Garrison Keillor,
My Country Tis of Thee ( Garrison Keillor ) God Bless America ( Garrison Keillor )
[undocumented]
Siamese twins
“regarded peas in tuna casserole as too show-offy.”
Talbot Spy Review: Garrison Keillor Tells It Like It Was by Steve Parks
Avalon Foundation president Al Bond took the stage Sunday evening to greet a full house gathered to hear the latest “News From Lake Wobegon” as reported by storyteller extraordinaire Garrison Keillor, former host and creative eminence of public radio’s “Prairie Home Companion.”
But first he thanked the audience for wearing masks and for helping kick-off the Avalon’s centennial year and the hopeful end of a dark period of abstinence from live in-person entertainment due to pandemic precautions. Opened in 1922 as a movie palace billed as “The Showplace of the Eastern Shore,” the Avalon is the kind of theater, Bond said, that he imagined as a perfect setting for the live radio variety show broadcast every Saturday night for decades.
Following a warm greeting as he moseyed onto the stage, Keillor picked up on the theme by extolling the acoustics of venerable small-town theaters before he’d heard a note sung in this one. He then recruited the audience as his guest-star choir for the evening, launching into a patriotic medley of “America (My Country Tis of Thee”) and “God Bless America.” (Our voices were mask-muffled, but you could tell that most everyone knew the lyrics – not so for some of the hymnal singalongs to come.)
It was just the start of Keillor’s two-and-a-quarter hour reminiscence – sometimes reverent, sometimes risque bordering on ribald, but always entertaining with his cleverly devious wordplay and the poetic license of a reformed clergyman celebrating his freedom from scriptural doctrine and societal conventions.
For a man of 79 going on 80 in August, Keillor showed remarkable stamina, performing without intermission, though he allowed one for his audience as we stood for a Christian singalong so those who desired a bar or bathroom break – “or to call a babysitter” – could exit more freely. Acknowledging the relative seniority of his audience, he quickly amended his “babysitter” remark to hint that even some of our grandchildren no longer require a sitter.
If there was one recurring theme to his rambling but astute observations, it was the freedom that advanced age confers on those well enough to enjoy it. Chief among professionals he was grateful for, he said, was his cardiologist and “the teenager who assisted him on an iPad.” The “teen,” he acknowledged, claimed to be 33. But Keillor would have none of it.
His other theme was the easily targeted absurdity of our times, taking a shot at the Washington Football Team formerly known as “Potato Skins.” (That’s one I anticipated years ago, having written that the Redskins could have averted the name change by simply switching their mascot to a ’tater.) He also observed that Easton was lucky to bear a name that not only indicates geographic location but avoids the controversy of a moniker, say, of a Confederate soldier or a statue of one. (I wasn’t alone in thinking he missed a ripe joke about the Talbot Boys.)
But Keillor was at his hilarious best in describing feelings of inferiority while growing up in a stultifying Minnesota Lutheran culture that “regarded peas in tuna casserole as too show-offy.” He recalls wearing hand-me-down clothes from older siblings, including a sister. The mental picture he painted of standing before a urinal trough in the boys’ lavatory at school, wearing his sister’s used side-zipper pants, was impossible to erase from your mind’s eye – at least until he topped that one with another side-splitter, so to speak.
The actual “News From Lake Wobegon” was limited, since he lives in New York now, to a seemingly endless stream of visits back home for funerals, many for people he disliked. Each story – I counted six, unless the one about Siamese twins, which he admitted is a verboten term these days, makes it seven – outscored the previous one in comic implausibility. The finale brought to mind a patriotic message, which brought the evening full circle to a stand-up singalong. I won’t spoil the ending by revealing the song, except to say everyone knew its lyrics.
Following a sustained standing ovation, Keillor returned for one curtain call before the house lights went up. When was the last time you saw that on radio?
I TOOK UP eating oysters on the half shell back in my late twenties, as a token of eastern sophistication. I was in New York and my editor took me to lunch and ordered a dozen and asked if I’d like some. “Of course,” I said, not wanting to seem provincial, and ate three, which resembled phlegm but with horseradish were palatable and went down easily, no chewing required.
Last week, passing through the lovely town of Easton, Maryland, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, I enjoyed six Chesapeake oysters, which were larger, meatier, than the ones in New York fifty years ago and a man sitting next to me at the bar asked how they were — “They’re very good, they must be wild,” I said — and he said, “You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you.” I said yes. I did not say, “But I live in New York.” It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re still from where you’re from. Provincial is baked into my blood and I can’t escape it by wearing a nice suit or eating seafood, I’m still from the land of the Spam sandwich.
The gentleman said he’d driven through Minnesota once when he was twenty. Under the influence of reading Jack Kerouac, he’d driven from his home in Maine to Oregon and in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he had pitched his tent in the cemetery and spent a peaceful night there.
“I used to live not far from there, in Freeport, in a rented farmhouse,” I said. He had loved Kerouac’s On The Road and started writing poetry in a flowing lowercase unpunctuated run-on style and spent some time in Oregon considering a Beat life but returned east to college and wound up a pediatrician. He loved Kerouac but he did not admire the heedless Beat lifestyle that wrecked the lives of so many and he was happy in medicine though he still enjoyed camping. He said, “I notice the defibrillator in your chest. Do you mind?” and he reached over and put his hand on it. He said, “Do you ever feel it kick in?” I shook my head. “Then you’re in a good shape,” he said.
It was a bonus, to get a professional opinion along with the oysters, and also to meet a man who confessed to being happy about his life. Kerouac should’ve met him, a man who enjoyed rambunctious prose but dedicated himself to a highly disciplined career in science. He asked what I did, I said, “I’m retired.” No point in getting into all that. I too am a happy man, though in Minnesota I was brought up to conceal pleasure lest it make the less fortunate feel bad. But it was a very happy day in Easton. A self-righteous Democrat finds it hard to say that — I should be bemoaning something — but I felt utterly happy.
I could imagine living in this town of 16,000. I had grown up in a town that size and escaped from it by eating those New York oysters but now it appealed to me. The pandemic has made our lives smaller anyway. I walked around the downtown of elegant old brick buildings and went to a show at the old Avalon Theatre at which the audience was in a jolly mood and sang the national anthem and on the line, “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,” they shouted the “Oh.” The hotel bed was comfortable, I had a big breakfast.
The next morning I was at Union Station in Washington to catch a train to New York and stepped onto a Down escalator and got myself and a suitcase aboard but my briefcase stayed behind and I looked back and saw it getting smaller and tried to run up the descending steps and made no progress but the briefcase contained my laptop with a good deal of work in the hard drive and I tried to climb faster and couldn’t, while toting the suitcase, and finally, not wanting to have a heart attack and die, I descended and I saw three young women laughing, sitting at a table drinking coffee, with two young children who were laughing too. They were laughing at me and now I could imagine how it looked, a scene from a Buster Keaton movie, man versus machine, and it pleased me, my debut in slapstick comedy, and I recovered the briefcase, and headed for home, a happy man, and if that’s what Chesapeake Bay oysters can do for you, then I hope to make them part of my daily diet.