Butch Thompson Trio, Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series, Janis Hardy, Garrison Keillor. Kate MacKenzie,
Tell Laura I love here ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) I can't seem to say good-bye ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Today I started loving you again ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie ) Nobody's sweetheart now (Butch Thompson Trio ) Darktown strutters ball (Butch Thompson Trio ) In the dark (Butch Thompson Trio ) In praise of Apollo ( Janis Hardy , Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series ) Diary of Virginia Wolff ( Janis Hardy , Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series ) Happy birthday Domenic Argento ( Janis Hardy , Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series ) Gloria ( Janis Hardy , Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series ) Happy trails to you ( Janis Hardy , Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series )
Cafe Boeuf Fisher's Coffee Guy's Shoes
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, in such a beautiful week, election week, and Election Day, the quietest day in America, and one of the most beautiful as well, when you get up in the morning, and all of the campaign is over, and all the barking and the yipping and the growling and the woofing of the campaign is done, and you get up and you make yourself coffee and a little breakfast, and you look forward to going down to vote, and You sort of put it off for a little while. I do because they want to savor the moment you get in your car.
It's a beautiful day, so quiet you drive along through the hills and the farms Lake Wobegon. And sometimes you pick up a Chicago radio station, wbbn. You get a Chicago traffic report as you're driving along the county road, there some Holsteins way up in the distance, like cut outs on the hill, bare trees. You hear somebody talking about stop and go traffic on the Dan Ryan expressway, and moderate to heavy on the Eisenhower and slow going, going out to O'Hare. And it's another world, you know, all the dim and confusion just far far away out there. And you drive down to the town hall, and you walk in, and the blast of hot air from that oil heater hits you in the face, and the clerks and the election judges are sitting there around that old cafeteria table with the balance on the table in front of them, ancient old people been there forever.
They know you. They know everybody in your family. If dead people came in to vote, they'd recognize them too. And you get your ballot, and you go stand in the booth with a curtain to your back and you enjoy this beautiful, calm moment of pure equality when your vote is the same as everybody else's. It's the only moment of pure equality you know in your life, until the day you die, and you give them your ballot and you drive away the snow on the hills on this beautiful, calm day in America, how lucky We are to live in this country. God really smiled on America. It wasn't because we were smart. It wasn't even that our forefathers and foremothers were that smart, either. If the truth be told,
God smiled on this country, and we're so lucky to live here, you drive down to the chatterbox cafe, get a little bit of analysis. Don't you know? You walk in, you sit down. The moment you rear end touches the stool. Les Vaughn's got the coffee there in front of you, that life giving coffee of Dorothy's her weak coffee that you can sit and drink gallons of, sit drink all day, and you sit there and you hear the soft voices of the people of my town all around you talking about this weather we've been having, and how they say she was going to get warm. This snow was supposed to melt, but it doesn't look like it's going to for a while. No, no, it doesn't.
Yeah, yeah. I heard on the news here the other day that about half of the corn crop still out there in the fields, too too wet to harvest. Goodness knows when they're going to bring it in. But you can't fight Mother Nature. You sit there listening to these voices as Les bond comes and fills up your coffee again. Nothing about the election, nothing whatsoever. Sit and look at the sign that's up on the wall over the back counter that Dorothy wrote up there that says, bloom where you are planted. There's a thought, there isn't it. Why we'd like to we tried, kind of makes a person like me feel guilty. I'm I'm one of those migratory plants like like Sandberg.
Sit there and you look up at the menu on the blackboard and and the special today is beef burritos or meatloaf, and dessert is chocolate peanutty or better than sex cake. You and Lev comes by and you say, Well, I think I'll have, I think I'll have some of that meatloaf looks pretty good. She says, any dessert? Les Vaughn is 19 years old. Oh, she's so beautiful and better than sex. Cake is an old joke, and like well begun. In fact, I think the recipe for it is in the Lutheran women's cookbook.
But still, I'm an older guy, and I feel embarrassed to say this out loud. So I say, Well, yeah, maybe, maybe you could bring me a piece of that cake then. And she says, You mean that better than sex cake. This beautiful 19 year old girl is so gets such a big kick out of my embarrassment. My looking down, yeah, sure, yeah, I'll have a piece of and it suddenly occurs to me that maybe this is the secret behind dirty jokes, that it's the innocent people who really enjoy them, and it's old sinners like myself who are embarrassed by them. So she brings little meatloaf, and you feel a dog edge up next to you, alongside the stool, and that's art's new dog, his little, short haired dog's about six months old. His name is PAL and art from Arts Bates and night arrest motel. He's there. Season is over for him. He's feeling good.
Yeah, that's quite a dog there. Dorothy says that's quite a dog. He's got show him. Show them what that dog does, art. So art says, sit, and the dog sits, and art takes a little piece of my meatloaf, and he puts it on that dog's nose, and the dog looks up at art. He doesn't look at the meatloaf. He balances that meatloaf there, and he looks up at art, and he waits, and he waits a long time, and art looks at him, and then art says, Okay, you can have that. And the dog flips his tosses his head up, and he flips that little piece of meatloaf in the air, and he got it. And it show him that other trick he does there. Dorothy says, lie down. He says, lie down. The dog lies down. And he takes two little pieces of meatloaf, and he puts one meatloaf on the dog's right paw, on top of it, sets it on top and puts the other one on top of the other paw. And the dog who looks up at art with his big eyes just sitting there, not moving, waiting and waiting. And then art says, Okay, you can have that one. And the dog stretches out and snaps up that little piece of meat loaf. Then he waits, and art says,
Okay, now you can have that other one. And he grabs that other piece of meatloaf. I come from a town that's quiet and a thing like this dog is such a big thing to us in like, it's better than the circus. You sit there and watch that dog all day, it's just fascinating. And then that better than sex cake comes. And frankly, it's not very good. It's a lemon cake with a white frosting. And if your sex life isn't as good as that cake, I think you probably ought to fast for a while and see if, and see if that wouldn't help.
It's a beautiful day, election day, such a great day just sit and drink coffee in the chatterbox and enjoy living in America on a winter day, bloom where you were planted. Well, we try to, don't we wish that we could accept that you discover growing up in a town like Lake Wobegon, whether you are meant to bloom there or not, or if you are so much at odds with the town you come from that you'll have to go bloom some other place. And I knew from the time I was a little boy that the people in my town were skeptics and were. Pessimists and that I was a romantic, and the two don't go together.
I come from a town where people don't really believe in beauty, and yet they live in such a beautiful place, especially in the month of November with fresh snow on the ground. But if you ever went into the chatterbox cafe and said it's so beautiful out there, they'd look at you squint, wondering if you were making fun of them.
But it is so beautiful. A beautiful girl like Les Vaughn has a hard time growing up in Lake Wobegon because young women are supposed to be nice, like walk on. They're supposed to look nice. But if you're naturally beautiful, you have to be careful to hold it back, keep it under wraps. Don't use any of that eye makeup. Don't use that makeup that heightens your high cheek bones, don't dress in revealing clothes. Wear baggy clothes. Keep your head down, be careful, because a beautiful woman is dangerous in my town, to herself and to the man she's with.
Beautiful Women are not supposed to look fascinating. Be careful. We don't really believe in beauty. We believe in not that bad. Went to the Grand Canyon this summer. How was that then? Well, a lot like it was in pictures. Really it's a lot like it is in the national geography. It wasn't that bad. No, it's not that bad. You learn, growing up young in my town, that my town doesn't have room for the best, not really, doesn't really believe in best. It believes in not that bad. Doesn't believe in great things that are really great, the best things you don't see in my town, like Ferraris, you don't see or or antique furniture or Steinway pianos or Martin guitars or or cappuccino or or original paintings, people look at those askances as being overpriced and ridiculous and and useless, except for form machinery. With farm machinery and tractors. There's no limit, no limit to what people will pay for them and breeding cattle, Holsteins, Holstein cattle, $30,000 for a prime champion Holstein bull, and somebody will sit in the chatterbox cafe and will explain to you why this cow, this animal, is worth $30,000 because it has a high protein count. It represents a hereditary line of cattle whose cows produce a milk that has extremely high protein count. Used to be butter fat count was thing that made Holstein valuable. Now it's protein count. That's why that bull is worth $30,000 but that same person, there is no way you could ever persuade that person that you should ever pay more than $200 for a piano for his children? Because he once saw a piano used listed for $200 piano was a piano. No difference between one or the other. He had never paid more than that.
No, we're pessimists in Lake Wobegon and were skeptics. But then it came down to election night, election day, night in Lake Wobegon and all of the Democrats gathered down at the side track tap. It was Democrat election headquarters down there.
