Freeland Barbour, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Richard Dworsky, Garrison Keillor, Masked Folksinger. Glenn Ohrlin, Spaelimennirir,
I Heard The Birds Singing ( Greg Brown , Richard Dworsky ) Cold Fall Rain ( Greg Brown , Richard Dworsky ) Nate’s Blues ( Greg Brown , Garrison Keillor , Butch Thompson Trio ) Gotta Travel On ( Greg Brown , Richard Dworsky , Garrison Keillor ) Long Black Veil ( Greg Brown , Garrison Keillor ) Angelitos ( Greg Brown ) Fitzgerald Blues ( Garrison Keillor ) The Linden Tree ( Garrison Keillor ) Going down the valley ( Garrison Keillor ) The May (Spaelimennirir ) Swedish Schottische (Spaelimennirir ) Humby ( Freeland Barbour ) Jake and Roney ( Glenn Ohrlin ) Reincarnation ( Glenn Ohrlin ) La Sanha ( Glenn Ohrlin ) The Lonesome Valley (Masked Folksinger ) Put Your Little Foot ( Garrison Keillor , Spaelimennirir ) Maivalsurin (Spaelimennirir ) Rundt på gulvet (Spaelimennirir ) Schottis från Norrbotten (Spaelimennirir ) Pindsvine-Reinlender (Spaelimennirir )
Snowbelt Wine The Dylan Brothers (Greg Brown, Rich Dworsky)
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Well, it's been a quiet week in my hometown, Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It's been cold, wet, cloudy, miserable. Up there, it's been awful, people. I wish I could tell you. My little town is kind of plain to begin with, you know. So when it gets cold and wet and dim, dark, and damp here in some of these dismal fall days, my little town loses... a lot of the charm that it did not have to begin with. And it becomes kind of depressing. So that a lot of storytellers I believe if they were to take a look at my little town, they would start inventing some story about a couple from California driving through the Midwest on a vacation trip, and they got four kids in the back seat, and they're coming up over the hill past the grain elevators around the bend there by the lake and up into the town.
And the dad says, look, kids, come on, look out the window. Here's a little town. Here's a little town like what I came from and your mom came from. They slow down, they ease into the town. It's a beautiful little town. Kind of grim on a dark day, but you can see how it might be beautiful sometimes. They're all looking out the window as they drive slowly into town. And then the mother notices... There's nobody on the streets. Little tricycles lying in the front yards behind the white picket fences, rusting in the front yards. A couple doors open, houses behind porches as they drive slowly by. The windshield wipers going, shoop, shoop, shoop. Jeff, she says, turn around. Something's wrong. No, he says, it's homecoming or something. They're all downtown, but they drive through downtown. There's nobody there on the streets. And he turns right and right there in the middle of the street is what they knew would be there all along as a tall man in bib overalls with a pitchfork in one hand and an axe in the other coming straight for him. And they look in his eyes, and he's got no eyeballs. His eyeballs are empty, and there's yellow stuff coming down, and his face is coming apart, and big chunks of his face are falling off, and big clods of dirt on his clothes as he comes after them, making a... It's a kind of a story that a lot of storytellers would tell you after two weeks of what we've had in Minnesota recently. And it's a story that I would enjoy telling if it weren't for the fact that I, for better or for worse, am a storyteller who is held by strict standards of factual truth so that... These sort of illustrative or moral stories are really beyond me.
I have tried to tell them, but my mouth would dry up if I lied to you. My tongue would stick to the roof of my mouth, and you would just hear kind of a soft, kind of a choking sound if I were to tell you a lie, and I want you to remember that. There was... a number of strange cars, however, that came through Lake Wobegon this last week for about four days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. On account of the state highway, there was a culvert that washed out from the rain, and the highway was closed for repairs, and there was an eight-mile detour through Lake Wobegon, first time in a long time this ever happened. So that suddenly, on Tuesday morning, people got up and noticed there was a stream of cars and trucks and buses coming through town, where, of course, business has been rather quiet for a long time. So about Wednesday, people got interested in this, businessmen.
Clarence Bunsen stood in the showroom of Bunsen Motors, kind of imagining if he stood there and smiled. Somebody might drive in. from this line of cars going by, trailers, campers, big campers, trucks, cars, station wagons, families looking out, little kids. He thought maybe somebody would pull in and say, I'm looking for a 1986 Pinto two-door kind of a dark puke green, one like what you've got right here in your showroom. Drive it away, but nobody did. Scoglans Five and Dime put up a sign for a fall clearance, 10% off on all items, but nobody much stock. 10% is nothing nowadays. I guess Scoglans didn't know that. Everything is at least 10% reduced. Even list price is 10% down from regular. Clifford at the Mercantile put up a sign on Thursday. saying, fall eyewear, slashed in half, big savings. But it was a strange sign. I don't know why he said eyewear, why he didn't say just glasses. Fall eyewear.
