Philip Brunelle, Janis Hardy, John Hartford, Garrison Keillor, Tom Keith, Kate MacKenzie, John Niemann, Plymouth Church Festival Choir, Vern Sutton.
We Gather Together in Silent Resentment ( Garrison Keillor , Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Nobody Knows the Trouble I See ( Garrison Keillor , Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Notre Dame Fight Song ( Garrison Keillor , Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Onward Christian Choirs (Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Bringing in the Cheese (Sheaves) (Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Thanksgiving ( Vern Sutton ) Thank the Lord for This Thanksgiving Day ( Vern Sutton ) Hit the Trail for Home Sweet Home ( Vern Sutton ) You're a Million Miles from Nowhere ( Vern Sutton ) Make Everyday Thanksgiving Day ( Vern Sutton ) Longing for My Prairie Home ( Vern Sutton ) I'm Still Here ( John Hartford ) Ain't it Gone Gone? ( John Hartford ) The Old Lamp Lighting Time in the Valley ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Sitting Alone in the Old Rocking Chair ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Learning to Smile All Over Again ( John Hartford ) Theme Song for falling In Love ( John Hartford ) Bless This House ( Janis Hardy ) Let all things now living ( Philip Brunelle , Plymouth Church Festival Choir ) Meatballs ( Garrison Keillor , John Hartford ) Steamboats & Cotton ( John Hartford ) Turkey In The Raspberries ( John Niemann , John Hartford ) Thanksgiving Cantata ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle , Janis Hardy ) Bringing in the Sheaves (Plymouth Church Festival Choir )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Garrison is concerned that the Turkey will go the was of the dodo bird and people will turn to dogs and cats. Bertha urges people to conserve turkey so there will be enough in the future.) Chruch Choir Salaries (Vern Sutton discusses that churches pay up to $35,000 yearly to choir members.) The Loraine Nissle Show (This week her guest is Verna Schoenecker.) Turkey Gobble (Tom Keith's famous Thanksgiving treat!)
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Well, it's been a quiet week in my hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Thanksgiving was Thursday, the great day, and all the kids come back for dinner. It's kind of a cold, cloudy, windy, gray day in town. For some reason, there was a full house at the Lutheran Church for Thanksgiving morning service, much to Pastor Inkvis' surprise. He only had a handful last year, so he had not prepared much of a sermon. And when he saw the church fill up at 10 o'clock Thursday morning, during the opening hymns, he sat and studied his index cards, tucked in his hymnal awfully hard. He didn't have much. He had one index card with some verses on it from the Psalms, and the second card had just said, Conclusion. Conclusion. So he thought pretty hard through the hymns and even was thinking through the prayer, which he read out of the hymnal unlike him. And then they were reading from the text from Ecclesiastes. There is a thing for every season, time for every purpose under heaven, time to be born, time to die. And as he read through this, as slowly as he could, suddenly... the fire siren went off down at the fire barn and every Lutheran in that church who had left a turkey roasting in the oven sat up straight in the pews and had visions of their homes going up in flames and the roofs crashing down in sparks and the firefighters all tumbled out through the side doors and ran down And it was a meditative minute and a half, two minutes before they came back. And it was nothing. Bud had accidentally tripped the siren switch, reaching back into the joists to get something that he stores back in there. I don't know whether it was because of that or what it was, but the sermon was a wonderful success. Pastor Inkvis didn't think so. He was sweating all the way. His knuckles were white. His palms were moist. And he brought this sermon in somehow to a three-point crash landing at the end after considerable turbulence en route and felt shameful and apologetic. when he stood at the church door to shake hands with them all as they filed out, and a good half of them said it was wonderful. It was lovely. Absolutely one of the best I have ever heard. He thought to himself, you've got to be kidding. But these are Lutherans of Lake Welbegon, and they don't use a lot of irony. They... use about as much irony as they use curry powder, which is some, not a lot. So when they say it, they mean it. Even Val Tollefson leaned in toward him, held on to his hand, gave him a two-handed shake, and said, thank you so much for that, which coming from Val is like a standing ovation. And Pastor Inkvist was just left to wonder, just left to wonder. felt humiliated, and everyone liked it more than anything else he'd ever done recently, which he'd worked more on and was better. Who could figure it out? Clarence Bunsen was not at church on Thursday morning, not to tell tales out of school, but you would have noticed had you been there, which perhaps you were not either. He was not there. Arlene went up for Thursday morning service, but Clarence didn't go for a number of reasons. For one thing, he's been having a lot of trouble with his fireplace since he had a new liner put in the chimney by an itinerant fireplace expert from Los Angeles who came through town. And for that and a number of reasons, he did not feel particularly thankful on Thursday morning. He felt kind of old when he got out of bed in the morning and then walking in to pee, he stepped on a screw. And he didn't have time really to stop and commiserate with himself. He stepped on a screw and had to move on to accomplish his mission. and stepped on a second one. And it hurt, and of course, stepping down at it, he tried to make himself levitate and kind of strain something in his back. He didn't sprain it, but it just felt kind of insubstantial back there in the lower back. And because he didn't want to slip in the tub then, he took a tub bath instead of a shower, which made him feel even older, made him feel like a patient in a hospital. And then, of course, getting out of the bathtub, he slipped. And didn't sprain his back, really crack it or anything, but he just weakened it somehow. And standing at the sink, combing his hair, a big clump of hair came out in his comb. And he's at that point where he's got to decide about his hair, Clarence does, whether to keep on combing it across or just let the bald spot show. See, all this hair loss at one moment made him feel like life was ganging up on him, beating up on him. But that wasn't the most important thing. The thing was that he'd had a long talk with his daughter Barbara Ann Bunsen down in Minneapolis on Wednesday evening. She had not been sure whether she and her husband Bill would be coming up for Thanksgiving, and she called on Wednesday night to say that they would. And there was something in the sound of her voice. she was just awfully subdued and didn't have much to say that made Clarence feel that something was wrong and that the reason they were coming up for Thanksgiving was to make a major announcement and he thought divorce after 10 years her and Bill not that he couldn't understand it of course he could it made him sad to think of her 34 divorced He could understand it. Bill was never good for her. I mean, he was all right for her. I mean, not that he was abusive or awful. He's not that. He's nice enough in his own way, I guess, once you get to know him, which Clarence hasn't. Awfully serious guy, though, for somebody who, with Barbara Ann's undying enthusiasm for life, and what a wonderful daughter, couldn't have a better daughter, to be married to this kind of serious guy who works so incredibly hard, much too hard, earning far too much money, doing things that don't really amount to a hill of beans. Old Clarence could understand it all right, but it still made him depressed to think of her being alone in the world, no husband, no children. What would he say to them? So he wasn't in the mood to go sing hymns on Thursday. And then, too, for one other thing, about a month ago, Arlene had turned to him and said, how about this year we go down to the Curtis Hotel for Thanksgiving and stay for the weekend and have that terrific buffet in the cardinal room? I hear that it is great. And Clarence heard the words coming out of his own mouth. He said, no, let's stay home so the kids can come home if they'd like. And if you're tired of making Thanksgiving dinner, why, I'll make it myself. The words just came out of his mouth like bubbles. Tried to grab them as they went out trying to... Pull them back in. Revise them. And then he heard her say, Why, sure. That would be lovely. There's nothing to it. I know you can do it. So that's what he was doing on Thursday morning. He was cooking and he was seeing to his fireplace, which he did not have many hopes for. It seemed to be pretty badly bunged up. The dinner was doing a little bit better, but not much. All the professional cooks could have everything all sorted out in casserole dishes in their refrigerators and have the turkey on at low heat. But Clarence was struggling with it. So he worked hard Thursday morning all through church service. Stood there in the kitchen with one of her aprons on and worked away trying to solve the problems that he'd never ever contemplated before. Making a pie crust and folding in those little chips of butter into flour using two knives. How in the world do you do it? Laughter He'd seen her do it a dozen times. But it's tricky. Tricky to get it all in. And then what if it turns out too dry? You follow the recipe, but the dough is too dry. You can't roll this out and make a pie crust. What do you do? You just glop some milk on it? Who knows? The cranberries. You wash them, and you start making the sauce, and you get a cup of water, and then you're supposed to put in two, three cups of sugar. What if you don't have sugar? Wasn't any sugar. You could put in honey, but then how much honey would you put in? What's the equivalent? And how would it come out in the end? He wasn't sure about this. Potatoes, to boil them for mashed potatoes. Did you use red or white potatoes? He couldn't remember. He used some of each. He worked away on the cooking. And then he set up the fan on the hearth of the fireplace to try and get a draft going up the chimney so they could have a fire in the fireplace as he had always had. This fireplace expert came