Roy Blount Jr, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Kate MacKenzie, Peter Ostroushko. Robin and Linda Williams,
The Weight ( Greg Brown ) My Name is Written on David's Line ( Kate MacKenzie ) Poem About Ballet ( Roy Blount Jr ) Rockin' Roll out on the Rural Route (Robin and Linda Williams ) I Wish I Were ( Greg Brown , Robin and Linda Williams , Peter Ostroushko ) Billy the Goat ( Greg Brown , Robin and Linda Williams , Peter Ostroushko ) Collard Greens ( Roy Blount Jr , Robin and Linda Williams , Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko ) Be Kind to Your Parents ( Greg Brown ) Jerusee My Me (Robin and Linda Williams ) Indicate the Way ( Greg Brown , Robin and Linda Williams , Peter Ostroushko , Roy Blount Jr ) I Went to Cincinatti ( Greg Brown , Robin and Linda Williams , Peter Ostroushko ) In the Good Old Steamboat Days ( Greg Brown ) Shovel ( Peter Ostroushko , Greg Brown ) Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral ( Greg Brown , Robin and Linda Williams )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Bill Benson professional litter box cleaner.) Essence De Plue (Soap for the delicate parts of your wrist and the inside of your arms.) Fearmonger's Shop (Find your seat in a theater.) Ingqvist, Judy Krebsbach, Curtis Lake Wobegon Merchants (Including the Chatterbox Cafe, where Dorothy presides, the place to go, that when you go there, you feel like you've been there before, home of that big hot beef sandwich, home of 100 casseroles you've seldom seen outside of church and home of the famous Bottomless cup of coffee, to judge by how much of it is spilled there on the counters. Also brought to you by the Sidetrack Tap where Wally and Evelyn wait to welcome you. The dim little place there on Main Street. Home of the famous 9-foot, count them nine feet on that pool table there with a slight westward drift and the real leather pockets, so a scratch is a scratch at the Side Track. Home too of the Skoglund’s 5 and Dime where if you can't find it at Ralphs you might be able to find it at Skoglund's Including those Minnesota Twins pennants that say Western Division Champs 1969, the supply is limited. So pick up yours today. They are marked down because they must go. ) Pastor Ingqvist Tollefsen, Diane
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. They got a foot of snow. This weekend it was Ash Wednesday, so it was kind of quiet. Thoughtful. Weak, sobering. As it is every year. As Father Emil says, when he puts the smudge of ash on your forehead. Up at Our Lady Church, "Remember, man that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return". In the words that the Lord used when Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden, which everybody's heard many times, but somehow when somebody looks you right in the eye and it's Father Emil and he says it always comes as a shock every year. You think me? wait a minute. Don't get so personal! . And he does make an awfully big smudge too. People don't appreciate it, I tell you when his friend Father Frank from the Las Vegas diocese filled in for Ash Wednesday one year, they made kind of a delicate ash mark up there, kind of like mascara in a way. But Father Emil puts his thumb in and sloshes it all around on you. So that even though you're not supposed to wash it off some. People do. Or don't care to be seen around town like that. It looks like you've been running. Around in the dirt. They weren't brought up to look like that. I believed back when I was a very small child. I think till about second grade, that Adam and Eve lived in Lake Wobegon. And the Lord said that to them, up behind the hill. Up behind the school. Where I thought that the Garden of Eden was located. Which I got into my head. Because the hill is named Adams Hill after an old cipher and even though there aren't any apple trees up there, there are snakes and. So I I believe that that they were kicked out of Lake Wobegon and sent off someplace else. I don't know where in North Dakota, Minneapolis, someplace. And that we were allowed by God to come back because we were nice. As I say, I was very small when I believed that. Some people in Minnesota still do believe that in some form or another, but I only believed it up until about the 2nd grade when I made the mistake of telling my cousin Martha. About it who was older than me and bigger and stronger? And who told me that was the dumbest thing she ever heard! She got hold of me and she got me down on the ground. And she gave me a choice. She said. You admit that's a lie, or else you're going to eat dirt. You're going to eat a handful of dirt. And I said it's true. I think it's true. Hello. And I would have stuck by it if I had. I got to choose. The handful of dirt I would eat, but we were out in the playground behind the swings and I knew something about that dirt out there. So I said, all right, it's a. Lie, I said. I made it up. So then she just rubbed the dirt in my face. My cousin Martha I met some people like her since then. I met one a few years ago at the IRS. We're reminded of her. I'd gone in there to, Well, I was under some pressure at the time. I went and told him that I thought the tax laws of our country were basically unfair because they forced everybody to be an accountant. And some of us are not accountants, material things don't matter that much to us because I am an artist and art is my life, not money. Art is my life, and so everything in a sense that I spend money on is a business expense because it all goes toward Living. He said he was glad that I did not value material things very highly. I would have less of them to value. In the near future. He was nice about it, but basically, rubbing dirt in my face is what he did. Though it's hard to be an artist and to believe in the in life of art as they're discovering in Lake Wobegon now. Especially, Mr. Burnham, the new English teacher is in his first year teaching school fresh out of college, discovered after he arrived in the fall that this year would also be his debut as a stage director. He would direct the senior class play in the spring, which had now almost, one of a number of duties that he didn't know about until he arrived. Like taking tickets at basketball and football games, he didn't know that was part of the teaching profession either, He never directed a play before, so as he thought about it over Christmas break, he decided that he would go beyond the usual senior class plays ,Our Town and The Man Who Came to Dinner and the Importance of Being Earnest. All of those. And he would do Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire which he had written a term paper on his senior year and teachers college, which got an A. And so he felt that he