Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Peter Ostroushko.
[undocumented]
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. Not really at all, not true, but I always say that, so I will. And in fact, I did. It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. If I should stop suddenly and you should hear the sounds of dry sobs, it's just me being overcome with nostalgia in the backwash of last weekend's 25th anniversary reunion of the Lake Wobegon High School class of 1960 out at the Moonlight Bay Resort and Supper Club just a little ways from town. my one event last Saturday night. It's not on our lake, Moonlight Bay, it's not on Lake Wobegon.
It's over on Lake Corinne, which is a little fancier lake about ten miles to the north and the west where they have lake homes, you know, and they mow their lawns and they have docks and lawn ornaments on their cabins. That's where our reunion was held, not in town itself.
We got a lot of heat from parents of the class of 1960 for not holding it in town. They said, why go over to the Moonlight Bay Supper Club? Pay a lot. It's not necessary. You could get the Lutheran Church basement for free.
I know that a lot of moms would be happy to pitch in and do the supper and everything. It wouldn't cost you anything. And besides, when you have a reunion, it doesn't make sense to go someplace else for it. When you have a reunion, you're supposed to come back.
See, not come back to some place nearby, you come back to the place itself. But we chose Moonlight Bay for the reunion. I'm 43 years old and I'm sensitive about that, especially when I get together with a lot of other people whom I haven't seen in 25 years and I don't want to be standing around under bright fluorescent light to be studied by people standing holding a plate of tuna hot dish. I would rather have a little bit of elegance and style and grace going for me and sit down at a table with a white tablecloth and look at some people over candlelight and give myself at least a head start in that situation and sit and look at my old classmate Oh, my old classmate Margaretha, our Danish exchange student, whom I've remembered for 25 years. Just sit and watch her in hopes that she might drop something on the floor and I could dash and pick it up and give it to her on the odd chance that our fingers might meet. Which, if it were a small object, they would probably. Anything smaller than a basketball. If she dropped the basketball, I'd let somebody else pick that up. Why do I mention her? Saturday night.
I imagine some of the old classmates may be still there. Even now, a week later. Still looking over the old yearbook. and saying, I can't believe it was 25 years ago. I heard that a lot. I went there in fear that it would have been 25 years for me and not for anybody else that everybody else would still be 18. I'd walk in through the door, 43 years old, big as life, and all of a sudden the fun would stop. Somebody would turn down the music and the food fight would stop and two, three couples who were entwined would disengage and stand at attention was what I was afraid of.
That and the fact that people would stare at me because I had a little case of acne before the... I was worried it was going to happen, and I was so worried that it would happen that it did happen, of course. First problem I've had with that in 25 years.
I went to the drugstore to get some you-know-what, and I was so shy about asking for it by name, he assumed that I wanted something else and took me over. And I said, no, I'm not interested in that. I want some of this. So I put it on, but you could tell, you could tell.
People come up to me at that reunion and they looked at my name tag to make sure it was me and they looked me in the eye and then they looked down to where it was, right on my upper lip. I went around with my hand, just holding my hand kind of over my upper lip like this.
And finally, after so many people had stared at it, I went into the men's room to look at myself in a mirror. And it wasn't this at all, what I had thought it was, but it was the fact that there was a particle of roast beef that was stuck in my nose.
I'd kind of eaten in a hurry, you know, I was nervous. And here I was, I'd been walking around with this thing and it was well done, so you could have confused it for something else. Well, I don't know. It was awkward. It was awkward.
I kind of felt like I ought to go around to explain to all the people I talked to. I said, you remember me? I was talking to you about five minutes ago. Anyway, what you thought that was, it wasn't that. It was something else. But I did it. It was nice. It was sweet. People were so kind.
People were so kind to everyone. Even people they hadn't liked 25 years ago. So sweet. People said, and what do you do? I said, well, I'm in radio. I said, are you a DJ? He said, no, not really. I said, are you in news? I said, yeah, kind of like being in news.
Saw a lot of old friends there. An old nickname that I had not heard in 25 years. I dropped it. I got rid of it when I went to college. I heard it for the first time a week ago. Which I'm not going to tell you what it was.
Because I don't know you well enough to trust you with something like that. People came up and called me that. All the time I was watching for the woman I loved. I went there to see Margaretha. Margaretha, she came over from Denmark onto the Dansk Amerikanska Vettersklub exchange program. All the way from Denmark for our senior year.
And she was like royalty to us. She was royalty. She was royalty because she was beautiful for one thing. She had reddish blonde hair and high cheekbones and dark brown eyes and sort of a permanent blush in her cheeks. She was so lovely.
She was so smart and so funny even in a language that was still work for her. That made her royalty too. And she was so sweet to everybody. But the thing that really made her royalty was the fact that she had come from so far away. From Denmark, in Europe, where nobody I knew had ever been.
