Bob and Ray, Richard Dworsky, Garrison Keillor, Tom Keith, Kate MacKenzie, Bobby McFerrin, Glenn Ohrlin.
When I was seventeen ( Garrison Keillor ) Come and sit by my side ( Garrison Keillor ) The horse wrangler ( Glenn Ohrlin ) Powder river ( Glenn Ohrlin ) Cancion mestica ( Glenn Ohrlin ) Oola ( Bobby McFerrin ) Over the Rainbow ( Bobby McFerrin ) The Wizard of Oz ( Bobby McFerrin ) Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ( Bobby McFerrin ) Drive ( Bobby McFerrin ) Cara Mia ( Bobby McFerrin )
Association of Serious People Bertha's Kitty Boutique Duck's Back Tux Spray Einbinder's First Class Flypaper Fearmonger's Shop Powdermilk Biscuits Scotty's Cough Syrup for Dogs
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Ever since, I don't mind telling you, ever since I mentioned on the air back in February that the show was going to end in the middle of June, especially as we get on closer to the month of June here, it's become harder and harder to think about Lake Wobegon for me or to talk about it or to tell you stories. And I start to realize today why this is, why I sit and think so hard and have such a hard time talking about my own hometown and my own childhood. The reason it's so hard is that as I come down towards the last few shows, I feel like I have to make something out of this town, as if I have to do some tremendous piece of work and do some tremendous stories that somehow draw in all of these characters I've told you about over the years and that will somehow make sense out of their lives, you see, and produce some awesome masterwork for you. And, of course, I can't do it Not with that town. It would be beyond me, beyond my talents, and I don't have much material to work from. And I've never, ever tried to do that before. But you see, you come down towards the end now, and you feel all this pressure to... make some sense out of it. I sat down last night and I made lists of people and I made diagrams of different families and Krebsbachs and Bunsons and Incvests and Toleroots and all these people and trying to match them together as if I were working out a chemistry problem and it just didn't make any sense. It got harder and harder. The best thing about it always has been just sort of dropping in to a town and looking around and reminiscing about a few things and then getting out when the time was up. I don't know how I was so brilliant as to come up with the first line, but that really was a secret of telling these stories all those years. Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, which solved years ago. I don't know how I could have ever thought of something so wonderful as this, a line that would serve me as a first line all these years of telling stories, saving me from first line problems, which are a writer's big, big problem. The first line coming up with it. I started out at the beginning, I think, saying something like, I'd like to talk a little bit about my hometown and about my childhood. And I could sense the audience thinking, well, so would we. But I solved that problem of a first line. They say that 95% of the world's greatest novels and stories are never written because of the inability to come up with a first line that is as good as what would come afterwards. So many writers work on that first line. The tall man with the sad face stood by the window and looked out at the wet soybeans. And it just isn't as good, you see, as what you know is going to come later. If you've got this story worked out in your mind, you know how good this is, what a brilliant piece of work this is, but somehow that first sentence... By the window which was open, the tall man stood sadly and looked out at the soybeans. It had rained the night before, and they were wet. If only you could go on, you see, to the middle of that story and start in with the good part, the symbolic part, where you sort of explain what these soybeans stand for. But you've got to start at the beginning. It's a shame. So it kills it right there at the very beginning. You're curious about this guy, but you can't get beyond the first line. The window was open. The tall man stood by it. looking out. He was sad. On account of rain, the soybeans were wet. This often happens. So he throws it away, and it's lost. Brilliant work, which is lost because we were unable to start. So many wonderful things we would do in life If only we didn't have to start at the beginning. If you could just start halfway through and not realize what it is that you're trying to do. See? So I solved that problem. And I'm so grateful for that line. Well, I've said all these times, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. And it has been. That's been a limitation in itself, the quietness of it. It did rain all day. Yesterday, one of those long, slow, soaking rains, which made everybody happy, but which also kept people indoors so that I did not see much of what they were doing. Some farmers came down, sit in the chatterbox cafe, and to comfort each other with a few beloved old stories about animals that walk into bars and Norwegians and stories about cannibals and men from Mars and the like, including the story about the man who trained his dog to go down to a tavern, a corner tavern, and get him cigarettes. And he'd tuck a dollar bill under that dog's collar. And the dog go down, bartender put a pack of cigarettes under his collar, send him back, and it's a good dog for years and years. And Then one night, the man, all he had was a $5 bill. So he stuck it under his collar and sent the dog down to the tavern. And the dog didn't come back. Hours passed. But finally, the man got up out of bed and got dressed and went down to the tavern, and there was the dog. He was sitting on a stool, and he was drinking a martini. The man said, you've never done this before. The dog said, I never had the money before. That kind of story is what they sit and tell each other in the Chatterbox Cafe on days when it is raining. That's the kind of thing that goes on in my hometown, see? Which is a limitation to a storyteller. Because somehow when your first line is, well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown... It's hard to go right on directly from there on to the limitless possibilities of life and the stars and having a dream and stories of magic and mystery and fantasy. Sumus, quote sumus, is our motto. We are what we are. Hard to be a storyteller from a town like that. You work under certain limitations. I grew up with dreams of being in show business, but they were mainly quiet ones that I did not dare tell anybody about. Because if I had, they would have told me about the Swenson sisters. who came not from Lake Wobegon, but from Kimball, which is not too far away from home. There were a quartet of four sisters, the Swenson sisters, and they sang at various resorts up around there in the early 1950s, including Moonlight Bay, not far from Lake Wobegon. They were a big hit. And then they came down to St. Paul. And they won the, on a cold day in February, they won the St. Paul Winter Carnival Outdoor Talent Contest. Four girls and a harmonica. And the next morning, they got on the Zephyr to Chicago, the morning Zephyr, and they caught the Super Chief down to Hollywood. And they signed a contract with Fairmont Pictures and to make a movie called Minnesota Moon, 1954. And we're all set to go on it until the producer, Leo Robinson, looked at the script and met with the girls, and he said, girls, this is a beautiful script. I love this. It's a masterpiece, Minnesota Moon. It's going to be a magnificent motion picture. I just have a few problems with it. the cows and the lakes and the farmers who were Lutherans. Let's change those. We'll change those to the desert and camels and desert oases and Bedouins racing across the sand. Bedouin bandits. We'll change it. So it became moon over Morocco. And the Swenson Sisters became the Casablanca Quartet. And that picture came out in the spring of 1955, and their career dropped like a cement block. And in the summer of that year, the next year, they were back up at Hilmer's Resort up on Gull Lake. Beer and setups, fish fry all the fish you can eat on Friday night. up back at Gull Lake, as a lesson to all of us in central Minnesota, don't go too far. Don't think you're better than the rest of us and you can go someplace. Don't get fancy ideas about yourself. You stay home. That was the lesson that the Swenson sisters were supposed to teach us, and indeed they did. Though I remember when I was a little boy and was in the fourth grade, it was the first time I came to downtown St. Paul. Got on a bus early one morning, half of the elementary grades got on the bus for the field trip down to St. Paul, our state capital. We'd never seen it before. The city has changed so much since then, but I still think of that spring day when I see the Cathedral of St. Paul up on one hill and the state capitol on the other. And our bus pulled up in front of the state capitol. This magnificent pile of splendor. out there shining, shimmering in the sunlight and the great pillars and columns and the great ranks of steps that rose up to this magnificent building on the hill and the gold horses up above and the magnificent dome up against the sky. We sat in our bus and we ate liverwurst sandwiches and we drank green Kool-Aid until it was time for us to go in and we walked in to scenes of such splendor down halls of marble and walked into a room with carpets we sank in up to the side labels on our tennis shoes and stood there our mouths open gold ceilings and deep rich gorgeous oil paintings of mysterious scenes of history. And then a man came in. He was the governor of Minnesota when I was a boy. with men standing behind him. Here he was, the leader of our people, stood there, and all of us children were very quiet, and we got into a straight line, something that we did very well. And Mrs. Erickson, our teacher, stood next to a man who stood next to the governor. And as we children came past Mrs. Erickson, she whispered each child's name to the man who then whispered it to the governor. And he looked down and he took the sweaty little hand in his and he smiled and he said, Hello, Stanley. It's good to meet you. And Stanley went numb from the thrill of this. And this went well for about the first six children. And then, just as Shirley was introduced, Shirley felt such excitement and admiration for this great man that she got sick. She put her hand over her mouth and she had to go to the bathroom. Hurry. Hurry. But her name had already been put into the pipeline. And so when Bill stood in front of the governor, the governor looked down and smiled and he said, Hello, Shirley. It's good to meet you. And every name from then on was wrong. Every one. I came up, he said, Hello, John. Good to see you. And Bob went through, and he was Teresa. And Eloise came through, and she was Harold. We couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. And then in the bus going home, we got into an argument. Some of us got into the bus, and we said, what a dumb governor. That was dumb. stand and look down at Bill and say, Shirley? That's stupid. We were so excited about meeting him, but he's dumb. But there were a lot of kids, most of them girls, who stood up for him and who said, no, you don't know. You don't know. He's got a lot on his mind. He's so busy, he's got more to think about than to try and remember everybody's name. You can't expect him just to know your name. He's the governor. He's a boy. He called him Shirley. That's dumb. We argued about this all the way back to Lake Wobbegon. And they said, well, how do you know? Shirley, maybe that's a name that some boys can have too. How do you know? You don't know. How do you know? And what they really meant was that if you were from Lake Wobegon, you couldn't know about that. You couldn't say that the emperor didn't have clothes on if you come from Lake Wobegon. How do you know? You don't know. He's the governor. What do you know? That made me so mad. You could tell. You could see that. that the emperor was naked. Didn't matter if he forgot to put clothes on or what he was thinking about or if he was just too busy. I could see. Everybody else could see. So why couldn't we say it? But we were brought up with this terrible, crushing politeness. How do you know? You don't know. He's the governor. Who are you? Because we were from Lake Wobegon. I remember when I was in high school. High school wanting so badly to get away from all of this. And I got away from it through poetry. Poems about Longing. Poems about life and getting the most out of life. I memorized a poem by Houseman when I was just a kid. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now. is hung with bloom along the bough. It stands along the woodland ride, wearing white for Eastertide. Now of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again. Subtract from seventy springs a score, it only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom, fifty springs is little room. Along the woodland I will go to watch the cherry hung with snow. but it was a metaphor that didn't quite fit our town. We didn't have cherries there. We had lilacs, great tall lilac bushes, eight, ten feet tall along the sidewalks on the way to school in the morning with great bunches of purple blossoms that hung down like bunches of grapes over our head. That to me seemed like the inexpressible beauty of life that I would never find in this little town, that I would never find until I went away. Miss Heinemann was my English teacher. And I remember her talking about metaphor and how metaphor is a way of knowing things in language that we do not quite know how to express directly. It's a way of stepping out into the dark using one thing that we have a name for to stand for something else. A rose. A tree. The sky. The sky. the moon, the sun. But what would be a metaphor for my little town? I had no idea. I thought of it as a place to leave, and I remember because I liked poetry and liked to memorize poems, I was chosen as class poet for winter homecoming when I was a senior. It was a tradition at Lake Wobegon High School that the class poet would stand up and recite from memory the Queen's favorite poem. We had somebody who would sing the Queen's favorite song, and then you'd stand up and recite the Queen's favorite poem. Well, that winter, the Queen was Carolyn Krepsbach, and I remember that her favorite song was Via Condios, And I think that was probably her favorite poem, too. But you couldn't have do it twice. She couldn't think of anything she wanted, so I said, that's all right, I'll think of something. And the morning of the assembly, I had it all ready, what I would do. And in class that morning, Miss Heinemann said, what are you going to recite at the homecoming program this afternoon? I said, oh, it's a poem by Whitman, I think. Just something that Carolyn liked. Nothing important. What is it, she said. I tried to think of something else by Whitman that I would know by heart. Like, oh, captain, my captain, the fearful trip is done. The ship has weathered every rack. The prize we sought has won. But I couldn't remember it. So I had to look down at the floor and tell her, the poem that was going to be Carolyn Krebsbach's favorite poem. I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another nor to one of his kind who lived a thousand years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy anywhere on the earth. My face was burning when I was done with it. I was so ashamed of myself. Not ashamed of the poem, which was a great poem, but I was ashamed of feeling ashamed, of being embarrassed in front of her. She said, I think you'd better find something more appropriate than that. And so she gave me something more appropriate than that. And that afternoon, when it was time for the Queen's favorite poem, I stepped up from the first row of the bleachers and I stepped across the white satin cloth that was the aisle that led the length of the gym up to the queen's throne. And I bowed to the queen and I stood at the microphone and I looked at my classmates all in the bleachers on this winter day. and I looked at the teachers with their arms folded frowning down at me and I looked at my friends who were sitting up at the very back in the last row and who were waving and who were sticking out their tongues and who were pointing at their armpits and pointing at their rear ends trying to make me laugh and I thought immediately of Whitman's poem. I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. But instead I said the poem that I was supposed to say. Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep, which is not the right poem for my town at all. Much too great a sense of destiny for the town of Lake Wobegon. We don't have miles to go before we sleep. we don't have any place to go. If there was a poem that summed up my little town, maybe it would be that poem. Somebody said that it couldn't be done, but he with a smile replied that maybe it couldn't, but he would be one who wouldn't say so till he tried. So he buckled right in with a bit of a grin. He sat down and got right to it. He tried that thing that couldn't be done, and he couldn't do it. And I'm finding out the truth of it as I come down towards the end of it, discovering the truth of it. There's no such thing as a successful story. No story is successful. Nobody is good at this. You try and make something come alive, and you almost imagine for just one minute that you almost did it. and you can almost smell that classroom and smell the wax on the floor and smell all those little children who were around that room back in 1954 and the smell of chalk dust and spring coming in the windows and you almost have got it alive and then it all slips away and then you're back where you were before. But what a wonderful thing to try. What a wonderful attempt to make. Always worth it. Always worth it. Especially in behalf of a place so lovely as I've come to realize where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
Beautiful spring day after a rain storm. Bob & Ray Skits: Controlling inflation in a paper clip factory. Lucky phone call to anywhere program. Serious people. Radio soap opera. The Komodo dragon. Poem by GO, 'The Wrangler". Radio Theater: Buster is left by the tracks. The gang arrives at Phantom Gulch. Buster is launched in the NPR space rocket. Upcoming programs on Public Radio
Archival contributors: musicbrainz, Ken Kuhl