A Prairie Home Companion Video Encore

Each week, while we are staying safe at home, Prairie Home Productions is reaching into the archive and pulling out videos of classic A Prairie Home Companion shows. These full shows will be available for streaming via our YouTube channel for a limited 7-day window (due to copyright issues with covers of songs). We hope you enjoy these special encore productions and that you share the link to your own social media pages so that other fans can enjoy, too!

This week's episode: May 28, 2016

Live from the Filene Center at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia. Chris Thile joins us as a guest with his mandolin and a bag of sharp songs; Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks head down from New York City for a blast of big-band jazz; and Heather Masse travels from even farther north in New York (i.e. New York State) to sing songs that will start your Memorial Day weekend off right. Plus: our Royal Academy of Radio Actors, Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Fred Newman; pianist and music director Rich Dworsky and the band (drummer Bernie Dresel, Larry Kohut on bass, Richard Kriehn on mandolin and fiddle duties, and the many guitars of Chris Siebold); and an update from the host on the latest News from Lake Wobegon.

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Some self-isolating thoughts about hair

Jenny cut my hair yesterday out on the balcony in the sun and she kept laughing as she did, which doesn’t instill confidence to hear your haircutter laugh, but at least the hair stays out of my eyes and the worst part (she says) is in back, and we’re in isolation so who cares, and at my age I’m not applying for a job, so it’s rather immaterial. If I wanted to do something wild with my hair, dye it deep purple with bright green stripes, now would be the time to do it, but I lack the motivation to be colorful. I’m a writer and an observer and you can’t see the world clearly if other people are staring at you: it’s see or be seen.

Hair was crucial in the 10th grade, 1958, when you had greasers like Trump and jocks with crewcuts and farmboys had shaggy hair and we cool guys aimed for an Ivy League look. My dad cut his sons’ hair and he was a carpenter and not so keen about fashion. I told him, “Short on top but with a part, a little longer in back.” Coolness was the point of it, blue button-down shirts, khaki pants, loafers, white socks, but now I have no clue about what’s cool, if anything is, and coolness is no longer a factor in my life. I’m old. The first section of the paper I turn to is the obituary section. People I know keep showing up there.

I went away to the U aiming to be a writer so I majored in English, not knowing how much I’d come to hate it. I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and my teachers were his mortician. The English Department was across the street from the Institute of Technology and we writers loved to look down on the engineers. They wore the wrong color shirts with plastic pocket protectors and high-water pants with belts hitched way up under their rib cage and half-rim horn-rimmed glasses and short nerdy hair whereas we had long majestic hair and we wrote dark incomprehensible poetry. If I ever felt miserable about having to write a paper about Dryden or Coleridge or Milton, I just crossed the street and mingled with engineers, their slide rules in a holster on their belt, a race of dullards without a single amazing and original thought, and it gave me the arrogance I was looking for.

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Wobegon Boy: A Novel

Have you been missing the News from Lake Wobegon? Wobegon Boy magically weaves together the story of John Tollefson, who long ago escaped Lake Wobegon and moved to upstate New York to manage a radio station. After some life-changing news, he finds he must return home to Lake Wobegon, where the reader finds comedy and some universal truths. Below, an official Amazon.com review plus the opportunity to read an excerpt:

A decade after he first explored the small-town precincts of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor makes a comical return to his roots. Not that Wobegon Boy takes place entirely within Mist County. The narrator, John Tollefson, made an early exit from his hometown and has spent the last 20 years managing a college radio station in upstate New York. Here he seems to have put a healthy distance between himself and his Wobegonian past.

For the author, John's job is a handy pulpit, allowing him to fulminate against radio, New Age affectation, and campus politicking. Keillor remains a master of the cantankerous one-liner, yet there's a romance here, too--between John and a historian named Alida Freeman. And while Keillor can't resist roping Alida into his own pan-Scandinavian schtick--she's writing a scholarly study of a 19th-century Norwegian neuropath who administered high colonics to Lincoln himself--the love story is genuinely touching and gives the novel an extra emotional ballast. So, too, does the magnetic pull of Lake Wobegon. John keeps describing life back in Minnesota as one long exercise in sensory (and emotional) deprivation: "We were not brought up to experience pleasure, so it doesn't register with us, like writing on glass with a pencil. Dullness is our stock-in-trade, dullness honed to its keenest edge." Nonetheless, he returns twice in the course of the novel, and his sojourns among the Lutherans are the source of not only comedy but home truths.

             
Read an excerpt >>>
Listen to an audio sample >>>
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Lake Wobegon Water Tower Hat

The Lake Wobegon water tower stands for everything tall, proud, and useful. When you wear it, you’re saying something! Embroidered cap is blue washed cotton twill. One size; adjustable strap.

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Lake Wobegon Family Reunion

The closest to a "Very Best of Garrison Keillor' collection that has been assembled. A mix of fan favorites from over over 40 years of live radio leads to many laughs, a few tears, plus the thought that Lake Wobegon could be your hometown as you seem to have lived the stories and know the people. Come enjoy "the little town that time forgot and decades could not improve."

19 of your favorite stories are included:
The Living Flag, The Tolleruds' Korean Baby, Bruno the Fishing Dog, A Trip to Grand Rapids, Buddy Holly & the Pharaohs of Rhythm, Driving in the City, The Six Labors of Father Wilmer, Sweet Corn, The Lake Superior Canyon Project, Ball Jars, Gladys Hits a Raccoon, Cowpies, Scrambled Eggs for Mom, Tent Caterpillars, Potato Salad, The Herdsman, The Flying Elvises on the 4th of July, The Hochestetter House, The Arrival of Liz

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