knew the major themes and the motifs, and that worked pretty well. But there are a lot of people in town who never had written a term paper about A Streetcar Named Desire, never had read it. Only knew that Tennessee Williams wrote it, that Marlon Brando had been in it, that the word desire was in the title, and that was enough for them. I didn't need to know anymore. So they went up and appeared in a body at a school board meeting on a Tuesday night back in January. It was kind of a brief, loud meeting as those meetings always are. Somehow. People are pretty well satisfied just to sit for a long time in a hot little room and stand up and make a long speech about the importance of taking a stand on this now. And they don't care all that much about the outcome. So the Pro Streetcar forces won the day. The School Board voted to study it, you know, and drop guidelines for the future. It was some kind of victory, but Mr. Burnham, the English teacher, stood up at that school board meeting and talked about A Streetcar Named Desire as a great work of art. Which, now that the play has been in rehearsal for a few weeks, he's starting to regret that he made that sort of claim It as a work of art on paper, but in rehearsal, it's kind of a mess. Actors are still wandering around the stage, holding their scripts, bumping into each other. And gets worse and worse as the weeks go by, even though he stands there and he tells them what this play is about. He said an allusion to this play is about illusion. Versus reality. You got your, you got your mutability of illusion. Is a major theme of the illusion of mutability, one of both of them actually. Theme. In this play, you've got your illusions of grandeur and southern decadence and you got the brute life force clashing here. It's right there in front of you people. Let's do it again now. And they do it again and they get quieter and quieter. Diane Tollefson as Blanche Dubois. I don't know Diane's idea of that. You know, if you go on stage, you're kind of supposed to be quirky and cheerful and like you are in front of company. And have good posture and smile. So when she comes on and says. I've always depended on the kindness of strangers. It kind of makes his teeth great. And Curtis Krebsbach as Stanley Kowalski. I'll tell you when Blanche refers to Stanley. As an animal looking at Curtis, you kind of wonder which animal she's referring to. A smaller animal. A chipmunk, man. And the more he tells them about what this play means. The worse they get. Until now, I think all the illusions are in the mind of the director and on stage. It is sort of a play within a play. As all senior class plays tend to be. It's a play about young people who are trying very hard to be inconspicuous. And who feels like dirt? And would just like it to be over as soon as possible and sometime around Easter, it will be. They celebrated Ash Wednesday up to. Lake Wobegon Lutheran, also with an evening service, though it was a close call. Pastor Enqvist was locked in the bathroom at home. For a good part of the day, thank goodness they finally got him out of there. Actually, he wasn't locked in,.the bathroom door was stuck. The Invquist the cat named Molly. She has a habit of whenever anybody goes in the bathroom and closes the door, she will scratch at the carpet just outside the door. Lifting it up, you see. So when you hear her do that, you have to run to the door and kick it and scare her away. But Pastor Inqvist wasn't able to run. To the door right then. And so she got hold of that carpet with her front claws, and she lifted it up so that when he went to try and open the door, it just pushed against the carpet and forced it farther up. And he could only open it about a half inch. Now, ordinarily, his wife would have been home. It was about in the morning of a Wednesday. But she wasn't on account they had had an argument after breakfast in which he told her that his sermons had been suffering because he got no peace and quiet around the house. He said I need time alone, he said. He said I I can't hear myself think sometimes in this House, for all the distractions said, if I just had a few hours by myself. So she put on her coat and took the car and left and that was when he got stuck in the bathroom. Nobody was there, he. Well, he started to panic and he started to do it right away. Started to think about maybe taking the scrub brush and bashing out the lower panel in the door so he got his hand down there and flattened the carpet out. And he broke the handle on that. He thought about his sermon from last Sunday about how we need to take more time to be with the Lord. More quiet time. He thought about the fact that the door hinges are on the outside of the bathroom door. He thought about the window which is awfully small and which he could only open up a little bit... in which he couldn't really get through, and if he had been able to get through, it's a long way down from the 2nd floor. But he opened it a crack and he opened the storm window a little bit. And then it occurred to him that he wasn't sure. That he could yell. Because you've been a minister for years. His voice has kind of developed in a pastoral direction. Which in the Lutheran Church does not include hollering. OK. He said. Help. Help. And then. He thought he'd better do something so that he would not panic and he ran hot water in the tub. And he got in it. And he kept running it hotter, and he sat in there and he started to sing hymns to calm himself down a little bit. And he tried to see how many hymns he knew by. Heart. Awarding himself points for the first verse. Five points for a Chorus points for the second verse. points for the third verse and keeping score using bristles off the scrub brush. The blue bristles stood for points. The red bristle stood for and the white bristles stood for and he was up to a score of points. When he heard her come in downstairs, he knocked on the door. And she came upstairs. She said the carpet was stuck. He said. I know that. And she opened the door. And there was a wet, naked Lutheran who was awfully glad to see her. Nailed down the carpet, went down, had some lunch, and felt great the rest of the day. I'll tell you something like that. Just puts a shine on the rest of your day and maybe even your week, went off and did the Ash Wednesday service never even preparing a sermon. And I don't know what he preached about. But I'm sure that whatever it was, it came from the bottom of his heart. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong. All the men are good-looking. All the children are above average.
Argus Leader Mar 16 1984 Star Tribune Mar 15 1984
1984.03.04 Rock Island Argus
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl