Briar Hoppers, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Mando Boys. Peter Ostroushko, Bill Staines,
George Washington March (Mando Boys ) Heart of the voyager (Mando Boys ) Nola (Mando Boys ) Slow city ( Greg Brown ) Wait till the sun shines (Briar Hoppers ) Back to old smokey mountain (Briar Hoppers ) When My Blue moon turns to gold again (Briar Hoppers ) Big stomp rag (Briar Hoppers ) Silver-haired Daddy of Mine (Briar Hoppers ) The prisoner's song (Briar Hoppers ) Blue mesa (Briar Hoppers ) Slewfoot (Briar Hoppers ) Ain't smoking ( Garrison Keillor ) Little boxes ( Bill Staines ) The happy yodeler ( Bill Staines ) Mississippi Sawyer ( Bill Staines ) Rooty toot toot for the moon ( Bill Staines , Greg Brown )
Airline Passenger Scholastic Aptitude Test Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Happening 1985 - A Return to the 60s Minnesota Forest Fuel Products Minnesota Language Systems Perpetual Phone Answering Service PHC Sweepstakes Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobbega in my hometown. We've got a pile of snow here on Sunday and Monday. You probably already heard about that, especially if you live here. Somebody's probably told you by now there was a lot of snow that fell. But even if you live down to the south, live down in Florida, live out on a beach somewhere, as they all do down there, you know, live in idyllic splendor, and never read a newspaper down in Florida. You probably still have heard about it, even if you don't read the paper even, except maybe for the Bolivian newspapers that they wrap around the large plastic bags with the white stuff that comes in there to your place in Florida that Tex and Ramon bring in on their fast boat every other Monday night to your doc, even if that's the only paper you read, probably somebody has told you by now that they got a lot of snow up in the Midwest. And you said, oh, really? Wow. Incredible. Oh, all that kind of snow. Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. They talk funny down in Florida. You ever notice how you call people down there and they talk just like that. They talk real slow and they talk funny. It's a very vague state down there in Florida because there is drug dust everywhere. It's all over the state. You can't help anywhere you go in Florida. You can't help but take in a lot of it every day. It's on the mouthpieces of telephones, pay telephones, and it's on water glasses and silverware in restaurants, and it's on money. It's on money in Florida that people handle every day. Drug dust is all over it. So that you see, when we were kids, our parents said, don't put money in your mouth. You don't know where that's been. You don't know who's touched that. Down in Florida, people pull the shades and sit in their living rooms and put money in their mouths. They do that. In fact, anytime you see shades pulled in Florida, that's what they're doing in there is people sucking on money in the living room. That's the truth. And if it's not completely the truth, at least it's as true as a lot of what they say about us in Florida. and about winter, and about snow. People do not tell the truth about snow and about winter. They always have to dramatize this. Even people in the news business who have taken a truth oath, and the Hippopotamic oath, I believe it is, that they Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and those guys who are pledged to tell you, the American people, the truth, anytime snow falls in the Midwest, they have to get into words like paralyzed. And parts of the Midwest were hit hard, were struck, were ravaged by record amounts of snow. Snow is soft, you know. It falls, but it doesn't really hit hard. You hardly feel it when it falls on you. And I've never felt ravaged by a snowstorm myself personally. It... A lot of snow just falls over a considerable period of time, and it lies on the ground. And it often does not seem particularly storm-like. It just falls, and you sit in the house, and... Watch it, and it comes down. And you have a kind of a magical feeling, a trance-like feeling. After a while, that the snow is not only falling, but that you and the house are rising. And it's... It's not like being struck at all. I mean, if you went out driving like an idiot, you might strike something, but that would be your fault. That's not the fault of the snow. So if they were to go on the air and report that a whole lot of snow fell Sunday in parts of the Midwest, mesmerizing thousands of people... That would be closer to the truth than hit or struck or paralyzed. A whole lot of snow fell in the Midwest last Sunday. Hundreds of poems were written in Iowa alone. Local officials said it was impossible to estimate how many people made love on Sunday night. To me, this would be closer to the real truth of... of a big snowfall than what you got on the news. Paralyzed, for example, paralyzed. How can it be paralysis if you didn't want to go anywhere in the first place? If you're content to sit at home and watch it fall, then it's not paralysis. See, it's really very pleasant. And you sit and watch it come down. You turn on the news and hear what a disaster is happening to you. And you put some wood in the fireplace and you fix a little supper and you go to bed early and one thing leads to another and then you wake up in the morning on Monday and school is off and there's no work and you have a day off and you sit and look at it some more. There's not a lot of pain connected with that. But you see, it's a delicate subject, winter, and it's something that a lot of people don't feel very humorous about because winter is death, of course. Winter represents death, which is not English teacher talk. I mean, that's true. Winter symbolizes death because plants die. in this kind of weather. There's no getting around that. And our life depends on plant life. And so during winter, we are momentarily cut off from our source of supply, which in the Midwest is a very long moment. Fresh tomatoes you can't get here from, say, early... October until mid or late June, which is a long time to be without plant life, fresh tomatoes, which are needed to support higher forms of life like Lutherans and Catholics, fresh tomatoes are. And so when you go all of these months without any, except for the stuff which is shipped up from Texas and California, which you don't know where that's been or who has touched that, and which doesn't even look like tomatoes. It looks like something that's been strip-mined down there, which is kind of styrofoam-flavored tomatoes. Then you feel a little bit of death connected to winter, and so people feel delicate about this, and they feel exposed during the wintertime. But death, you see, is something that happens to all of us. See, we know that now. Years ago, we thought maybe some exception would be made in our case, but we see now that it is a universal experience, death is. And so, it ought to be humorous, I would think, in some way. Because comedy is about universal things that happen to everybody. Doing a live radio show is not a universal experience. You see, not everybody does that. And so what I am doing right now is not particularly humorous, as you could tell there for a while. But as I stand up here, see, I am thinking universal thoughts. I am thinking the same thing that everyone else in this theater is thinking. Each and every person here is worried that he or she is going to suddenly make a very loud vulgar noise Probably when everything is most quiet. Maybe one of those sudden unexpected hiccups that almost takes your face right off. Right out in front of everybody. Or other types of vulgar noises, which I could illustrate for you here, but... It is supper time in many homes out there, and so you will probably be making them yourself in just a little while. You worry about this, and I worry about it. All of us in this hall are thinking about this right now, knowing that oftentimes these things can come on without us realizing it, and there is no warning. And that if you try to suppress a hideous, vulgar noise of air erupting from your body, it will only make it louder and make it into a major event, a big decibel event, kind of the Mormon tabernacle choir of belches. coming right up out of your row when everything is most quiet in the hall, probably when a guy is talking about death. That's when it will happen. And people will turn and look at you in disgust and say, go do that outside if you don't mind. And the house lights will come up and Ushers will surround your row and your row monitor will point at you and say, it was her. It was her. It was the mature, attractive woman who is here with her whole family. It was her. And you'll have to get up out of your seat as the show stops and as you hear sirens off in the distance. and you'll be taken out into the lobby, and the audience, the radio audience around the country will wait for your name to be announced at the end of the show. Prairie Home Companion was produced by, technical direction by, and special sound effects by, including the incredible eruption of inflammable gases by Mrs. Agnes Minneapolis, right out there in the sixth row, stand up and take a bow, Agnes, or don't, as the case may be. This is what we think about, you and I, when we're in a group of high-class people, as we are today. We all think about it, and we think that it would be worse than death. Well, we'll see. we shall soon see. Lyle up Lake Wobegon was going through some death this last week, the death that comes to a person as a result of having smoked cigarettes for a great long time and then not smoking them, the death, the pain, and the death of withdrawal. It's something that other people seem to find easy to do, to give up cigarettes, especially after they have not done it for a long time. But Lyle was at points of death this last week sitting at the table where his family tears would come to his eyes. eating his pork chops and his Brussels sprouts. Tears run down his cheeks just from pain, wishing some bigger person would come in the room, some big dad, a 20-foot dad, would come in and put his hand on Lyle's shoulder and say, all right, Lyle, your punishment is over. You can come down now. And Lyle would say, oh, thanks, Dad. Does that mean I can smoke now? Oh, sure you can smoke, Lyle. I bought you a whole bunch of cigarettes. Lucky's, your favorites. Oh, boy, thanks, Dad. Lucky's. Knowing that there was no dad going to come in and tell him that he could do that. Almost three weeks for Lyle. How come it's still so painful? How come he's still hearing that little voice in his mind that says, I want to smoke, and that's no joke. This is your body talking to you right now, Lyle. This is your whole body talking to you. We all want to smoke. And if you don't get a cigarette in your mouth in the next 10 seconds, we're going to die. We're going to die. We know how to do it, Lyle. We're going to die on you right now. We're gonna count to ten. We wanna smoke. One, two, three. Why does this keep going on for weeks? I'll tell you why. He had a dream on Sunday night. He had a dream in which he was 21 years old. He was wearing a black tuxedo and he was standing in a gorgeous roadhouse leaning with one elbow on a polished oak bar. A bartender brought him a martini made from a special type of gin which they only make two or three quarts of a week in India, and it's flown over, and only William F. Buckley and Eve St. Loren and Lyle know about it. Standing in his black tux, drinking his martini, and listening to a big band play, I See You in My Dreams, played by men with little mustaches, playing saxophones behind band desks in dim purple light. When a beautiful woman walked up to Lyle in his dream, a woman in a black dress painted onto her body with a slit up the side to her shoulder, looked deep into Lyle's eyes and said, do you have a cigarette? And Lyle said, of course, and reached into his pocket and drew out two regulation non-filter cigarettes and gave her one and took the other for himself and drew from his pocket. his silver lighter given to him by the Royal Air Force in recognition of conspicuous bravery in the face of sure death and lit her cigarette and then his and inhaled. And thought to himself, you pig, woke up, you pig you can't smoke, slapped himself across the face and then realized there was no cigarette in his face that it was only a dream that he hadn't smoked and felt so happy and so pleased he reached over to turn on the light on the nightstand and his fingers touched a cigarette lying there. Three weeks ago that Monday night when he quit smoking, when he creamed his kid that night coming out of the bathroom, he'd looked all over the house. He couldn't find one cigarette. Now here was one on the nightstand. He picked it up. He was half asleep. He put it in his mouth. He lit it. He inhaled, and it tasted remarkable. and he smoked it all the way down and then felt as bad as he's felt in the last three weeks and forced himself to lie very still in the dark in bed on his back looking at the ceiling forced himself to lie there so he would not run screaming down the stairs tearing around the house looking for his second one and then got up very slowly out of bed and went to the bathroom and got two large towels and got them good and wet and wrung them out and walked back into the bedroom and waved them around in the air so that Mavis wouldn't be able to smell it. but then could still smell smoke and so got a can of Glade and filled up the bedroom with chemical forest. which nauseated him and he lay awake for hours in the dark feeling shame and guilt and remorse and desire for cigarettes and woke up full of pain Monday morning and put on his gray sweatpants and his jacket and his cap and his mittens and his running shoes with rubber boots over them. The town was full of snow. Lyle forced himself to go out and run to get this out of his system. The roads were full of snow so Mavis couldn't drive him out somewhere so that he could run back home. He had to run out and back and running out is the hard part for him. He decided he would run around the lake all the way, a long way. and took off running very slowly and very painfully like the world's oldest heavyweight trying to get back into shape one last time. Struggles through deep snowdrifts like running into the surf, into deep water. struggled on until he got way out to the eastern end of the lake, running around. And there, as he struggled on, panting, exhausted, running slowly, Something about him attracted two large farm dogs that ran out a driveway and came at him barking as if they were crazed and dashed up to him. He made a move at them, but they only backed up a little ways. They growled at him. He'd never heard that sound come out of a dog's throat before. Two big brown dogs. And they followed him the rest of his way, making little moves at him. He'd turn, he'd raise his arm, they'd only back off a few feet. They trailed him as their ancestors must have tracked wounded moose running through the forests. Lyle went up that hill at the eastern end of the lake, staggering with two beasts, two Fleischhunds on his trail. Didn't know if he would make it to the top up there by the Hansons and then saw a pickup truck coming over the hill. He waved for it to stop. It stopped. It was Mrs. Samuelson. He said, oh Lord, thank you for sending me a ride. She opened the door of the pickup. She said, now Brownie, now Buster, you bad dogs, bad dogs. You come and get in the truck now. And the dogs trotted over to the truck. She said to Lyle, you know they don't bite people. They would have bitten him. They would have killed him. In two more minutes they would have torn the flesh from his bones and he would have been dead. In two more minutes. That's how close it was. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.
The story of the Briar Hoppers radio program. Garrison and Butch have given up smoking