Bagnoli. Carol, Vince Gill, Emory Gordy, EmmyLou Harris, Carl Jackson, Garrison Keillor, Leo Kottke, Kate MacKenzie, Dan Rowles, Ralph Stanley.
The darkest hour ( Ralph Stanley , EmmyLou Harris ) Nobody's love is like mine ( Ralph Stanley ) I'm willing to try ( Ralph Stanley ) Room at the top ( Ralph Stanley ) Clinch mountain backstep ( Ralph Stanley ) Amazing Grace ( Ralph Stanley ) I'll Fly Away ( Ralph Stanley ) Be lifted up ( EmmyLou Harris ) Drifting Too Far From The Shore ( EmmyLou Harris , Vince Gill , Emory Gordy , Carl Jackson ) If I Could Only Win Your Love ( EmmyLou Harris ) Bright morning stars ( EmmyLou Harris ) Have you seen ( Garrison Keillor , EmmyLou Harris ) Farther Along ( Garrison Keillor , EmmyLou Harris ) The Sweetest Gift ( Garrison Keillor , EmmyLou Harris ) Marriage song ( Leo Kottke )
Adventures of Buster the Show Dog Boll Weevil's Teen Casino Cyrus Hartley's Touch and Glow Fertilizer Desert Island Diet Center Fearmonger's Shop Powdermilk Biscuits Scotty's Cough Syrup for Dogs
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. Went up there on Monday for Memorial Day services at the cemetery. Wanted to see everybody before I go away. You get so busy packing, you know, towards the end, when you get set to leave, you don't have time to visit with people. So you really want to do that a little bit early. And everybody goes to Memorial Day in my hometown. Everybody was up at the cemetery. It's your civic duty to be there. Everything was just as I remembered it from when I was a boy. The sixth grade kids all dressed up standing there alongside the G.A.R. Memorial and the Boy Scouts were all there in their brown shirts. And the lady sextet was standing over under the tree. And there was a lectern. And Val Tollefson, who was the chairman of the event, stood waiting for it to begin and thinking of all the things that could go wrong with it. People who put on events always have those thoughts before they start. You have a clear vision of right afterward somebody coming up to you and saying, you never thought about that? You never took any precautions at all about that? It never occurred to you that that could happen? And it's very clear. You can see that person's face after the event and how aghast and surprised they would be at your irresponsibility. As they say, you never thought of that, except you can't figure out what it is they're talking about. So you think of all possibilities. however unlikely, the possibility that a tree could fall, just fall, just not even a cracking sound to give you a warning, just fall on the lady's sextet, pin them all right there, change them from sopranos to baritones. Think of all the things that could go wrong. Think of the public address system failing, or worse than that, a little bare wire lying down there in the damp grass. And that sixth-grade boy who's been picked to recite the Gettysburg Address comes up to that microphone. Little boy, pale, shaking, and his hands all sweaty. his little tiny hand grabs onto the microphone and he's electrocuted in front of everybody. Yep. When he was back in the crowd and she picked him to recite, he knew he was going to die and he was right. Val thought about that, thought about that. Boy, that'd be a way for our town to get in the newspapers then, wouldn't it? Twelve slain by falling tree at Memorial Day rites. Nothing newspaper likes better than tragic irony like that. So Val went up and himself took hold of the microphone and did not die. and looked out at people and said, our services will begin in just a few minutes, as soon as we have solved an equipment problem. That's what was holding them up, not that we cared. It was late getting started, but it gave us all a chance to sit and look at each other and talk to each other. The sons of Canute Honor Guard were down the road, and one of the Canutes had had a stone in his shoe in the Honor Guard, the one carrying the U.S. flag. And he went to get it out of his shoe, and he broke his shoelace, and he had to go home and get another shoelace. You'd think he could have tied it together, but it's already been tied together two, three times. A lot of knots in it. So he went home to get another one. That's what we're waiting on. But as I say, we didn't mind. Everybody is here at this Memorial Day service. And so Virginia Inquist, who is the chairman of Toast and Jelly Days, this is her opportunity to come around from group to group sitting on the grass there and sign up some people for committees. She's got them right there. They're easy to pluck. Because you go on Memorial Day and you sit and you think about death and somehow serving on a committee doesn't seem so bad. A kind of purgatory, but not the end, you know. And Elmer comes around, who's the organizer of Flag Day, to organize the living flag for June the 14th. He comes around, signs people up for his committees. He's got four committees, the red, the blue, the white, and a cleanup committee. He signs up some of those. Then Clint Bunsen comes around from group to group, all sitting in the grass, looking down towards the G.A.R. monument, waiting for it all to start. Clint comes around to maybe sign up a few people to join the Boosters Club. They're short, a few members. And he looks down at me and he says, you know, you ought to join the Boosters Club. The Boosters Club could use some younger fellas in it. And then he stops and said, oh, no, you're leaving. No point in you joining. And he's right. I'm gone. It's awfully hard to leave a town like that. or you've had an attachment to it all of your life. It's like Bob Bowser's 55 Merc that he finally got out of his backyard. It was behind his garage. It's been there for, what, 20 years? Sat out behind his garage. And vines have grown over it. Honeysuckle have grown over