Butch Thompson Trio, Lost World String Band, Joel Mabus. Robin & Linda Williams, Sally Rogers,
Clouds of Joy (Butch Thompson Trio ) Home (When Shadows Fall) (Butch Thompson Trio )
[undocumented]
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. I know as I'll come out here and talk a great deal about it. It's been about that quiet. You'll probably find similar things going on wherever you live, as I might tell you about in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown. But I'll tell you what's on my heart to talk about is the quietness up at the high school, up on the hill in Lake Wobegon, where those children are about to graduate and go out into the world. I think about them, and I know that they think about it. Just a couple more weeks here, the lines, the mooring lines are going to be cast loose, and all those kids as leaders of tomorrow are going to have to go out and find jobs, find something to do with their lives. They're not quite sure what. The band has been rehearsing pomp and circumstance down in the cafeteria now all week, all 13 of them in the marching band there, with a lot of wrong notes and with a lot of hesitation to it, which is sort of the way the seniors feel about it anyway, but with a lot of feeling in it. I'm not sure that Sir Edward Elgar realized what he wrote when he wrote pomp and circumstance. He probably thought it had to do with empire and with dominion and victory and glory, but to a lot of kids who are looking forward to something they don't know what, it represents confusion and doubt and uncertainty and a certain sadness because all of them, most all of them, will be leaving Lake Wobegon when they graduate. There's nothing for them there unless they want to be comedians like me. Every time I mention Lake Wobegon, it gets a laugh, but you know when you're 17 and 18 years old, you don't want to laugh when you tell people where you're from. You want to be from someplace distinguished, you know, Minneapolis or Chicago or Lansing or someplace people stand up and respect. So they will be heading off down the road. In fact, one of them is coming out to East Lansing. The Kruger boy, the second boy after Arnold, Larry Kruger's, Wally and Evelyn's boy. He got a work scholarship at Michigan State. That's another term for a low-paying job, as I recall. But he's going to come out in the fall is his plan, and he is hoping to get a football scholarship at Michigan State, though I'm not so sure about that. I wouldn't count on it if I were him. He was the star quarterback for the Lake Wobegon Lenards last fall and set all sorts of new scoring records. But when you move into the Big Ten from a town like Lake Wobegon, you may discover that you're not as good as you were in Lake Wobegon, when you can't pass very well and you can't run all that well. They might take a look at you as a deep safety, or you might get to be student manager, or you might just get to be a good dishwasher and work your way through college. It's a question that he asks and that I think a lot of kids in Lake Wobegon and everywhere else, but especially in that town, ask when they come to that age: - Am I any good? - Am I good? - I wrote in high school and my English teacher says I've got talent at writing, but do I really? - Am I any good at that? - I'm president of my chemistry club, but could I really do that for a living? - Am I any good? - I do well in speech class. I'm kind of interested in a career in radio broadcasting. Would I be good at that? Well, yes, you probably would be at that. Anybody who listens to this show knows that that doesn't take an awful lot, you know, to be an announcer. But it's such a heartbreaking question that you never know how to answer it. My boy is 12 years old, and he wonders that. Come to a point, you know, where it's not where the love of your parents isn't quite enough, and we do love him, but it comes a point where you wonder if you're any good at something. The thing that hewants to be good at is magic tricks, which he buys at Scoglin's Five and Dime, and he does the card tricks where you pull the... pull the card out and he doesn't look at it and then you put it back in the deck and he shuffles it and he comes up with your card. He's bought that one and he's bought the trick where you have the ropes that are in little pieces and you work them around in your hand and then you pull it out and it's all one piece. And disappearing coin tricks and all the rest of it. And he does these tricks for the family and we're just all a terrific audience, you know, and we say, oh, that's amazing. Oh, that's good. Thirty times wasn't enough to see that trick. Oh, show us that again. And we clap and we say, oh, boy, you're good at that. But then he asks me afterward, am I any good at magic? Could I really do that for an audience? Well, I don't know. I wouldn't count on it. I don't know if they'd go for those here in Lansing. Of course, they've been wrong in the past, but I wouldn't lean on it too heavily. I'd work on it for a few more years and work on a couple, two, three other things on the side, like I did, you know. I didn't put all my marbles on radio broadcasting. I have skills as a parking lot attendant as well. And I am a pretty good janitor. I have done that before. And dishwashing I am good at. And I can type 45 words a minute. So that, you know, if I ever had to, I could always do that again. And that's important to have something to fall back on. Now performing for an audience like this one in Lansing is sort of like performing for your own relatives in a way. You just don't ever want to count on it being quite as easy as this. But if you really must know the answer, the question is yes, you are good. You're awfully good. You're terrific. Absolutely. And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all those children are above average. Every single one of them.
Green Bay Press Gazette May 3 1981 Lansing State Journal May 9 1981
1981.05.09 Lansing State Journal / 1981.05.09 Chicago Tribune The Butch Thomspon Trio - Live From St Paul (liner notes)
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl