no match for the satirist, Keillor.  Ventura should stick to the clean and jerk, and avoid tournaments requiring quick wit.

I’m quite aware that as Keillor has aged, he has drifted away from the place he was long ago when my fellow evangelicals thought of him as one of us.  Maybe the classic of all the old Lake Wobegon tales for my people was a story called “The Gospel Birds,” which I’ve listened to via cassette tape, oh may fifty or sixty times.  He’s a fixture now in Public Radio, and seems to experience a certain fiendish glee when he says something that is sure to throw the religious right off balance.  But then again, he’s equally gleeful when he tosses out the same sort of curve ball at, let’s say, the Bostonian Unitarians.

He is, mainly, salt-of-the-earth Midwestern born and bred.  And try as he may, he hasn’t been able to shake it.  Kinda like me.

I went to see him in person last week at the historic Fitzgerald Theater (named for one of his heroes, F. Scott) in St. Paul.

* * * * * *

It wasn’t easy.

Tickets for the live performance of A Prairie Home Companion, I know now, sell out routinely in less than ninety minutes.  It doesn’t matter where the venue.

So having missed the IPO (initial public offering), and unwilling to pay quadruple to the face value of the tickets from an Internet scalper (reseller), Larry and I stood in line at noon on the day of the performance at the ticket window of the Fitzgerald.  We secured numbers twenty and twenty-one, which assured that we would be admitted.

What we didn’t know, was that the “Rush Tickets” set aside for hard-core fans like me, put us right on the stage.

We were ushered in, down the aisle, through an obscure tunnel, and onto the stage.  We sat beside the Victorian façade, a porch and two story house on the prairie, and smack on stage beside the All-star Shoe Band, where Rich Dworsky warmed up his guys for the five o’clock live performance.

I remember them from the Fourth Annual Farewell that we took in at the Universal in Los Angeles.  It was the fourth year in a row that GK bid farewell to St. Paul.  Those were the New York City days. 

But this time, we were close enough to pull on Keillor’s coat tail. 

“I hear that old piano,” Keillor sang, “down the avenue.  I smell the coffee, I look around for you…”

It was like comin’ home.

“My sweet, sweet old someone, comin’ through that door… It’s Saturday, the band is playin’, Honey who could ask for more?”

I know one thing.  I couldn’t.

* * * * * * *

During the intermission, I saw Sue Scott standing alone behind the bleachers.  Carolyn said, “There she is.”  She knew.  I wanted to meet her.  So I did.  Sue Scott is the enormously talented female voice of PHC.  She, like her counterpart Tim Russell, has a hundred voices.  Just by the delightful lilt of her diction, she creates the image of a little old lady, the sultry object of Guy Noir’s affections in the Private Eye series, a wacky valley girl, the caring wife in The Ketchup Advisory Board spots, and a matronly Minnesotan who could right well have played a cameo in the North Woods classic, Fargo. 

You hear radio voices and create a mental image.  I had one of Sue Scott.  And there she was.  Different than my mind’s creation.  Slight build, bi-focals, about my age.  And all those voices.  It was joke night.  She used them all.

I felt a little foolish.  Like a kid again.  Star struck.  I approached her, extending my hand, “Sue Scott?” I blurted.  “My name’s Ken,” I said.

She smiled one of those, “Oh boy, here comes another one” smiles.  Pleasant enough.

“I just wanted to meet you personally.”  It was all I could think to say.  What a dumb, predictable, ordinary line.

“I really enjoy your work,” I said, adding to the tedium.

“Thank you,” she acknowledged.

I nodded, felt a shyness I hadn’t known for some time, and turned back to my seat on stage. 

It was Lake Wobegon.  I was there.  I just experienced the self-effacing, repressed Wobegonian longings Keillor describes so much better than I.

What I really wanted to say was, “You make me laugh.”  But I didn’t.

I failed to think of it in time.

Carolyn reached over, smiled, and squeezed my hand.

* * * * * * * *

It’s Monday morning.  You are a leader.

If you’ve been to Lake Wobegon, you know the simple joys of the smell of coffee, the sweet strains of a familiar song in the air, and you, carefree, join in.  And you know how those visits home, real and imagined, can energize you for all the rest. 

Personal greetings from members of the live audience to his radio listeners are always a part of the show, and the one I submitted was read by GK himself on the air just before the intermission – a message to my brother-in-law back in California who, just as we hoped, listened live and heard his name.

The Fitzgerald Theater is as nostalgic as the theme.  Keillor, now plodding into his sixties, is prolific as ever.  He spends his weekends telling stories in the company of comedians and musicians and enormously talented people.  What a job.

He’s lanky again, like his childhood days.  I think he’s discovered the low carb plan – no discernible body fat - tall in his starched white shirt, open collar, tux jacket, matching black trousers with a silk stripe and those trademark red tennis shoes.

“Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon,” he concluded.

And as if it’s necessary, for me, the power of story is once more underscored.

Garrison Keillor – story-teller.

Sounds good to me.

Posted in Valley Center, California

© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004

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