it. And weeds come up under it. All four tires have gone flat as it sat there, winter and summer. And two box elder trees have grown up through the floorboards and made their way up the front seat where Bob and Bonnie used to sit. The box elder trees come out where the windshield used to be. where Bob and Bonnie used to sit, that was the first car he owned. That was the car that they dated in. They went off to movies and dances and parties in that car, and they sat in that car after movies and dances and parties, sat in that front seat where now those two box elder trees have grown up where they used to sit. And the vines intermingled with each other kind of like Bob and Bonnie used to be, sitting in the front seat, all around each other there. Saved it all these years. He said all she needs is a good engine, new engine and a new transmission. After a while, he said all she needs is a little body work and a new engine and a new transmission and some tires, and she'd run good. Those cars gain in value, you know, year after year. Those 55 Mercs, they built them like tanks. Now this spring he finally had to get it out. Clint Bunsen came down from Bunsen Motors and he put a hook around one bumper. He wasn't sure which one. The whole thing got vines all over. He had to peel greenery and vegetation off to get at a bumper. He put a hook up under it and he pulled and it trembled and it shook. And then with a shudder it came loose and came out. The bumper fell off. After a few feet, he couldn't tow it. So what he had to do after they ripped most of the vines off it was that Bob had to get in it, and he put the wrecker behind it and pushed it all the way down to the town dump. It looked like a hill moving down the street. And Bob Bowser inside it, trying to steer. vines all around him the thing was dropping dirt as it went along his eyes all misty thinking about old days of romance and when he was young and sat in his car that's what it's like for me to to leave that town behind they came up to me at memorial day and commented on it as people will Mr. Berge came up after Memorial Day service and he said, Yeah, I know. I knew of a young man about your age. Went to live in Denmark. Forget his name. He went over there and a week later he was dead. He was so used to driving on the right-hand side of the road. He couldn't shake that habit of driving on the right-hand side. Went over to Denmark, dead within days in a head-on collision. That's a true story. I said, yeah, but in Denmark, they drive on the right-hand side. He said, yeah, that's what he thought before he went. Clint, no, it wasn't Clint. Clint, I didn't talk to Clint. He wanted me to join the Boosters Club. No, it was Wally . It was Wally from the Sidetrack Tap came and said, yeah, I know a lot of people. I know of a number of people who've done what you're doing, who left a good deal and went off for something else, and they regretted it within weeks. They made a big mistake. They realized it was a big mistake. They went off. Something else looked better. They went off for it. And then they tried to come back and get what they left behind, but you never can do that. You know, you give it up once and it's lost. You don't get a second chance on a deal like that. Life is not a practice. Life is the real thing. You better think twice, mister, he said. But Wally is a bartender, and bartenders are conservatives because they've seen too many stories, all the same story over and over. They see all these guys sit down on bar stools in dim light, guys who are in reasonably good shape with all their faculties intact. They see a guy who wants to better his condition and make himself more sophisticated and witty and more graceful and more fun to be with. And he has a couple bottles. And he has a couple bumps. And things go downhill from there. Bartenders are conservatives. They believe in hanging on to what you got. It doesn't get any better than this. Be careful. Look out. Watch out. That's probably why they did not ask me to speak at graduation at Lake Wobegon High School. It's because I'm not a conservative. I'm a romantic guy. And I believe in the impossible beauty of the world and the endless possibilities And though commencement is Wednesday and the band was practicing pomp and circumstance all last week, Mr. Halverson will speak at graduation. I was hoping they'd ask me, but they didn't. because they were afraid that I might have told those kids, go, run, see, find out, go have an adventure. And they are all afraid, and they want to instill a little fear into those kids and tell them, hey, hold on, stop, wait, be careful, look out, look out. That's what I would have told them, all right, if I had given commencement at my old high school. I would have looked those kids in their eyes and said, life is far more dangerous than you ever guessed. and there are failures ahead of you that you don't even know about. You've been sheltered from all of that by your parents and your teachers have tried to keep from you the knowledge of failure, but you'll find it out. There's far more failure in life than you're aware of, but you'll survive it. And surviving it, you will become a different person It'll change you, and you'll never change back to what you were. Failure will make you sympathetic to other people. You will feel other people's pain and their happiness more than you ever did before when you were all tied up inside yourself, this wonderful, successful, happy child who enjoyed success after success. When you start to fail, you'll start to notice other people, and you'll enjoy one of life's great gifts, which is to take pleasure in other people, just looking at them, just watching them. It's your great entertainment in life, but you only get it if you failed at enough things first. Then