in, what, I don't know, six weeks ago into town from Los Angeles. Schlock was his name, but they called him Bernie. Bernie. They called him Bernie. They should have called him Schlock. That was his real name. It might have given them a hint. This guy was recommended by somebody's son-in-law, Val Tollefson's, Clarence thought, after the fact. But then he talked to Val about it, and Val said, no, I didn't recommend him, Clarence. I was just passing on what other people had told me about him. They said he knew his fireplaces. This man came in and put in an insert into Clarence's fireplace and a liner in the chimney and took about a week and a half doing it. Who had been highly recommended, a fireplace expert from L.A. And when he got done with a fireplace that had worked pretty well in the past... It was a fireplace in which the heat all went straight up the chimney and the smoke all came out in the living room. Clarence stood and looked at it with Mr. Schlock standing next to him, kind of a nervous man wringing his hands. Clarence said, it's supposed to work the other way, thinking maybe he didn't know. The fireplace expert from Los Angeles said, oh my gosh, I can't tell you how bad I feel about this, but you have convex airflow in your living room. And I had no way of knowing. I don't live in this house. I haven't lived in this house. I had no way of knowing. I come from Los Angeles. where we have an air conditioner on when we use a fireplace, so we have a concavity of airflow. And you've got convexity, and I had absolutely no reason to know that you had this inverse proportional in-come-out-go-out-flow-in-flow ratio in your home, and I just wish that you could understand how bad I feel. I mean, try and look at this from my point of view, how bad I feel. about this I had absolutely no way of knowing and I just don't know what to say I feel embarrassed I feel threatened as a person I feel I feel I feel humiliated and I feel especially humiliated considering that you've already paid me 1200 can you understand how I feel about this Clarence looked at him and tried to communicate with him using the English language. He said, this fireplace doesn't work. You don't know anything about fireplaces. There should be some kind of refund. The mention of a refund confused this man. And he left in confusion. Clarence called in Carl, who went up, looked down the chimney, and said, well, he put in the liner all right, but he knocked a few bricks loose in the process, I think, and they came down, and so the liner, he tried to pound that in, and he sure pounded on it awfully hard. I think you've got a lot of sheet metal wadded up inside your chimney in there. I'm not sure this thing is going to come out. So there he was, kneeling, trying to make this thing burn on Thanksgiving morning. The fan blowing in, piling the logs carefully towards the back. when he heard her voice behind him. And she said, Hi, Daddy. And he turned. And there was his tall, beautiful, long-haired daughter. He put his arms around her. She looked kind of sad. He held her. And then He went up to the bathroom to wipe his eyes. Norwegians don't cry in front of their daughters. Blew his nose and came back down, and Arlene was home. They sat in the kitchen, and Clarence worked some more on the dinner. Arlene said, why don't you have some coffee? She said, that ought to perk you up a little bit, and usually it would. Usually for any Norwegian, coffee will do the trick. Norwegians who are in a state of brain death, where the EKG is absolutely flat, little coffee on the lips, oftentimes that pen starts to jump on the graph paper. But it didn't work. It didn't work for Clarence. He sat there, his poor daughter. He waited for her to announce this. He thought, will they live here? What should I say to Bill? He prepared his speech in his mind, his calm, fatherly speech. He'd say, well, that's your decision, kids. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I certainly understand it. Arlene and I have been married for 40 years, but there have been times, well, now he wouldn't say that. She sat in the kitchen with him. Her mother went in the living room and talked with Bill. Clarence worked on the meal. He could understand everything. Why women did this every Sunday and year after year, making a big dinner. More fun. More fun to be in charge, have people offer to come help you, be in the kitchen, chopping, cutting. It was hard. It was hard making dinner, but it was not impossible. Far from it. And much preferable, he thought, to sitting in the living room as he'd done for years on these holidays, talking to a silent son-in-law and saying, well, how's the real estate business, Bill? And Bill would say, oh, not bad. Well, there's 15 seconds killed. Just two hours left to go. Well, what do you think of these Vikings then? Yeah, there's something. Finally, Barbran cleared her throat. Bill had come in. He said, would you like something to drink to Clarence? Clarence said, no, I'm cooking. What do you have? Bill said. Oh, I don't know, Sherry or something. She said, Daddy, we want to tell you something. We're expecting a baby. In April. He started to say, Well, that's your decision, kids. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I certainly understand it. Why Arlene and I have been married for 40 years and there have been... Many times we've been And then he was dazed and all the blood left his head. And he just leaned up against the counter and he put his hands on the counter and he looked at her. My gosh. His own daughter. Nothing mattered after that. The pie was in the oven for 30, 35, 40, 45 minutes. Never did get done. He kept testing it. Dipping the knife in the middle. Still came up, smeared with pumpkin. Been there for an hour. Finally it caught fire in the crust. Chipped off that part of it. Brought out the turkey. It was a little black, a little black. Hadn't, hadn't. He'd forgotten about the aluminum foil. It's a little crispy around the skin, but the skin is bad for you anyway, is what they said. They took off the skin. The rest of it was good. It was dry, but you put gravy over it, and it was all right. Sweet potatoes, a cinch. Mashed potatoes, perfect. They sat and they ate a quiet, lovely Thanksgiving dinner. Not much needed to be said. The presence of this child, of this unborn child, this child who was there, sleeping inside his daughter, inspired him. They sat in a blissful silence and ate a lovely dinner It was wonderful, dear, said Arlene. And after dinner, went into the living room to lie down and take a nap, as he had done all these years. He and Barbara Ann went in to wash dishes. They stood next to each other, washing, singing a few songs. They still remembered that they knew the words to doing dishes. What a lovely day. And then Bill came in and said, Dad, there seems to be something wrong with your fireplace. Clarence dropped the washcloth. He tore into the living room. Arlene was coughing. The room was filled with smoke. He'd built a bonfire in the fireplace. Clarence threw the window open. Arlene was just waking up. He helped her out the door. Clarence reached down. He picked up burning logs. He pitched them out the window, out onto the grass. From far off, he heard sirens. The old red truck came chugging up the driveway. Eight guys got off. All of them dressed up for Thanksgiving. Some of them still with drinks in their hands. He said, it's all right. No emergency. Everything's under control. The house was full of smoke. Bill decided he would like to go for a long walk. Arlene went with him. Clarence and Barbara Ann came in, and it was just when they were walking back into the kitchen to finish the dishes that she felt the pain in her right side, and she said, oh, oh. He said, what? What is it? What's the matter? She said, mm. He said, get your coat. Let's go. She said, no, it's not that. It's not that. Don't worry. I'll be all right. I'm just going to sit down. It was a pain just to the right of her belly, on her side. He said, don't be ridiculous. He said, I'm going to get your coat, I'm going to get the car, and we're going to go to the hospital. Now come right now. She said, Daddy, don't. It's not. He said, do what I say. He said, there's no sense in taking a chance. And got the car. And she came and got in. But by then she felt much better. They drove, they headed towards St. Cloud to go to the hospital. But the foolishness of his words came back to him. It's not worth taking a chance. What a strange thing to say to someone who's going to be a parent. What is being a mother or father but taking incredible chances? He turned off the highway. They just went for a ride. They just went for a ride. The sun was setting on Thanksgiving, and they just went for a ride. She felt a lot better, as in fact she used to when she was a little girl and got stomach aches. He'd take her for a ride. He said, you know, I remember the day when I knew that you were coming. It was early in July when your mother told me that she was expecting him. And I was so happy. it was a brilliant sunny July day and I walked downtown in my undershirt and I bought a Panatella cigar and I stood on the corner by Ralph's and I smoked it and then I went down to the co-op and I got myself four rockets and I took them down to the beach and I stuck them in the gravel and I fired them one two three four out towards the sun across the lake He could still see them as they'd gone into that sunny sky back in 1952. Meanwhile, cars were passing them, cars heading south, the children of Lake Wobegon going home to the city. Children driving their strange foreign cars, Mazdas, Toyotas. You'd never see in a town of Fords and Chevys. Children wearing their strange clothes, talking their strange talk about their lives. odd people that we produced up there. Our kids, a car cruising by, a silent father, an exhausted mother, five kids in back, quiet, polite, happy, with little headphones on their heads. heading back to the cities, back to some other life. Our children, the children of Lake Wobegon, they took a chance when they made us. They took a big chance, and they are still waiting to see how it turned out. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are above average.
Garrison thinks Thanksgiving should be a four-day weekend because we lost Lincoln's birthday! Vern, Phillip & Janis will collect a list of things the audience is thankful for and perform a song at the end of the show. they continue to work on the cantata throughout the show.
1986.11.28 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl