An account of what I've been up to

The Column: 02.18.25

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I’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.

A person forgets things at 82. One night I forgot the story about the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon and it’s not easy to find your way back to a logical point where you can have old Norwegian men drop their trousers and attempt to pick up a 50-cent piece with their bare cheeks. I got this story from Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who was a fan of the show, and it works beautifully and I hate to lose it.

The show is a service to the crowd; it’s not for me to show off. I give them a singing intermission, they stand and sing “America” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” which gives older men the pleasure of singing falsetto OOOOHs and then “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made,” which brings tears to their eyes. Oftentimes Unitarians have told me afterward how much they enjoyed singing that old Baptist hymn. (When else would they ever get the chance?)

I never mentioned Elon Musk or his friend. I talked about Minnesota winter and the beauty of being 82 and my mother and the adventure of putting on my underwear in the morning without leaning against the wall and all in the interest of lightheartedness.

Wound up in Key West for the last show and also stopped by the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. My mother was upset when she saw me reading A Farewell To Arms when I was 18, afraid it would lead me down the wrong path, which it certainly didn’t. I was never fascinated by death and killing and I never ventured into the long dark hallways of depression. I admired his graceful style and imitated it briefly.

The shows being down South, people enjoyed hearing me talk about Minnesota winter back in my boyhood, waking up on a twenty-below morning, a blizzard in progress, but no mention of school cancellations — back then school cancellation was on the Forbidden list along with atheism, communism, and boys dancing ballet — so I put on my long woolens, ate my Cream of Wheat, and held Mickey our cat who was miserable in winter. His sphincter locked up in the cold and he needed to be massaged to loosen the bladder. That was my job, gently manipulating the genitalia of an elderly cat who could not be shot because it would break the hearts of the little kids and they’d grow up to become criminals.

And then the venture out through the wintry blast to the county road, barely visible in the blowing snow, to wait for the bus, sitting huddled in the ditch, listening for coyotes, watchful for snow snakes slithering under the snow, making slight waves.

My crowd, in their shorts and sandals, enjoyed this, probably thinking it was fictional, the drowsiness of the boy in the ditch, watching for headlights, seeing the dark shapes of buzzards in the bare limbs of trees, big carnivorous birds watching me, waiting, and if for some reason the bus does not appear — this was before children had cellphones, we were beyond rescue — could I defend myself against the sharp beaks of a flock of hungry birds?

It was a good show, with jokes and poetry and a sexual awakening and pond hockey and the grimness of Ecclesiastes and the goodness of aunts and girl cousins, plus the singing and the buzzards, and I felt it was a genuine public service. No mention of Musk or Vance, no mention of constitutional issues, carbon emissions, climate change. Call me a coward but I saw my job as giving them an evening of freedom. When you can get Unitarians to sing joyfully about the Second Coming, you’ve accomplished some good in the world. I wish my mother had been there.

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