you'll know what they're going through, and you'll have the endless curiosity and pleasure of looking at other people. And once you find that, life is never boring I was 17 when I started on my downward course of failure at one thing after another. The night I graduated, I had the use of my father's car for the first time and headed out west of town towards the gravel pit, towards the party with my friend Jim, going along in a day and age before seat belts. We were driving down the highway as fast as I could go, and he had two cigarillos that he'd swiped from his old man, and we put them in our mouths, and I looked up in the rearview mirror to see how they looked, and we lit them up, and we took a deep drag on it, and I kind of heisted myself up off the seat to see how it looked in the mirror when I exhaled smoke through my nose. It looked darn good. And I did it again, and then I felt the car tip to the left, and we went way down, and I thought we were going over, and then we went way back the other way, and we were up in a field of soybeans going right down the road. I didn't take my feet off the gas. I just went all the way down, and we got to the road again, and we made another little bump, and we were back up on the gravel. It still drove. It pulled to the right a little bit, but it still drove. And Jim said, you're going to tell your dad about this? And I said, tell him about what? And he said, same here. And we went down the road, but I thought to myself, God, I owe you one now. Thanks. We went down to the gravel pit, and I sat in that car, and he got out, and Donna Bunsen was sitting next to me, and we were talking, and I lit up that cigarillo again, and I went up to look in the mirror to see how it looked, but I took the precaution of stepping on the brake, because we were aiming down towards the creek. I stepped in on the brake, but it wasn't the brake. It was the clutch. and it rolled right down into the water, down to the hood ornament, went down in the water of the creek, looked at it, got out, climbed up on shore. I thought I'd let it sit there for a while. Maybe the water might cure whatever I'd done to it when I went off the road into the soybeans, kind of the lords of cars, you know? We pulled it out. Finally, somebody had a chain. We got it out. I didn't tell him about that either. I tell you, it's been one story like that after another all my life. I went to college at the University of Minnesota, and I, one year, got 12 Fs, the most a person could earn, if earn is the word for it. They were incompletes, and they turned into Fs after the passage of, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. I owe term papers now to professors who are dead. I withdrew a book from the Minneapolis Public Library in 1962. I still have it. I still have it. Gosh, I could go on. Somehow failures, failures, when you survive them, make you love life more. I don't know how to explain it to you, but I do remember that summer that I graduated and how we all went down to the farmer's co-op grain elevator, the highest building in town. It was late one night, and we had two six-packs of beer, and there were five of us, and Jim was there, and it was easy opening the lock to get into the elevator. And we all went in and stood in that cool, dark, the highest building in town. And I don't know how this happened. It's one of those deals where somebody says, oh, you wouldn't do that, and you say, oh, yes, I would. And they say, nah, you wouldn't dare do that, and yes, you would dare do that, and then you're doing it. And you're in the grain bucket. and they've got the motor on, and they're pulling you up, up, up in the dark in this shallow bucket like a wheelbarrow, and you're hanging onto the sides with both hands, and you're going up 50 feet, 75 feet, 100 feet, 120 feet, and you're up, and suddenly there's a window. you can see the moon and stars and down below are the lights of what you figure must be your town and you lean to see out but it's farther over there than you thought and the bucket tips way to one side and you go to scream and nothing comes out just air comes out your mouth and just as you're about to pitch into the dark your right hand grabs onto the cable, and you hang on, and you yell to let me down, and they pull the lever, and it takes off the brake, and you drop 50 feet. And then they put the brake back on. And you are about two inches shorter than you were. And you're hanging on to the sides in pitch black as they bring it down by hand, turning the wheel over and over, inch by inch. You come down in the dark. And when you finally come down to the floor, your hands are locked onto the side of it. You can't let go. And they have to pry your fingers loose. And they help you out the door. And you lean down and you throw up. but nobody cares they're so glad that you lived through it and so are you when you finally realize that you did and you take a deep breath and you smell green you smell flowers and you smell the night and you smell lake and you smell life itself you're so happy to be alive well Doing this show has been like the trip up in the bucket. And I saw it out the window and I leaned and something else happened. And then I finally made it down to the bottom. And now I'm going to go out the door. That's why. I want to enjoy the sweet life that I describe in my stories. I don't leave you when I leave. I rejoin you in that life that we share in that little town. 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.
Theater: Buster and friends walk from St. Paul to Denver. The overhead tram car collapses. GK reads Walt Whitman poems.
1987.05.23 Detroit Free Press / 1987.05.30 Cincinnati Enquirer: "Ralph Stanley"
Archival contributors: musicbrainz / Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl