Thoughts about toothpaste and patriotism I am severely irked by the silver security foil protecting the tip of my tube of toothpaste, which I must pry off with my thumbnail before I can squeeze Colgate onto my toothbrush. It suggests that insidious persons are out to poison me via my habit of twice-daily brushing. When I order a cheeseburger in a café, it doesn’t come to me locked in a tin box; when I go to the barber, she doesn’t offer me a metal shield to prevent her from cutting my throat; the oranges in the grocery store don’t come wrapped in steel foil to prevent evil persons from injecting strychnine with a hypodermic: why the security cap on the Colgate?... Go to Garrison Keillor and Friends on Substack to read the rest of THE COLUMN >>>
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This week on A Prairie Home Companion This week — from the John S. Glas Fieldhouse in Bemidji, Minnesota — we have a show dedicated to ice fishing. Special guests: Rhonda Vincent & The Rage, jazz guitarist Sam Miltich, and the diva of the Dakotas, vocalist Andra Suchy. Also with us, the Royal Academy of Radio Acting (Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Tom Keith), Richard Dworsky and The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, and the latest News from Lake Wobegon. It was February 2011, and this was our first destination travel show, with 600 fans from across the country descending on Minnesota to join us for a live performance of A Prairie Home Companion, plus a weekend’s worth of activities, including ice fishing and campfire songs. Join us Saturday for a listen via our Facebook page at 5 p.m. CT (or click the link below). Listen to the Show >>>Like our Facebook page >>>
More about this week’s featured guests
Rhonda Vincent was barely five years old when she began performing with her family band, the Sally Mountain Show. She’s been in the spotlight ever since. Named Female Vocalist of the Year multiple times by the International Bluegrass Music Association and was recently inducted into the Grand Old Opry, this ace mandolinist has dozens of albums to her credit, including her latest, Music Is What I See, released in 2021 on the Upper Management label. The Rage (on this broadcast) is: Hunter Berry (fiddle), Brent Burke (Dobro), Mickey Harris (bass), Aaron McDaris (banjo), and Josh Williams (guitar).
Andra Suchy spent her childhood on a farm near Mandan, North Dakota, the daughter of two talented singers. By the time she was in grade school, she was traveling around, doing concerts and festivals with her family. She has performed with several groups in the Twin Cities area, and you might have recognized her voice on commercials for White Castle, Target, and more.
“Little Heart” >>>Read our guest interview >>>
Sam Miltich is a self-taught jazz guitarist born and raised in the woods of northern Minnesota. Sam burst on the scene in his teens as a young lion of gypsy jazz, joining Paul Mehling’s Hot Club of San Francisco and touring internationally with the Robin Nolan Trio. Sam’s fluid and instinctive sound has graced hundreds of stages, from small towns on the Iron Range to New York’s Lincoln Center. In addition to fronting his own band, the Clearwater Hot Club, Sam records and performs extensively with Minneapolis-based jazz performers Connie Evingson, Charmin Michelle, saxophonist Dave Karr, and many more Twin Cities top jazz artists.
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Garrison Keillor & Company on Tour
Keillor & Company starring Garrison Keillor and featuring pianist Dan Chouinard and vocalist Prudence Johnson is an evening of stand-up, storytelling, audience song, and poetry.
There are sonnets (sung), limericks, and musical jokes. And the thread that runs through the show is the beauty of growing old. Despite the inconvenience, old age brings the contentment of LESS IS MORE. Your mistakes and big ambitions are behind you, nothing left to prove, and small things give you great pleasure because that’s what’s left. (“I was unhappy in college because it was a requirement for an intellectual, but then I went into show business and discovered that people won’t pay to be made unhappy, their kids will do it for free.”)
And there is always News from Lake Wobegon, a town booming with new entrepreneurs, makers of artisanal firewood and gourmet meatloaf, breeders of composting worms, and dogs trained to do childcare. But some things endure, such as the formation of the Living Flag on Main Street, citizens in tight formation wearing red, white, or blue caps, and Mr. Keillor among them, standing close to old neighbors, Myrtle Krebsbach (“Truckstop”), Julie Christensen (“Bruno, the Fishing Dog”), and Clint Bunsen. And an a cappella sing-along with the audience joining in an odd medley of patriotic songs, pop standards, and hymns, and ending with the national anthem.
March 3rd in Newark, OH >>>March 4th in Kent, OH >>> |
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| We Are Still Married
Garrison Keillor’s We Are Still Married is a celebrated collection of short stories and poems. Here’s how the New York Times described the book when it was released in 1989:
“The other poems, opinions, stories, letters and whatnots in this collection ponder the meaning and nuance of yard sales, sneezes, Woodlawn Cemetery, the last surviving cigarette smokers, the solo sock, the old shower stall, the perils of celebrity, being nearsighted, growing up fundamentalist and traveling with teenage children. And in these ‘ordinary things,’ the grace of Garrison Keillor shines through.” —New York Times Book Review
Behold, Garrison’s poem “The Finn Who Would Not Take a Sauna”:
(a recorded version from APHC can be found on Anniversary Album: The First Five Years.)
THE FINN WHO WOULD NOT TAKE A SAUNA
In northeast Minnesota, what they call the Iron Range,
Where a woman is a woman and some things never change,
Where winter lasts nine months a year, there is no spring or fall,
Where it gets so cold the mercury cannot be seen at all,
And you and I, we normal folk, would shiver, shake, and chatter,
And if we used an outhouse, we would grow an extra bladder;
But even when it’s coldest, when our feet would have no feeling,
Those Iron Rangers get dressed up and go out snowmobiling
Out across the frozen land and make a couple stops
At Gino’s Lounge and Rudy’s Bar for whiskey, beer, and schnapps—
And then they go into a shack that’s filled with boiling rocks
Hot enough to sterilize an Iron Ranger’s socks
And sit there till they steam out every sin and every foible
And then jump into a frozen lake and claim that it’s enjoy’ble—
But there was one, a shy young man, and although he was Finnish,
The joys of winter had, for him, long started to diminish.
He was a Finn, the only Finn, who would not take a sauna.
“It isn’t that I can’t,” he said. “I simply do not wanna.
To jump into a frozen lake is not my fondest wish.
For just because I am a Finn don’t mean that I’m a fish.”
His friends said, “Come on, Toivo! Let’s go out to Sunfish Lake!
A Finn who don’t take saunas? Why, there must be some mistake.”
But Toivo said, “There’s no mistake. I know that I would freeze
In water colder than myself (98.6 degrees).”
And so he stayed close by the stove for nine months of the year
Because he was so sensitive to change of temperature.
One night he went to Eveleth to attend the Miners’ Ball.
(If you have not danced in Eveleth, you’ve never danced at all.)
And he met a Finnish beauty there who turned his head around.
She was broad of beam and when she danced, she shook the frozen ground.
She took that shy young man in hand and swept him off his feet
And bounced him up and down until he learned the polka beat.
She was fair as she was tall, as tall as she was wide,
And when the dance was over, he asked her to be his bride.
She looked him over carefully. She said, “You’re kinda thin.
But you must have some courage if it’s true you are a Finn.
I ain’t particular about men. I am no prima donna.
But I would never marry one who would not take a sauna.”
They got into her pickup, and down the road they drove,
And fifteen minutes later, they were stoking up the stove.
She had a flask of whiskey. They took a couple toots
And went into the shack and got into their birthday suits.
She steamed him and she boiled him until his skin turned red;
She poured it on until his brains were bubbling in his head.
To improve his circulation and to soften up his hide,
She took a couple birch boughs and beat him till he cried,
“Oh, couldn’t you just love me now? Oh, don’t you think you can?”
She said, “It’s time to step outside and show you are a man.”
Straightway (because he loved her so, he thought his heart would break)
He jumped right up and out the door and ran down to the lake,
And though he paused a moment when he saw the lake was frozen
And tried to think just which snowbank his love had put his clothes in—
When he thought of Tina, Lord—that man did not think twice
But just picked up his size-12 feet and loped across the ice—
And coming to the hole that they had chopped there with an ax—
Putting common sense aside, ignoring all the facts—
He leaped! Oh, what a leap! And as he dove beneath the surface,
It thrilled him to his very soul!—and also made him nervous!
And it wasn’t just the tingling he felt in every limb—
He cried: “My love! I’m finished! I forgot! I cannot swim!”
She fished him out and stood him up and gave him an embrace
To warm a Viking’s heart and make the blood rush to his face.
“I love you, darling dear!” she cried. “I love you with all my might!”
And she drove him to Biwabik and married him that night.
She drove him down the road to Carl’s Tourist Cabins
And spent a sleepless night and in the morning, as it happens,
Though it was only April, it was absolutely spring,
Birds, flowers, people put away their parkas and everything.
They bought a couple acres around Hibbing, up near Chisholm,
And began a life of gardening and love and Lutheranism.
And they lived happily to this day, although they sometimes quarrel.
And there, I guess, the story ends, except for this, the moral:
Marriage, friends, is a lifelong feast. Love is no light lunch.
You cannot dabble round the edge, but each must take the plunge.
And though marriage, like that frozen lake, may sometimes make us colder,
It has its pleasures, too, as you may find out when you’re older. Get the book >>>Follow our Facebook page >>> |
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| Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 Garrison’s humorous take on aging and why we should all want to keep getting older contains humor and wisdom to lead us all into our later years.
Also included are the Five Stages of Aging, for those who like lists, and Mr. Keillor’s account of 24 hours in a New York ER, in which he saw clearly his own good fortune and also got an EEG and a lesson in contentment from Bob the Buddhist. And a few poems for no extra charge:
Every day is a beautiful gift,
Tender and precious and swift.
The light and the sound,
The sky and the ground,
Every hour cries out to be lived.
Though I may be over the hill,
Still I think I can and I will.
I’ve forgotten just what
I can and will, but
They remain a goal of mine still.
Every year I pass the date
When my balloon shall deflate.
My mom entered heaven
At age ninety-seven,
And I aim to reach ninety-eight.
Get the book >>> |
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| From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon 1982 Discover the stories that haven’t been heard in over three decades!
Everyone has a different Lake Wobegon story that they remember from the live A Prairie Home Companion broadcasts, and they call in or write to see if a specific story is available. Well, they haven’t been until now. From the Archives is a deep dive into the archive, unearthing stories season by season, and here is the collection featuring the stories from 1982. Lake Wobegon experiences extreme cold and shuts people in their homes to feuds, frustrations, plumbing issues, and other crazy antics. Memories told of romance with Donna Bunsen at the laundromat and the Diener boy’s first drag on a cigarette landing his car in the pond. In fall, we hear about the demise of Irene Anderson’s 20-ounce tomato and the avalanche of squash from the attic. Christmas is nearly perfect with the exception of Einer’s reading of the Gospel. Get From the Archives, our brand-new collection featuring the News from Lake Wobegon stories from 1982. Over 3 hours on 3 CDs. Get the CDs >>> |
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| Giving Thanks Shirt Our limited-edition Garrison quotation product selection continues with this classic shirt highlighting a simple life mantra: “Giving thanks is the key to happiness.” That’s exactly where it’s at — being happy and appreciative for everything you have in your life. Lightweight cotton/poly blend shirt is available in sizes S–XXL Get the Shirt >>> |
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