Elvin Bishop, Sam Bush, Pat Donohue, Elvin Bishop, Guy's All-Star Shoe Band. Garrison Keillor, Portland Cello Project,
Bo Weevil (Elvin Bishop , Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Take Five (Portland Cello Project ) When I was a Cowboy (Western Plain) ( Pat Donohue , Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Sanctus ( Garrison Keillor , Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) That's My Thing ( Elvin Bishop , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band , Sam Bush ) Limericks ( Garrison Keillor , Portland Cello Project ) Freight Train Boogie ( Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Super Mario Brothers Theme (Portland Cello Project ) Arkansas Line ( Elvin Bishop , Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) Denmark (Portland Cello Project ) Picasso's Mandolin ( Sam Bush , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band ) I'll Fly Away ( Garrison Keillor , Sam Bush , Elvin Bishop , Guy's All-Star Shoe Band )
Keillor talks Oregon (Garrison Keillor talks about Eugene, Oregon) Life of the Cowboys skit Opening Narritive (Garrison Keillor opening Monologue)
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
Well, it’s been a quiet week at Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown, out there on the edge of the prairie. It’s very, brutally, brutally hot here this last week, and the deer flies came in, which is a form of plague, a sort of a torture. If the deer flies had come early in the plague, the pharaoh would have let those children of Israel go right away. The flies will make a mark on you that’ll last you the rest of your life. And then the storms rolled in. These powerful storms. The sky turned a kind of a dark green, and the world got so still, that even people who didn’t believe in the last judgement thought, you know if there were one, which I don’t think there is, this is what it would be like. When the book is open and God looks in the book and sees all of your cruelty and your meanness and your cravenness and all the dirt you did in your life. It would be just like this, this greenish silence, and then the storm rolled in and poured down on people and thunder and lightning, and there was a power surge. And people who had been working at their computers looked at the screens and saw jumbled letters, and some of the screens went black, and they wouldn’t come back. And people who had been working at their computers for a while, because what had been there was irrecoverable, now began to seem so precious to them. Potentially brilliant writing. They were in grief over it. It was right about that time that Carley Krebsbach decided to break up with Buck Rasmussen, and she texted him. She said, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” Not that they’d seen each other that much, they mostly texted, and sent e-mails, though they live only a block-and-a-half away. “Why? What’s wrong?” he texted back. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” which made him feel terrible. “I just don’t think this is leading anywhere,” she said. He said, “Where did you want it to lead?” But it was too late for that. The storm crashing, thunder, lightning coming down on people. Luana Peterson was driving home from her job. She works in the big hospital that’s off to the east of there. She works in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and she spent this whole week tending to a 13-year-old girl who was struck by a car a week ago. She was crossing the street with her friend, Brianna, and a car stopped and waved them to come, and they did, and another car hit them, hard. She’s in extremely critical condition. This beautiful girl, who was so excited, she was heading off to swing-dance lessons. And now, she lies in a coma and she will never move her arms or legs again. Weeping family coming to see her. Bringing holy water, bringing prayer cards, bringing things blessed by the bishop. Bringing statues of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Kneeling at her bedside, holding her hand, praying for a miracle. Luana, the professional person, she has to be cool, and collected, and pleasant, and dealing with these people who believed in a miracle. Luana, who could see the science only too clearly, that most of the girl’s brain function was gone, and she is not long for this world. She knew all too well. Nonetheless, she put on a pleasant face. But, when she drove awa from work that afternoon, as the storm was just gathering in the sky, she fell apart, she fell apart. She wept, she sobbed, as she hadn’t sobbed in years. She could no longer see to drive. Tears blinded her, She pulled in under a bridge, where a whole gang of people on motorcycles were there under the shelter, temporary hoboes in the storm. And one of them walked over, and tapped on her window, and said, “Are you okay?” She said, “No.” “Is there anything I can do?” “No,” she said. I guess she didn’t recognize me wearing a black leather jacket. She hadn’t seen me in years. And I don’t know Luana that well. It was her mother who I dated. I mean, dating in the loosest sense of the word. Not that we were loose, we were not. I wish that we were at the time, but it didn’t develop that way. She didn’t have to text me to tell me that it wasn’t going anywhere. I knew that already. But then, when I saw the Peterson’s marriage in later years, I was glad that it wasn’t me she had chosen. So, she doesn’t know me, Luana. I can see she was sobbing and I opened the door and I set down in the front seat. Sometimes you have to go in first and wait for the invitation later. I said, “Just let me sit here for a minute.” I said, ”As soon as this rain lets up” I said, “I’m on my way to go out to Oregon. I’m going out to Eugene, Oregon. A college town. I love college towns; I like to walk around college towns. It reminds me of when I was that age, when I was arrogant and filled with self-pity. “I looked down on anybody who was older than me, people in their 30’s. I looked own on anybody who used the word, “impact,” as a verb, or anybody who had never read Proust, or never read Albert Camus. I looked down on people who were rich, not that I like people who were poor, I didn’t like them either.” I knew that nobody I saw would ever appreciate my writing. How could they? I was a genius. A proof of my genius was that I had never been published, and so it wasn’t a problem that nobody had asked to see my work. I wouldn’t have wanted to show it to them anyway, because they never would have been able to appreciate it. I was a true original. Well, I got into radio because I saw an ad in a newspaper, and it said, “Radio host wanted. Must be pleasant, agreeable, and have a good personality.” It was a multiple-choice test, thank goodness, not an interview. And I had a friend who taken the test that very test that morning, so I knew the answers and I passed. and I got the job. What had got me interested in radio, if you’re wondering, was a job that I had before. I was a deck hand on a ship, and it was an ocean-going ship. And we ran into heavy weather and the navigation equipment went out and the Coast Guard had to get a fix on our ship. And the old man, the captain, told me to go on the radio, and stay on the radio, so they could pick up our signal. So I did. I was on the radio for eight hours and I sang, and I told jokes and I told stories and eight hours went by pretty quickly. I thought, “You know, this is not so hard.” This was a ship that was crossing the ocean. It was a tanker ship and it was loaded with red wine, Bordeau wine, going from France, over to the U.S. See, France is where I was from. That’s where I grew up, in Bordeaux, which is sort of the French Midwest. And people say to me, they say, “You know you don’t look French, you don’t sound French.” But you know, that’s what they said to me in France, when I was growing up there. They said “You don’t sound French.” Which was a problem growing up. So, it was kind of a relief for me to get away from my home country and my family, though they were wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people. My father was a post-impressionist painter, and he didn’t know he was post, you know. He thought he was part of a thing, but he was post. And my mother was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and it was a good life, you know. We had champagne for breakfast, and escargot and crème brulee and all the rest of it. It was wonderful life, living in Paris. But I didn’t belong. People kept saying, “You don’t sound French. You don’t seem French.” So, I got into radio, even though my English was very poor. I ‘d only learned English from dating American girls. So, I only knew a certain language, much of which you couldn’t use on the radio. But, luckily for me, the transmitter was not operating at the station where I worked that first year. Gophers had eaten the antenna wires. Unbeknownst to me, I was sitting in a studio, and I was reading the news, and nobody was listening, whatsoever. I wondered why there was so little mail. And I sat there and I did the news and after a year, my English was better. It’s still not great, as you can tell. But I talk slowly, because it is not my first language. I’m doing better. People ask me how long are you going to keep on doing this. I keep telling them, “I’m going to keep doing this until I get the hang of it and as long as it’s fun.” It’s a lot more fun, now that they are paying me. I did it for many, many years, thinking I was part of a church group. But anyway, that’s my story. I told my story to Luana Peterson. I said “Yeah, I’m going out to Eugene, Oregon and find my roots out there. To see how I used to be back when I was not much at all and see how things have improved ever since.” She appreciated that. There’s no way you can comfort anybody. Nothing you can say that makes sense. All you can do is distract them, tell a story. She thanked me for that. She knew that when she want back to the Intensive Care Unit, she was going to lose that 13-year-old girl, as she’s lost so many people over the years. And she just has to buck up and she just has to bear it. She drove home. The rain was ended, the grass was a beautiful green. Her computer was on the blink from the power surge. And her dishwasher was on and her refrigerator was making a humming sound, that sounded so much like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “Glory, glory hallelujah,” it seemed to be wanting to sing, her refrigerator. And the vacuum was murmuring to itself, too. “Glory, glory hallelujah. Its truth is marching on.” 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