Post to the Host

Dear Garrison,

I got to read a couple of your posts this morning, and they were mostly informative and encouraging, unlike your new Cheerfulness book, which has suddenly become inexplicably gloomy. What’s up? In your eighties, can’t you tell up from down? Ask Jenny to set you right. Younger women are usually helpful. Here at Morningside of Fullerton, older ones are too. As a ninety-year-old former Minnesotan, I rarely offer advice unless asked.

Jim Armstrong

I wasn’t aware of gloominess when I wrote it or when I read it in a recording studio but thanks for the warning. GK

Dear Garrison,

I started listening to Prairie Home Companion in the early ‘80s after meeting John Allen, who introduced me to his hometown of Minneota and to Bill Holm who still lived there. We drove along long, flat highways in search of local Minnesota poets. John wanted me to have signed copies of their Westerheim Press handbooks. Leo Dangel, Tom Hennen, John Rezmerski. Today’s Post to the Host mentioning the passing of Howard Mohr has me remembering all this. It was 1982, and I had just graduated with an anthropology degree. Howard wrote in the front of How to Tell a Tornado:To Susie, if you ever get tired of studying the neolithic slope-head who had me sign this, drop over. I’m an improved, fully evolved, civilized person. 

I wonder if Howard would refer to Both Sides Now as a stupid song, and I wonder why you did.

Sincerely,

Susie Gilfoy

I don’t think Howard would’ve written it in a public place but in private conversation over a beer, sure, of course he would’ve. It typifies a pretentious silliness that affects many of us in our adolescence but we’re supposed to get over it before the age of forty. Ann Reed is a better songwriter, so is Iris DeMent. This Tired Old World, If You Were Mine, and Iris’s My Life and Our Town. Just stating an opinion. GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I seek your help. The adult child of friends of ours, a person we have known for most of their life, has begun to identify as nonbinary. My issue is evidenced above; there is a pronoun problem that must be addressed. I find it difficult and jarring to use the plural to address the singular.

As a writer you can perhaps take on this challenge. We need a set of pronouns that identify he/her, him/her, his, hers, etc./etc. in a way that provides relief without offending the ear while honoring the nominative of the subject. I welcome any suggestions.

Thank you,

Bill Ziegler
Branford, Connecticut

I speak to anyone I know with the name or pronoun they choose for themselves. It’s not my business to correct them. I don’t believe I know any nonbinary person so it isn’t an issue in my life. Sorry to be unhelpful. GK

Dear Garrison,

I have a twin sister. I was born twenty minutes before Patty, a fact I never let her forget. My mother, Fern, a devout Lutheran, baked us each a birthday cake every year from the time we were two until she passed some forty years later. Mine was always devil’s food; Patty’s always angel food.

Gary Gackstatter

We are waiting for the rest of the story, sir. Take your time. GK

Do you still keep in touch with your writers? I enjoyed the work of Norman Conquest, Emanuel Transmission, Warren Peace, Ida Dunmore, Dora Jar, Hugh Mongous, Preston Folded, and award-winning writer Muriel L. Brubaker so much. Are they employed elsewhere in radio?

Barbara

I try not to keep in touch with them because they were inept and not only that, they also wrote lousy material and wrote it very slowly. It was a live radio show, 5 p.m. Central on Saturday, and oftentimes they’d be straggling into the studio at 4 and 4:30, waving scripts that were full of typos, mixed metaphors, subjunctive moods, you name it. And then they started stealing old material of mine, copying old Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty and Duane’s Mom and Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian, and passing it off as their own. So I fired them. Plagiarism is no compliment in my book because the stuff they stole was not my good stuff. It was a sad story and I’m sorry you brought it up and now I think I recognize you as Barbara Seville, one of the gang. Go away and don’t come back. GK

Hi, Garrison.

I was just writing to say that I was somewhat surprised by your describing Joni Mitchell’s song Both Sides Now as stupid in your response to the person who wrote a cat-themed parody of it. I think it’s a great song, and really the opposite of stupid. And I would guess that there are many who feel the same way, judging by the fact that there are over 1,600 recorded cover versions of it, including recordings by such varied artists as Frank Sinatra, Willy Nelson, Dizzy Gillespie, Judy Collins, Stan Getz, Emmylou Harris, Rufus Wainwright, Paul Anka, Dolly Parton, Pete Seeger, Cilla Black, Seal, Petula Clark, Chet Atkins, Harry Belafonte, Glen Campbell, John Cain, Betty Buckley, Belinda Carlisle, Benny Goodman, Sutton Foster, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Mary Wilson, Robert Goulet, Chanticleer, John Denver, Skeeter Davis, Neil Diamond, Mary Hopkin, Dion, Doris Day, Lonnie Donegan, Hole, Susan Boyle, Jim Nabors, Fairport Convention, Dexys Midnight Runners, Percy Faith, Michael Feinstein, Joel Grey, Mel C, Herbie Hancock, Josh Groban, Harpers Bizarre, Blossom Dearie, Dick Hyman, KC and the Sunshine Band, Roger Whittaker, Ronan Keating, The Tokens, Ray Charles Singers, The Yale Whiffenpoofs, United States Army and Air Force Bands, Dave Van Ronk, Clannad, Canadian Brass, and Kelly Clarkson, to name (as they say) but a few.

It is a song with a brilliant melody combined with lyrics that are simultaneously both sincere and slightly sardonic — much like your own writing. 

Certainly, there are some sappy and saccharine versions of the song out there, but that’s not Joni Mitchell’s fault. You should give the original a listen — and also her 1970 performance at The Isle of Wight Festival on YouTube, as well as her recent performance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival (another octogenarian who is still out there performing). Might I also recommend Joni’s 1966 live coffeehouse performance in Philadelphia before the song was even recorded. 

Maybe you might even consider adding Both Sides Now to your sing-along repertoire, since I’m pretty sure most of the people who attend your shows would know most of the words.

P.S. I’m also pretty surprised by the fact you’ve never read Great Expectations or Moby-Dick — but I’ll save that for another letter.

P.P.S. I very much enjoy most of YOUR original songs too. But you really can’t say you’ve made it until The United States Army and Air Force Bands record one of your compositions.

Sincerely,

Angela Winslow-DiCelesti

Nantucket, Massachusetts

I loved your letter, Angela, and that’s why I didn’t edit a word out of it. I don’t mind being in the minority on the Both Sides Now question. I could make a long list of artists who never recorded the song but what would that prove? As for Dickens and Melville, I was busy trying to write back when we were assigned those books in English, and I only read a brief synopsis of each one, but I used it to write term papers on Expectations and the fish story that got a B-minus, which was a good preparation for life. I have fooled a lot of people since. GK

GK,

Contemporary interpretation by our beloved politicians, FYI …

“Do one to others before they do one to you.”

Scott Taylor, 87 trips around the sun and still mainly cheerful.

Thanks, Scott. I’m catching up to you. GK

Hi, Garrison.

I’m assuming the stinker of a play you saw was The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. I saw the original production back in the ’60s and wasn’t crazy about it back then … this was a revival … and according to your review, the defibrillator didn’t work this time.

Noel Coward once wrote a line … “It’s surprising how potent cheap music is.” I guess that goes for food as well. Many’s the time I had to wash the bad taste of a lousy play away at a Nedick’s stand with a red hot and an orange soda.

Be well.
Rick Whelan

Rick, yes, that was the play, and I admired how the actors threw themselves into it — I can’t imagine working that hard eight times a week — but the play kept interrupting itself and in the second act, it simply fell apart. She was a wonderful playwright but young and I’m guessing the play was written under great pressure. GK

I just read Pontoon and am confused by the epilogue. Please clarify for my simple mind. Did Barbara die? Did she take her mom in the bowling ball on her journey to Georgia? Help! It’s driving me crazy! Thanks in advance.

Laurie

Wow, it’s quite an epilogue, isn’t it. I say that she did take the bowling ball with her because Mother speaks to her, and surely it’s Mother who falls asleep, not Barbara because she is still driving. Thanks for asking the question. I never go back and read my books and this was rather thrilling reading a book I wrote fifteen years ago. I could not have written that epilogue today but I did at one time. I wanted Barbara to be haunted but I also wanted her to survive and there she is, heading for Chicago in the middle of the night, on her way to Georgia, the bowling ball with her mom’s ashes sitting on the seat beside her. Thanks, Laurie. GK