Big Medicine, Pat Donohue, Richard Dworsky, Adam Granger, Guy's, Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, Peter Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Heather Masse, Joe Newberry. Aoife O'Donovan, Robin & Linda Williams, Anni Spring,
Carolina Moon ( Garrison Keillor , Heather Masse , Aoife O'Donovan , Richard Dworsky ) Wild Bill Jones (Big Medicine ) Keep on Truckin' (Truckin' My Blues Away) ( Pat Donohue , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Carolina Sunshine Girl (Robin & Linda Williams , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Cluck Old Hen ( Adam Granger , Anni Spring , Peter Johnson ) Powdermilk Biscuit Theme ( Garrison Keillor , Robin & Linda Williams , Aoife O'Donovan , Heather Masse , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Turn Your Radio On ( Garrison Keillor , Robin & Linda Williams , Aoife O'Donovan , Heather Masse , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) The Ace ( Garrison Keillor , Joe Newberry , Adam Granger , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Limericks ( Garrison Keillor , Big Medicine , Richard Dworsky ) Red & White & Blue & Gold ( Aoife O'Donovan , Heather Masse , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Doc Watson Tribute Medley ( Garrison Keillor , Big Medicine , Robin & Linda Williams , Heather Masse , Aoife O'Donovan , Pat Donohue , Richard Dworsky , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) For Better or Worse (Robin & Linda Williams , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Finseth's Wake ( Adam Granger , Anni Spring ) Orphan Girl ( Heather Masse , Aoife O'Donovan , Guy's ) What Does the Lonesome Dove Say? (Big Medicine ) These Old Dark Hills (Robin & Linda Williams , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Closing Medley ( Garrison Keillor , Big Medicine , Robin & Linda Williams , Heather Masse , Aoife O'Donovan , Adam Granger , Anni Spring , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band )
Cool Script (How to keep cool in Cary, N.C.) Greetings Guy Noir, Private Eye Life of the Cowboys Script (Cowboys are in Cary, N.C.) Open Script (Describing the sites and history of the ) Post Office Script (Monthly auction held by the USPS for unclaimed packages)
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It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon, my hometown, out on the edge of the prairie.. It's been beautiful. it's been dry, it's been in the 70's, a little breeze coming in. Very low humidity, The water in the lake is warm enough to go swimming at last. The water lilies have opened up and the gardens are booming along. it's been a beautiful time. The class of 2012 is getting ready to leave us and meanwhile, the class of 1962 came back for a reunion in town. They had a big pavilion down by the lake, looking out over the water. They're all down there. Interesting to see them all. They're circulating around, about 120 pe0ple. People who had been in high school in the throes of angst and hormones and unreal ambition and envy, and now they were circulating among each other, fifty years later. And they were finding out how much they like each other. Good, decent people, they were enjoying each other's company. They did a memorial to Henry Hill, who was in the class of 1962, who went off and died in Vietnam in 1968. He was a first lieutenant in the Army, and Julie Orbach, who acted in "Romeo and Juliet," opposite Henry Hill, who was Romeo., gave a little speech about her classmate. She stood and she looked into the bright lights and she said, "Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will fall in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun." There were people standing around the pavilion, outside. The choir from high school, and they were waiting, shuffling around in the dark, wondering who these old, sentimental people were. Altogether, thinking I'm never going to get that old, or that stupid. But when the cue was there, they stepped forward and they hummed the alma mater, and they saw all these old people burst into tears, as they sang, "Hail to thee, our alma mater. Would that we might dwell longer in thy hallowed hallways." "But we bid farewell. Long life's dangerous lonely passages, through the clouds of grief and fear. In our hearts will 'er remember how your love and taught ours, here." What I remember about high school, when I was 18. I remember that all the bright kids got to go to a picnic on the last day of school, and I was not one of them. And we stayed behind in class, all of us dummies. We certainly wished that we were among the best and the brightest, but we obviously were not. So, we were considering other options. Larceny, for example, and cheating, and so forth. And it was down in the cafeteria. And we were all together. I don't know how it started, or who started it, but it just happened. All of a sudden, suddenly, everybody was reaching down in their plate of spaghetti and they were grabbing whole handfuls of spaghetti. It was the greatest food fight I have ever been in in my life. The greatest - it was such a wonderful feeling. It was just pure restlessness, when you've been standing in line and following directions for years and years and years. It just felt so good to grab food and throw it at other people. I loved it. We had to write letters of apology to the kitchen staff, but I didn't mean mine. I thought it was absolutely, absolutely wonderful. Well, I'm not sure what the class of 1962 is reminiscing about, but probably, probably not that. It's a beautiful week in Lake Woebegone. The tent caterpillars have arrived in huge numbers. We have a bumper crop of them this year. They're everywhere - they're up in the trees and when you sleep at night with your windows open, you can hear their poop dropping through the leaves. It's like rain falling, you just never know where they may be. You wake up in the morning, and there's one crawling out of the butter dish. And there's two sitting on your chair. You sit down there and your wife is sitting and reading the paper, and there's one crawling up the sleeve of her nightgown. And you watch it crawl up your wife's sleeve, She's reading about Afghanistan and this caterpillar is heading for its own Afghanistan. Her bare shoulder is heading up there and when he gets up there, she leaps up and she screams. and she brushes him away. And she goes off to the toilet to clean off her shoulder and she comes back and she looks you in the eye and she knows, wives know, she knows that you knew and you didn't say anything about it. They are everywhere. They are all over town. Paster Liz in the Lutheran Church last Sunday morning, serving communion and there was sort of motion there in the plate of wafers. The body of Christ was moving, there. And her little acolyte, Brian, took the caterpillar from her and she was moving down the line and then he said, "Hold on," which he never said before when serving communion, and he picked one off her chasuble. And she said, "Thank you." And he said, "And also yourself." There are pesticides that will deal with caterpillars, but they have side effects, and they cause sleepiness and we do not need more of that in our town. We do not need any of that, whatsoever. Our town is in high alert and so, when a skunk walked into town on Tuesday, everybody knew about it. It just came down the alley past the Sidetrack Tap and it crossed over Main Street and went by Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery. and down by the mercantile and went down by Krebsbach's Chevrolet and it went around by the Chatterbox Cafe. People standing in the window watching this skunk go in and went all the way down the block and then up McKinley Street and it went across the ballfield and off into the woods. Mr. Burgee, who had been standing at the window of the Chatterbox, watching it, went back to finish his lunch and he took a bite of his salad, and he felt something furry in his mouth. And he spat it out and he almost yorked up his whole meal, and he was spitting and spitting and spitting and then he ran off to the men's room. People laughing, laughing, laughing, until they almost cried. Darlene had put, wound up some pieces of yarn and she had put it in there and that was the fuzziness that he felt against his palate. This was a payment for two weeks ago, when he put a mouse into the pocket of her apron and she got upset and she had to run off to the lady's room. And when she was gone, he took her hot fudge sundae and he swapped it out for a dish of ice cream with some heated laxative poured over it. It was not a nice thing to do. It was not a good thing to do. No, we're all at a high, high alert. The Class of 2012 does not care about any of this. They don't care about caterpillars, they're just thinking about getting out of here. Their favorite part of town is the road out and that's what they're planning on. Every year, the graduating class pulls a major prank for commencement and Mr. Halvorson is wondering what this class will do this year. Last year, there were 10 graduating seniors who, on the recessional, leaving the platform with their diplomas in hand, they dropped their gowns and walked naked through the crowd. People screaming and students applauding and flash cameras going off. This year, we don't know, we don't know what they will do. There's a bit bonfire tonight at the Hansen's farm and I'm sure the seniors will be talking about it there. The Hansens, of course will be there, but they're not going to stay up all night, are they? No, they're not. And the constables, Gary and Leroy, they weren't either. So, there will come a time when the seniors are free, free, to work whatever mischief they want to. When I was 18, I discovered that walking around town, full of grief and sorrow and anxiety, I discovered that between two a.m. and six a.m., this town lies utterly defenseless and innocent. You walk, and here's all the houses and here are the people sleeping in there. And you could, if you wanted to, walk in the side door - not the front door - they keep that locked, because that's the one the Jehovah Witnesses use. But, go in the side door, and you can go through their living room, you can try on their clothes, you can read their books. You could, if you were brave, you could go right up those stairs and you could walk into their room Heavy sleepers in Lake Woebegone, you could sit there and watch their little chests go up and down and listen to them snore. Watch them and watch that tent caterpillar walking up their neck, and up their cheek and walking over to the great precipice of the mouth. And then heading up towards the nose, and putting its little head up one nostril, waving his little antenna up in there. You can see all of that, all of that. One of those young people who dropped her gown last year, was Gwen Tallerud, who's come back from St. Olaf College and she took a course in philosophy and studied Kjelgaard and she is full of, full of Kjelgaard now. And she's happy to talk about Kjelgaard to anybody who show any interest. It just changed her life completely. LIfe is a race without a finish line, so you don't even need to bother to run into it, you can just stay home, let God choose the winners. Just don't worry about it, Life can only be understood backwards, but life has to be lived forwards, Kjelgaard said., She's all taken up with this, taken up with Kjelgaard and existentialism. Why do we vacuum? Why do we do this? Dirt is organic, dirt is a part of this world. People say why does a young woman like yourself just stay home? You should be out seeing the world? What does young mean? What does woman mean? You can’t define me by those words. A very interesting, very interesting young person, full of Kjelgaard, full of profundity. She ran across Pastor Liz on the street the other day and she called her. “Pastor Liz,” she said, “I never understand the Christian faith until one month ago, reading Kjelgaard. ‘Life can only be understood backwards but it has to be lived forwards,’ and most people claim not to understand the Christian faith because they’re afraid that if they didn’t understand it, they’d be responsible for living up to it and they don’t want to do it." “But you know it’s not that hard. Don’t own anything. Don’t want anything. Give away everything that you have. Don’t have anything matter to you and love people you don’t like. It’s just that simple.” I was standing there, and I noticed the caterpillar that was climbing up her back, and I did not remove it. It was headed for her neck and I just didn’t feel I had a right to interrupt the path of another living thing, And now thinking backwards, I wish that I had taken care of it. But looking forwards, I look forward to when you invite me to your house for supper and you serve me spaghetti – a whole big plate of it. And you sit across the table from me and you bow your head and you give thanks, for the food as people do in the South, and the force outside myself, makes my hand reach down and grab a whole handful of spaghetti and red sauce and look at you and pull my hand back. Ask and you shall receive more than you ever thought possible. Life can only be understood backwards, it has to be lived forwards. Two directions. And 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.
Archival contributors: Duff E. McFadden