Thanksgiving Celebs and More from 1996

with The Rankin Family, Bill Holm, and Walter Bobbie

Finish the year with warmth in your heart by attending one of four live A Prairie Home Companion Christmas shows!

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Listen to the classic show!

This week, we revisit a show from The Town Hall in New York featuring great music, a few essays, some prose, plus celebrities, rhubarb, Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and the Guy’s Shoe Song. It’s a classic originally broadcast on November 30, 1996, with cabaret singer Susanna McCorkle and Canada's hot Celtic-rooted band, The Rankin Family. Listen to the show.

The Chicago Tribune called them “five lark-throated siblings surnamed Rankin.” The Los Angeles Times said that tears spring to the eyes from “the inherent mellifluousness of the [Gaelic] language, issuing from those angelic voices.” With their wonderful harmonies, step-dancing, and instrumentation — including Cape Breton fiddling, complete with foot-stomping – The Rankin Family strikes a chord with listeners across North America. The band comes from a family of 12, raised on the western shore of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, a place settled by Scottish immigrants, whose once-prevalent Gaelic language now survives only in folk songs.

A poet and essayist who traveled the world, Bill Holm died in February 2009 at the age of 65. He was born in 1943 on a farm north of the town of Minneota, Minnesota. He continued to live there while working as an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, where he taught for 27 years before retiring in 2007. He wrote more than a dozen books, including The Windows of Brimnes, named for his cottage near the small fishing village of Hofsos in Iceland. He spent his summers there in the land of his ancestors.

Grab a copy of Garrison’s humorous take on aging, including his very own 23 rules for aging, which will no doubt inspire you to want to keep on getting older. Get the book.

The Best of Guy Noir

A bounty of cases waiting to be solved by America’s favorite private detective.

It’s a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but high above the mean streets, a light burns on the 12th floor of the Acme Building, where Guy Noir is trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. In his big swivel chair under the bare bulb beside the beat-up gray file cabinet, he awaits the call of his clientele: the disappointed, the paranoid, the embittered, the rejected — and the absurd. Garrison Keillor’s private eye spoof thrilled audiences for decades on live public radio broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. Now, for the very first time, thirty-six all-time-favorite Guy Noir episodes are available in one collection. Follow the intrepid detective as he solves cases no other gumshoe would touch, and enjoy Keillor’s intelligent and funny spin on the classic detective genre. Featuring Garrison Keillor, Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Fred Newman, Tom Keith, Walter Bobbie, and special guests. With music by Richard Dworsky. Over 6 hours on 5 CDs. Get the CD.

The 50th Anniversary Polo Shirt

A simple embroidered design to mark the 50th Anniversary of A Prairie Home Companion. The show name and the number “50” are embroidered on the left chest of this gray, lightweight polo shirt, featuring stay-cool wicking technology. Available in both Unisex and Women’s Cuts, in sizes S – XXL.

Get the Unisex Cut or the more fitted Women’s Cut.

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