It sounds like little skirts maybe would attach to your eyebrows or something. Fall eyewear. And to use the word I in the same sign with the verb slashed in half. People don't stop, look for a parking space when they see I and slashed in half. They press their foot on the gas a little bit. They're thinking about the guy in the bib overalls with the pitchfork and the axe. The guy goes... So nobody much stopped... The town never got much business from this detour. You see people go by. You could see what they were saying to each other. People go by saying, where is this? I don't know. I've got no idea. Do you want to stop for coffee? Yeah, but not here. I don't see how people can live in a town like this. I just don't understand how you can live in a place, look at this, like this. How far is it to Minneapolis? I don't know. You want to stop for coffee later? No, let's keep going.
So they never got much business of it. About Thursday, Mayor Clint Bunsen sent Bud out to fix the welcome to Lake Wobegon gateway to central Minnesota sign. on the south end of town, which the welcome had worn out so that the sign had fallen down into a vertical configuration, but went out there and unbolted it on that end and she fell off and she busted in three pieces. Put them in the pickup, took them back to town, piled them up in back of the town hall and there it sits, the town sign. Probably use it to firewood or something so there's my little town sitting up there in the rain unlabeled unlisted on no maps and now without even a welcome to Lake Wobegon gateway to central Minnesota sign I tell you if it weren't for the fact that I was brought up there and was brought up to tell the truth you people wouldn't know that that place even existed And some of you may think that it doesn't. But then Lake Wobegon does not have proof of your existence either. And never asked for any until now. It was chilly week. It was cold, except for Tuesday morning.
Sun came out just very briefly. The rest of the week was cold, dismal, and dark. Some trees, some maple trees, turned yellow kind of prematurely. They panicked, got overexcited. Thought it was time to kind of depress Mr. Berge, who went into the sidetrack tap, sat in there complaining to Wally. Mr. Berge says, geez, he said, I thought it was supposed to get warmer. They said it was going to get warmer. It's not supposed to be cold like this. Wally said, Mr. Berge, he says, it's not going to be getting warmer for a long time. It's going to be getting colder right on now through the end of the year and beyond it. This is fall. Winter comes next. You could look it up. But Wally sits there in the dark in the sidetracked tap all day, day after day. So you see he's removed from the outside world.
He can afford to be a realist. Sitting in there like a bear in a cave. A little cave with the yellow and the blue and the green beer signs hanging on the side of the cave and the bubble lights going up and down. Sitting back in there with the older bears kind of leaning up against the bar drinking their beers. murmuring, complaining, kind of hibernating in there. He can afford to be a realist. But if you get outside during the day, especially on a day like Tuesday, then you know how fall can raise your hopes. When it is warm, but with a little chill to it. When it is, not warm, when it is bright and a little cool in the air and a little damp in the air all at the same time. Bright, damp, chill. And you walk down Elm Street in my little town. majestic fall you can believe as you walk along that the world has now achieved a state of perfection which God in his grace will keep for us for all time that this green little place has been removed from the ravages of time and placed outside time that it will always be like this, sunny, the sun coming down through the great canopy of trees over the street as you walk along between the houses of all the people you know. You can imagine that it will always be like this for the rest of the time and that all the people whom we love will never die but always be as they are now. You can believe in immortality on a morning like Tuesday and then Tuesday afternoon comes around and it gets dark and rainy again and you wonder if there is a God if there is a God and if perhaps this world that we think is immense is actually very tiny and unimportant in the scheme of things if this entire lovely universe
The entire cosmos is just a seed in an apple hanging from a tree. In some other reality, our entire universe, all that we know is in this tiny black seed. And the great truth that science is grasping for is the fact that we are nothing. Because in that other reality, one second of their time is a million years to us, and we are nothing. And the great truth that science is grasping is that our apple has already fallen. the little seed that is us fell one second ago and in one one millionth of a second it will hit the ground and lie there split apart and rot And a bear will come along and eat it. Everything. The Judeo-Christian tradition and Western civilization, the Renaissance, democracy, art, music, sweet corn, everything that is most wonderful will all disappear into that black maw. and we will cease to exist and nobody will care. That is how you can feel on an afternoon like Tuesday afternoon.
Go from faith in an eternity of bliss by the grace of a loving God, go from that to atheistic nihilism and despair in the space of four hours in a town of under 2,000 population is quite a shift, but that's what fall is like. It raises your hopes and then it lets you down. It was this time of year when I was young many years ago When I told myself, I told myself, this year I'm really going to do well in physics. I'm going to read the text. I'm going to study it. I'm going to ask for help if I need help. I'm going to study physics. I'm going to listen carefully in class. I'm going to take good notes. I'm going to work on things as we go along and not fall behind. I'm going to be good in physics this year and apply myself and be successful in this course, which is an important thing to know. So that when he calls on me in class, I will raise my hand, I will stand up, and I will deliver the correct answer in a loud, clear voice. And maybe not just the correct answer, but a brilliant answer. An answer that amazingly sheds new light on some dark corner of physics. From the mouths of babes. Brilliance.
Not just a correct answer, but a genius. Seventeen-year-old rural Minnesota boy discovers new theorem of light that proves doctrine of justification by faith. Entire New Testament shown in mathematical terms by boy formerly thought of as slow learner. I thought that about this time of year some sunny Tuesday morning 25 years ago and then and then weeks passed and I couldn't figure it out and I didn't know anything and I sat in the back of the class with my head down trying not to be noticed and I was afraid that he would call on me and he did call on me and I had to walk the long walk in that hot dry room to the front of the class and stand there and look at the problem numbers letters on the blackboard Look at it. This awful silence. Praying God, take the chalk in my hand. Write the answer. And if you won't do that, let the blackboard fall on me and kill me. Long pause. And then his voice from behind me, from the back of the room. Well, well, we took this up last week, Mr. Keeler. You were here, as I recall. You seemed to be awake. Your eyes were open. The class laughing. Teachers aren't supposed to make fun of kids. They're supposed to teach kids. What kind of man is this?
Why does he hate me? And I turned around, and there he was, and his eyes were empty. He had no... Eyeballs in his head, there was a kind of a yellowish fluid that dripped down his cheeks. Big chunks of his face were falling off as he came slowly towards me. I grabbed for the pointer. Well, I didn't really. It was this time of year when I was young, when I was elected president of the Young People's Bible Study Group, and I had high hopes then. It was an honor, even though in the sanctified brethren of Lake Wobegon there were only five of us in young people's Bible study group, including Mel, who was 34 years old, an old person to me at the time, still to be president. It was an honor. And I thought to myself, I said, this year I'm going to make something, a Bible study group on Sunday mornings. And I'm going to study these lessons early in the week. Look at the chapter. meditate on it so that we really get into Scripture and mine these deep nuggets of the Lord's truth and His will for our lives, and we're going to mimeograph outlines, and we're going to have a good year in Bible study group. And then it was the Saturday before the first Sunday I was supposed to lead the discussion of the first epistle to Timothy, and I had been busy, and then I was going to do it on Saturday night, and then At the last minute I got this date with a girl whom I had never met before so my hopes were high and I was looking forward to this and I didn't work on the first epistle to Timothy because I was out with her on Saturday night, so it was not until Sunday morning when I really got to look at the first chapter of Paul's epistle to Timothy, and I had to meditate on it kind of fast in the car on the way to church, which is only five blocks in Lake Wobegon, and there are no stop signs. So suddenly there we were sitting around in a circle, the five of us, me, the president, about to lead the discussion on Timothy.
And Mel stood up first and to give to open with prayer, stood up right next to me. And I had my eyes half open, was squinting down at the first chapter and the warning against false doctrine, kind of figuring out how I could develop this. in sort of an interesting way that would make it seem as if I'd studied it all week and was working on it, when all of a sudden, standing next to me, Mel, his voice, he started praying this strange prayer. He said, Lord, it's on my heart this morning to bring before thee the throne of grace, the one who is among us this morning, Who has slipped aside from the path of thy truth? And who has fallen among worldly companions? And who has in pursuit of carnal pleasures of this world? Lord, we... Bring him before the throne of grace this morning. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, supposed to lead the discussion, me, the president of the Young People's Bible Study Group, and he was undermining my credibility here by praying for me as a backslider in front of everybody. I was clear who he was talking about, who was in pursuit of carnal pleasures. I mean, he wasn't talking about himself, and Chuck and Bonnie, they were married, so whatever carnal pleasures they were after, they were entitled to. And that left me and my cousin Roy, and Roy didn't even have a driver's license. He was talking about me. I might have been in pursuit of carnal pleasure, folks, but if you're unsuccessful, don't you get points for that? You get credit for that?
She was a girl who took my mind right off sensual pleasures from shortly after the moment we finished our third vodka sour sitting in my dad's car up there by the gravel pit. And she started to make a kind of a moaning noise. And she said, oh, no. She reached for the door handle and it came off in her hand and I said, what's wrong? I said, what's wrong? And she said, oh no. And she turned toward me. And it was shortly after she turned toward me that she kind of ruined the evening and my good brown sport coat. So that's what happened in the pursuit of carnal pleasure. But here he was praying for me, holding me up as a backslider in front of these people. Lord, we ask thy guidance and thy mercy on one who's in our midst. And I looked up and his eyes were not closed. His eyes were empty. That was it.
That's what fall is like. It was this time of year. I'll close on this. Unless I think of something else. It was this time of year that the only person from Lake Wobegon ever to become a movie star returned to our town. Barb Diener, known as Marnie Montaigne, formerly Barb Diener, came back to town. And we kind of combined Homecoming and Halloween in her honor to make a big... Civic celebration in honor of a girl gone away and made good. She came back. Her movie was shown at the Knights in the Gardens of Spain Theater, formerly the Alhambra, formerly the Morocco. And Bernie, in her honor, fixed up the magic lantern that cast the images of clouds, clouds moving across the ceiling of our old movie theater. And he got up on a stepladder and he replaced 325 tiny light bulbs to make the stars in the blue ceiling of our old theater. All in honor of... of Marnie Montaigne, the former Barb Diener, come back to town in a black dress and red shoes. She kind of swept around town on her day in her honor. And she said, oh, hi, it's so good to see you, she said to people, kind of looking them straight in the forehead and not calling them by name, you know, because she didn't remember them. But we remembered her. She was unhappy in town. Barb Diener was. Tried a lot of different things. Didn't work out for her. Finally went out to Sonoma, California in 1972 and joined a commune out there that made belts out of feathers.
And she changed her name to Starflower Moonbright and hooked up with a guy named Third World Anderson. And they went to L.A. together, and he wanted to get a recording contract to put out his songs, which were kind of like humming, in a way. He called them breathing songs. This was the early 70s, kids. It was a different time then. They were about 30, 35, 40 minutes in length, each of them. And he was able to stand on a stage and perform a lot more of them in one evening than any audience would want to hear if it had a free choice. So she hooked up with him, and then she was part of a theater troupe called You, which didn't put on plays so much as it stood on stage and sort of confronted audiences with their own hypocrisies. And... Then suddenly she was in commercials and her name was Marnie Montaigne. And one night in 1975, everybody in town gathered around their TV sets to watch her in a national commercial for Papa's Popcorn. She went by kind of quick. She was dressed up as a kernel of popcorn and you had to be watching the screen because she popped fast.
But there she was, Marnie Montaigne, formerly Barb Diener, of us, a big deal and doing well. So she came back a few years later with her movie, and the theater was packed. Everybody came out. The Hand Under the Bed, it was called. She was not the star of it. She was not in the title role, either title role. She was in the role of the motel clerk who in the first reel of the movie, On the Dark and Stormy Night, when the couple from California came to this deserted motel, and said, please, we see the no vacancy sign out front, but please, isn't there somewhere you could put up our family, our four kids and us? Please, we have nowhere else to go. And it was Barb Diener who played the part of the clerk who looked up and said, well, of course, there's cabin eight. We haven't used it for 13 years. ever since the night that, yes, it was on this night 13 years ago. Fine, they said, we'll take that. That was her part. That's all she did. Bernie stopped the movie and ran it back so we could see it a few more times. That was Barb's part in the movie. Then she stood up.
He stopped the movie after we'd seen it three, four times, kind of appreciating the nuance of it. And she stood up and gave a little speech about how what seemed so simple on the screen was really very complicated to do and how friendly the director was and how he wanted her in his next picture. And it would be... a bigger part and it was so wonderful to come back to town and what a great honor and she had to leave now she was sorry but she had to catch a plane and thanks so much and goodbye and we all stood up in the theater and gave her a standing ovation and she left well we didn't quite know what to do then it was early in the film there was still the couple from California and their four children So he turned on the movie, turned on the lights. Clouds moved across the ceiling. The little stars twinkled in the blue sky. And we watched the rest of the hand under the bed. But it wasn't so interesting without Barb. Like her or not, she's one of ours. We kind of lost interest in the movie. People were killed and stuff, you know. People were dying left and right. I mean, they were being slaughtered, choked, hacked to pieces.
But we knew that she wouldn't come back on the screen. So people kind of left one by one. I stayed. I was in the front row. I stayed until towards the end. And I got up and left. There was a guy in the movie... He had no eyes. He had a pitchfork and, you know. So I left. I left. Turned around and went up the aisle. The theater was about empty, except for just a few young people sitting in the back. Frightened, I guess. Too frightened to leave. just trying to comfort each other as best they could. As the clouds moved across the sky and the little stars twinkled on the ceiling over our green little place. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above all.
The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and St. Paul. Nate's Clothing Store in St. Paul is closing, problem with the seats in the World Theater.
John L (2025-10-12): The few Spaelimennirir appearances were all magical to me. The tune identified as The May here, a May waltz, still brings tears to my eyes after all these years, as do many of their tunes.
1987-03-28 1987-10-10
1986.09.16 Star Tribune / Berto says this was rebroadcast on October 10, 1987.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, John Lippincott