Stevie Beck, Giddings. Lael (Pianist), Dakota Dave Hull, Leroy Larson, Jan Mara, Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble, Sally Rogers, Claudia Schmidt. Pop Wagner,
Finnish Wedding Song ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Swedish Schottische ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) When Jesus Wept ( Sally Rogers , Jan Mara , Claudia Schmidt ) May You Find Peace ( Claudia Schmidt ) Take Me As I Am ( Claudia Schmidt , Stevie Beck ) Midnight on the Water Waltz ( Stevie Beck ) The Life of the Watermill ( Jan Mara , Giddings. Lael (Pianist) ) Swedish Waltz ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Gary's Polka ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) A Woman's Got to Ride ( Claudia Schmidt , Jan Mara , Sally Rogers ) Folk Song (Abbreviated) ( Pop Wagner ) love Till You've Love It Away ( Sally Rogers , Claudia Schmidt , Jan Mara ) Guitar Interlude ( Dakota Dave Hull ) Gringo De Nango ( Jan Mara , Claudia Schmidt , Sally Rogers , Dakota Dave Hull ) These Crazy Years ( Jan Mara , Claudia Schmidt , Sally Rogers , Dakota Dave Hull ) Oh Agnes, Won't You Go With Me? ( Jan Mara , Claudia Schmidt , Sally Rogers , Dakota Dave Hull ) Meet Me Tonight in The Moonlight ( Jan Mara , Sally Rogers , Claudia Schmidt , Dakota Dave Hull ) Log Driver's Waltz ( Jan Mara , Sally Rogers , Claudia Schmidt , Dakota Dave Hull )
Art's Bait and Night of Rest Motel (Steve Beck won the "Weekend for One" sleeping in a hammock on the porch...) Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Dakota Dave Hull explains why every musical artist should have a cat.) Dorothy's Cafe (Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato Sandwich, Tuna Fish Casserole ) Powdermilk Biscuits (Story of Sandra the"right-fielder" catching a fly ball...)
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It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Porch life is in full swing, and the life of garden vegetables is too. In fact, Mr. Luger found a couple of the biggest big red tomatoes out in his garden ever seen in that town this time of year. Picked them, such beauties, he took them around town Tuesday and Wednesday. Showed them just about everybody. After which time the tomatoes were pretty well bruised and battered from all that handling and people saying, "My goodness, these sure are big ones." They'd take a hold of them, give it a squeeze. I'll tell you, if 50 people do that to a tomato, it's nothing you'd want to put on your plate. But Mr. Luger got about as much pleasure out of them as he would have had if he'd sat down and eaten them first thing. I tell you, he was proud of them. You'd have thought he'd built them himself down in his basement. You would have thought he'd invented tomatoes. I don't know who did. I don't know who invented porches. But whoever did invent the porch certainly made life a lot more pleasant in a town like Lake Wobegon, where people do not buy air conditioners. Consider them to be a sign of ill health or a sign of luxury and indulgence of the sort that brought down the Roman Empire. Roman Empire had air conditioners, you know. That's why they didn't hear the barbarians coming. They had their doors and their windows closed. But in Lake Wobegon, all their windows are open in the morning, on all night to let in the cool breezes, and then they close them and pull the shades in the afternoon. And in the evening, they sit out on the open screen porch and sit out there and wait for a little bit of a cool breeze to come drifting across. Sit out there and shoot the breeze while they wait for it. Heat is a lot harder on you, I think, if you are shut up by yourself and have more time to think about it. But if you get out on your front porch with your family and other people walking down the sidewalk see that you're there and they say hello to you and they come up and sit with you for a little bit on the porch and you offer them some iced tea and they have a little iced tea and you sit and talk for a while, it almost makes you forget how uncomfortable you are when you sit there like that. One of the topics of conversation in Lake Wobegon this past week has been something that somebody wrote me a note about here. I'm just looking for it here on the stand. Jim and Sherry from Brookfield, Wisconsin, who say hello to Uncle Gary in San Francisco and to everybody at the Brookfield branch of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. They say tell Father Emil not to build a rec center as we've just built one and it's become a millstone around the neck of the parish. People have been talking about that in Lake Wobegon. It was a few weeks ago, as reported on this newscast, Father Emil had a dream in which he believed that the Lord was telling him that he ought to do something for the children in town, and that was, Father Emil thought, to build a youth recreation center, including an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Well, other people in the parish who had not dreamed that same dream thought that was one of the dumbest ideas they'd ever heard. Ever since the town council voted to put the landfill and dump up on top of a hill, that was sort of a landmark in dumbness until they heard about Father Emil's youth recreation center. But still, Father Emil plunged ahead and he had formed an advisory committee and had started to think about raising the money for this recreation center until all of a sudden, this last week, reality just dawned on him. It just fell on him like a rock was what it did. The financial statement of the church was finished and put out and mimeographed here this last week, and he took one look at it. Fuel costs, cost of fuel oil for the church, the rectory, the nun's house, and the school came to $56,000, which was more than half of the total income for the church the whole year, more than half. Collections were down this year. Seems like people pay more for everything else, but of course when the collection plate comes around, it's easy to put in a five where you might have put in a ten before. Now and then, if you fold it right, you can put in a one. Nobody would notice, except God, of course, sees. Nobody noticed. Except God, of course, sees, but he doesn't yell at you or anything out loud, not right at the moment. And you always assume that you can ask him for forgiveness and he'll give it to you. So collections have been down. And in the meantime, the re-roofing job that was put off from last summer can't be put off any longer. It's raining in the sanctuary. Rained a couple of Sundays ago. Usher's going around with plastic buckets putting them out on the pews. It's got to be done. Money's got to be raised for that before a swimming pool. Can't do that sort of thing with volunteer labor. Re-roofing job. Though there might be volunteer labor available. No pastor would send his sheep up on a roof quite as steep as the one there at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. So the money's got to come from somewhere. And Father Emil is no longer dreaming dreams. He's facing facts. And it's kind of a dreary business. I'll tell you it's a sad thing when the facts come out like that. I do believe people can do all sorts of wonderful and amazing things if they just don't realize how difficult they are. A lot of heroic things have been done, you know, by people in utter ignorance. If they'd known what the odds were, they never would have ventured to do it. That's why so many, in fact all, of the children in Lake Wobegon are above average is because they don't know any different. There's a lot of children come through the schools there who have done amazing things in school and done brilliantly. But wouldn't have if they'd known that their IQ was such that it was impossible for them to do that. So I'm not for that necessarily, facing the facts. And thank goodness I don't need to. People sometimes ask me if Lake Wobegon is real. Wonder if it's a factual town up there in the center of Minnesota. I don't need to have to think about that. See, I don't have to bring Father Emil and Pastor Inkvest and the Bunsens and the Lugers and the Krebsbachs. I don't need to bring them down here, stand them up on this stage and interrogate them or something to prove a point. I wouldn't put them to that sort of trouble. All I have to do is just say that's the news, believe it or not. That's the news in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children, every single one of them, all the children are above average. Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, God bless it. Thank you.
Radio Romance Magazine Production ~ Hell Bent For Leather ~ The Story of Frankie & Jesse James and the Younger Girls. Starring Stevie Beck, Sally Rogers, Claudia Schmidt, Jan Mara, Dakota Dave Hull, and Jim Ed Poole (Tom Keith) Women's Formal Dress Get-together! Freeze the Arms Race Campaign! Ice & Flowers on Stage.
Chicago Tribune Jul 16 1981
John Hall claims this was recorded at the Sculpture Gardens, and rebroadcast 7/21/1984. Chris Spenker agrees. The rebroadcast monologue about Porch Eaves-Dropping from a different show...
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl