Audience, Garrison Keillor.
How Great Thou Art ( Garrison Keillor , Audience ) America ( Garrison Keillor , Audience ) Doxology ( Garrison Keillor , Audience )
[undocumented]
I did a bunch of shows up Northeast that, as usual, I’d written at the last minute, my lifelong bad habit, so I had to use a teleprompter for the first few, which is sort of miserable because I make a lot of changes on the fly and the poor prompter has to flip forward (or backward) to find where I am and I wind up winging half of it anyway, but then I hit a magical audience in Northampton and put the prompter aside and the next night in Nashua, NH, another great audience, and I did two hours each night completely by heart or off the top of my head, and that is pure happiness for someone in my line of work. You have to convince yourself that (1) order isn’t that important, spontaneity is, and the audience loves big illogical leaps, and (2) these aren’t fans, these are friends. I love this solo show I’m doing, I could do it for a year or two, adding stuff, cutting stuff, and when I go out onstage with only the first lines in mind —
Thanks for coming to see a historic man From back before social media began, Back when cigarettes were considered beneficial Before intelligence became artificial, When there were no seat belts and no airbag, You just stood on the front seat next to your dad, No metal detectors did we walk through, We just got on the plane and flew. Back then there was no internet, Google hadn’t been invented yet, There were no chat rooms for us to go to, We just sat around and talked to people we knew.
I recite poetry, tell stories, do stand-up about the pleasures of being 82, sing songs, sing some with the audience, and they are moved by how lovely they sound. They sing by heart, and in Northampton and Nashua, though it was a fairly lefty crowd, judging by my one and only reference to you-know-who, they sang “How Great Thou Art” gorgeously and “America” and the Doxology. During the first few tough shows with the leaky memory, I thought maybe I didn’t want to do this anymore, but once it gets into my head it feels like something I could keep on doing for a while. I just need to draw some younger people. They may think it’s a nostalgic show; it’s not. I’m just talking about memory and gratitude. I am deeply grateful to the people who enable me to do this, starting with my wife, Jenny, and agent Kevin Daly and producer Sam Hudson and on from there. I am the luckiest old man on the circuit.