Now Lake Wobegon itself voted for President Bush. It's always been pretty much Republican. Most of the Democrats wound up in Minneapolis a long time ago. They left town to believe. Home someplace else, but there's always little minority of them, and they gather down at the side track tap. Now, the Republicans in town knew that the President was a loser, and so they didn't want to be at the side track tap and have to endure all of that gloating. It was just Democrats who came in there, except for Wally, the owner of the side track behind the bar. He's a Republican, but he had to be there take our money from us. So we all came in there have a few beers, and the returns were already starting to come in. Well, sat in the side track tap, looking up at the TV, and to the side of it was, was Wally's sign. He's got a sign up there that says, we don't have a town drunk. We take turns.
And all US Democrats came in there to enjoy election night because we knew our God was going to win. And sure enough, all those states, they started to turn blue, starting off on the East Coast. Gosh, we're lucky to live in America. Our forefathers, you know, that came up with these things without even, like the electoral college thing that people claim to be irritated with and they don't see any reason for it. It's a beautiful invention, but it's something that nobody ever wanted. It came about as a result of a political compromise when our country was being founded, and it was a compromise between the people who believed in the direct election, the popular election of the President, and the other people who believed that Congress should elect the president, so they made a compromise, and they came up with this thing called the Electoral College, and it's what makes for most dramatic and exciting Election Night anywhere in the world. This is the most exciting democracy in the democratic world. Instead of sitting there all night and just watching these huge vote totals mount up, and your man is now leading. 21,789,342 to 19,641,127 new totals in 10 minutes. Instead, each state is fought over, starting with the East Coast, and some states go down right away into one column or the other. In other states, the struggle goes on for hours. In Florida, they don't know who that goes to men. Suddenly, Ohio is gone and Pennsylvania is gone, and it goes from the east out to the West, and states are battled over and they fall into one column or the other. Parliamentary democracy in Europe is just a big struggle. It's just a big shoving match. It's just a lot of manipulation backstage. There's nothing like Election Night in America. We're lucky to have it. Sit and watch election night after you voted. How exciting?
People who don't vote on Election Day? I'm not in favor of trying to persuade them to people who don't use their privilege to vote, who don't realize how great this is, they are not bright enough to be allowed into a into a voting booth, sit and watch these states go down, and All the Democrats in the side track tap are starting to think their man is going to win. They can't believe that they could be so lucky. Here they are. It's just two weeks since the American League won the World Series and the despised Atlanta Braves were defeated. Then on that Monday night before the election, the Minnesota Vikings went down to Chicago and there, on national television, in front of everybody, they defeated the Chicago Bears, 38 to 10 in front of this immense, solemn Chicago audience, and Mike Ditka, famous Republican coach, defeated, and now here their candidate is winning on election night, and then Deer hunting season starts, four things in one week.
How can life be this good? And they sit and they watch, and the President comes in to concede, and people jeer and yell abuse at him, and they whoop and they yell, and when he sort of stumbles through his concession speech and he. He means to say Americans share the same, but he says Americans shame, and people laugh and jeer, and they have another beer. And while he's waiting behind the bar,
Wally's waiting for this all to slide as it does. Of course, it's too good. They realize it. They realize this is too good to be true. And they start to get moody as the night goes on and suspicious. And then they start to talk bad about Clinton and how he's just a politician like everybody else. And they order another beer, and they sit and they start to get depressed, and they talk about how he just lies like all of them do nothing he can do. And Wally is waiting for the coupe to grace. He says, Yeah. He says, it reminds me of that story about the woman, she was 70 years old. She was getting married for the fourth time, and she got married, and she and her husband, they went to the hotel after the wedding, and she said,
I want you to know she said that that I'm a virgin and and so I just want you to know that he said you've been married three times before. Yeah. She said, Well, she says, see now the first man I married, he was very sweet man, but he wasn't that interested in women, and that was okay. I understood. He just got married for appearances. So we're married for a while, and then I married again. And the second man I married, he'd suffered a terrible injury, and I understood that, and he was a nice man. And we were together for a while, and then the third man I married, he was a Democrat, and he just sat on the side of the bed and told me how wonderful it was going to be. You and with that, they drained their beer glasses and they went home.
The night was over. That was all the joy there would be for them that night. And Wally turned out, the lights turned off the TV. 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.
Halloween, conversation with the vampire who lives below the stage. Radio gave us car phones. Checking outside for trick or treaters. LRT: If Paul Guiguin had gone to Minnesota, invented the shopping mall. Domenic Argento. Halloween is an American holiday. Everything has tamper-proof plastic seals. Sitting in a silent house with a mad ax murderer in the cellar. What if Dale Evans had married someone else.