Join us in THE BACK ROOM: Monologues - The Early Years

In addition to the other content popping up in The Back Room, each Sunday we will upload a monologue from the Eighties. The voice, the story line, and the length evolved over the years. We pretty sure you’ll find that receiving a link to the monologue each week — plus discounts in the store as well as exclusive written content for The Back Room — makes this a worthwhile investment ($60 per year or $6 per month).

"It usually occurred around 6:15 p.m. Central on Saturdays, I walked out onstage wherever APHC was playing and I said, “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown” and the audience took a deep breath and settled in to hear the news from my hometown. I had started the show in 1974, in homage to The Grand Ole Opry on WSM in Nashville, and I served as the host/announcer and I was looking for a way to broaden the show to include spoken word and drama, a natural move for a writer, and I’d introduced commercials for Jack’s Auto Repair and Powdermilk Biscuits and the Chatterbox Café, all from Lake Wobegon, and so it was natural to start out doing an extension of the commercials and then, as the News grew from a few minutes to twenty, it became its own thing. It was very free, always starting with a few lines about the weather — Lake Wobegon is in Minnesota, after all — and then went off in all directions, sometimes an anecdote leading to an essay, which turns into a story. I always wrote the monologue on Friday evening, four or five pages, and looked at it Saturday morning, and then not again. I never read it. I never memorized it. I felt that I’d naturally remember the memorable parts and that improv would serve to edit out the filler. That was the idea. People were impressed by the scriptlessness but actually it wasn’t that hard. You just say the line about a quiet week and then keep talking. Teachers do it all the time. So did I."