I had never been outside of the Midwest. And here she was, come from a strange land. And the fact that everything was strange and mysterious to her, even in a town as common as Lake Wobegon, made it seem more wonderful to us I look back at her and at that year and I see how she lit up our lives. She turned on a light for us. All of the things in our life that were ordinary, that we had looked at so often that we didn't see them anymore, she looked at them and we saw them through her eyes.
She said, what is that?
Why do you do this? It's wonderful and made them wonderful for us. Even our old brick school and the yellow school buses and putting velvet robes on a guy and a girl and crowning them king and queen and having a dance on the gym floor with the lights turned down, this was wonderful to her and a mirrored ball turning slowly above the dancers as a spotlight shone on it, scattering thousands of diamonds of light around and around on the faces and the bodies of our friends as they danced slowly at the dance. This was amazing to her, but she shed her light on all of us.
Even things as simple as cherry cokes or the idea of putting wieners on sticks with marshmallows and holding them over a fire and singing Red River Valley was amazing to her. And so they became amazing to us, don't you see? Her coming back for our reunion made it powerfully dramatic.
The idea that she would come all that way made the evening magical. But then too, it was her. What a wonderful person. I had memorized four sentences in Danish just in her honor and walked around most of the evening looking for some opportunity to bring them up in conversation. of which there's less opportunity than you might think.
She said she was glad to see me, that she had thought of me often, and that she hoped that we would have a chance to dance before the evening was out. And then she was gone as we mingled around our old classmates there on the porch of the old concrete block Moonlight Bay Supper Club underneath the paper Chinese lanterns. looking out towards the lake across the lawn. The moon, a blue moon hanging up in the sky, leaving a path of light across the water. What a magical evening. Such beautiful women.
I tell you there were women there who just made you think that 43 is the best age for a woman to be. I tell you there were handsome, handsome, lovely women who hadn't been all that attractive when they were 17 or 18. Because back when I was in school, There wasn't much choice for a woman.
The standards of attractiveness were rather narrow. You were supposed to be pretty and perky, not too bright. If you were a woman, blonde particularly, kind of perky and peppy. You were supposed to be Sandra Dee, was who you were supposed to be. If you weren't Sandra Dee, then you were brand X. Just forget about it.
And here they were, all of these women, that I had never thought were attractive in high school, and they just took your breath away, and they were so self-assured, so confident, more than confident, valiant, valiant, beautiful women who were attractive in ways that we had been unable to appreciate when we were boys, and which it was now too late for us to appreciate. Because guys, and this was all too clear by looking around, guys reach their peak about 18 or 19. And then it's down. It's a long way down. You could see that a lot of guys had kind of interrupted their descent a little bit.
Kind of gliding, you know, maybe looking for an updraft. But basically, Basically, the women were on the way up and the guys were heading down. I thought about that often as we walked around, kind of with one foot in middle age and one foot in youth, as it so often is.
I was just about to go in and dance with her when I saw a woman who I didn't know was going to be there. And it shocked me, my reaction, the feelings that I felt. I don't know how to tell you. But I fell over a cliff for that woman when I was 18.
I don't need to tell you her name or even describe her because my feelings didn't have that much to do with her. They had to do with me. I just fell in love with her. And I was sick for months, as only an 18-year-old kid can be.
And there, standing on the porch of the Moonlight Bay Sabbath Club, it all came back to me. In a rush. I felt 18 again. And ridiculous. Ridiculously in love with someone who was unavailable an impossible situation. I felt so bad. I felt so bad. Lord, I remember back when I was in love with that girl.
I loved her all the more because she didn't care for me very much at all. I threw myself at her. I just walked up and down gravel roads late at night saying her name over and over again, sitting down in a ditch, put my hands up to my face and just weep.
It was kind of like a lesson in Elizabethan poetry. All those poets were right when they talked about love as kind of a sickness. and freezing cold and burning fever and the disease of love. They warned us. All those poets warned us about that. But given the chance to do it myself, I did it.
And it all came back to me. Last Saturday night, I couldn't bear it. I had to walk away and walk down to the lake and look out across the water and the path of moonlight across the water. I thought about going in swimming. I thought about going in. I felt so bad. I haven't felt that bad in a long time. Lovesick. I felt like g
oing in and drowning myself. But it's been a dry summer up there. And they've always said you could walk across that lake. Be foolish. Go in to drown yourself and just walk across a lake. Have to walk back. So I came back. I recovered.
I came back to the dance. And there she was, Margrethe, my old classmate. What a friend. She said, let's dance. And we did. She led, and I followed. She asked me why I felt so bad. I told her. She said, well, I still like you, even if you're not grown up.
And I said the lines of Danish that I had memorized for this occasion.
I said, I tell you Danish. You, you are Dalit. I love you.
I am an American comedian. Many days. I said, I speak no Danish, but you are delightful. I love you. I am an American humorist. Thank you very much. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
1985.08.04 Star Tribune