At The New Yorker: My Own Memoir
More memoirs have been written on the theme Me and the New Yorker than about the Spanish-American War or homesteading in Nebraska or train trips down South America way, which is a tribute to its legendary editors Harold Ross and William Shawn and also to the rich self-consciousness of some of their writers. Mr. Shawn was followed by Bob Gottlieb who could easily have become legendary but didn’t stick around long enough, who was followed by Tina Brown who was legendary in her own mind and didn’t need to be remembered, and then David Remnick, a good guy who will surely inspire a memoir or two someday though the magazine now is so straight compared to the mysterious bundle of eccentricities I loved so much in my youth in Anoka, Minnesota — the absence of a masthead or Table of Contents, the unsigned Talk of the Town pieces with their brisk whimsical tone, the Letter from Paris signed simply “Genet,” the horse-racing column by “Audax Minor,” squibs about Ivy League football, the Long-Winded Lady, “The Wayward Press,” the great two-initial authors (E.B., J.D., A.J., S.J., J.F.), and “Annals of Medicine,” and enormous long pieces about exotic places winding their way through columns of ads for Baccarat and Jaguar and Chanel. It was another world from mine. I only knew Mr. Shawn from his neatly penciled comments signed WS in the margins of galley proofs and a couple of awkward lunches at the Algonquin, not enough material for a book-length memoir so I made up some stuff about him and stuck it in the novel Love Me. And while I was at it, I murdered a publisher, which I’d always wanted to do.

William Shawn took a shine to me right off the bat when I arrived at the magazine back in the fall of 1969. “Glad you’re not creepy and obsessive like some of these introspective sons of bitches around here,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful of neurotics. White and Thurber drove me nuts and all those Harvard snots. You look like a midwesterner. Me, too. Chicago. Call me Bill.”

We liked to shoot pocket billiards at a little smoke-filled joint called Patsy’s and we discovered we shared a fondness for old Chicago bands like the Jazz Equestrians and the Skippers of Rhythm and we both knew the rules for a poker variant called footsie. He was an excellent bowler and arm wrestler and could toss playing cards into a top hat with accuracy at up to thirty-five feet, farther if he was drunk. He could size a man up by studying the soles of his shoes and the back of his shirt collar. He could tell if you’d recently been to church or taken an unmarried woman to the movies. He knew every species of bird and he could open any lock with a paper clip and could disassemble a typewriter and put it back together in two minutes flat. One night over a pitcher of martinis he told me his life story: it just flowed out. All about his mama and how she prayed every night that his schoolwork would be free of typographical errors. His childhood in Chi-town. His Irish dad, Sean Hanratty, a button man for the Bugs Moran gang, killed in the Arbor Day Massacre. Young William changed his name and hitchhiked to Vegas to deal blackjack for Bugsy Siegel and then a man named Crossandotti sent him to New York as Harold Ross’s stickman, back when the magazine was a hotbed of steady tipplers and wisecracking women with hinges on their heels. “The Mafia owned it, you know,” he told me.

“They owned The New Yorker?”

“What we talking about? Silk undies? Yes. The New Yorker. Still do.”

“The Mafia owns the magazine?”

He was lining up a very tricky bank shot, a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, smoke curling up under his fedora — “What does it matter? Owners are owners. Thank God it’s not the Newhouses, I say. At least the Crossandottis know they don’t know anything. All the Newhouses want is to stick their noses up the butts of the rich and famous.” And then he banked the eight-ball into the side pocket off the fourteen and picked up the money off the bar and stuffed it in his breast pocket. “Want to go again? For double?” he muttered.

“You’re so different from the William Shawn I always imagined,” I said. “James Thurber portrayed you as a flustered guy who spoke in a whisper and obsessed over commas and ate dry cornflakes for lunch and dreaded elevators and other motor vehicles.”

He chuckled. “Thurber was blind, you know. The phone rang and he’d pick up the steam iron. He needed a lot of supervision. Him and White both. White struggled to operate an ordinary stapler. A coffeemaker was beyond him. His ambition was to raise chickens. And The Years with Ross was about as true to life as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

“Sometimes I feign fluster—it’s a useful stratagem with women,” he said.

“I liked hanging out with Dorothy Parker because she could talk louder than anybody else. Glamorous woman, if you like the smell of gin. She had a voice that could crack ice. Most guys were scared shitless and of course her pal Benchley was completely in the bag, so Dotty needed a man to stand up to her. We were having lunch at the Algonquin and Kaufman was there and Marc Connelly and Harpo Marx and Joe Kennedy and Dietrich and that whole crowd, and I said to Dietrich in kraut, ‘I got a sausage for your bun, mein Schatz,’ and that got Dotty all jealous and she was running her toe up and down my calf. So I took off her shoe and pissed in it without anybody noticing and handed it to her and said, ‘Hey, you’re in luck,’ and she jumped up and yelled, ‘He pissed in my shoe!’ and they all said, ‘Aw, shuddup, you’re drunk.’ All except Dietrich. She saw the whole thing. She saw that the great thing about being a quiet little bald guy is that you can piss in a lady’s shoe at lunch and nobody will ever believe you did it. She leaned over and said, ‘I have a sentence I’d like you to invert for me.’ And we went upstairs to her suite and steamed up the windows for a while. The woman had fabulous legs and her other features were pretty good too. Hemingway was passed out on the couch. I slipped a ladyfinger in his shirt pocket. She was crazy about me, and so were some others in that Hollywood crowd, but why look back? Now I’ve got Shochine and I’ve never been happier.”

This was before he broke up with Shochine and took up with Louise Twelve Trees.

He gave me the nickname Prairie Dog and he’d ring me up around 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and holler into the phone, “Come on, Skip, let’s go get our pant-legs wet,” and off we’d go to the 79th Street Boat Basin with a sack of grub and a bottle of bourbon and boarded the Shawnee and cast off the lines and motored down the Hudson. “Ain’t this the life!” he said. “To hell with Harvard and fuck the fact-checkers, let’s have a party!” He got out of his suit and into shorts and a black muscle shirt as midtown Manhattan slid past on the port side, the cross streets like corn rows, and when 43rd passed, we yelled, “Boogers!” and hooked little fingers. Around Canal Street I hoisted the mainsail and we caught fresh wind at the Battery and flew around Governors Island and out under the Verrazano Bridge to sea and he sang out, “The sun’s over the yardarm, Prairie Dog!” and I broke out the bourbon and poured two china cups full and he drew a chestful of salt air and started talking.

“I’m a hunted man. Crazy magazine’s got me jumping like a poisoned rat in a coffee can. Some fool stuck his head in my office today and asked what’s the difference between a solecism and a solipsism. Go spend a week with a dictionary I told him. A writer is supposed to know the English language, dang it.”

I asked him about the perils of success and how fame and fortune seem to dig a deeper hole for a guy. I was thinking of J.D. Salinger and J.F. Powers, two heavy hitters who hadn’t been heard from for a long long time.

“They’re swinging too hard. Trying to aim the ball.” He hawked and spat. “Listen, kid. Every writer I know is on a winding mountain road in the fog, headlights on high beam, worried about plunging over the cliff. That’s what it means to be in the business. Some of these bozos get confused about their capabilities, like a sumo wrestler trying to run the 440 low hurdles. Or they wind up as preachers pandering to high-minded dipshits. The Betterment of Man is the worst motive for writing.Better to write out of sheer cussedness and fling a cherry bomb into the ladies’ latrine and make them all jump out of their camisoles than climb into the pulpit and pontificate about the sun and moon and the Milky Way and the meaning of it all.

“John O’Hara had it about right. The purest motivation for a writer is to earn a pile of money. Which of course makes you the target of envy and you wind up with gobs of spit on your shoes and you don’t win the Pulitzer and critics spitball you for the rest of your life. But what the hell. You can cry on your way to the bank.”

Mr. Shawn walked to the rail and looked at the houses of Brooklyn as it slipped past in the twilight. “That’s Bay Ridge,” he said, pointing to a low rise. “I was in love with a lady who lived there. Bright red nail polish and curlicue hair and some of the nicest epidermis you ever saw. Met her at a party at Norman Mailer’s. What an arrogant blowhole he was before I slapped him around a little. He was coming on to the Brooklyn girl at that party and I had to take him outside and give him a nosebleed. Now the guy can almost write sometimes. My gosh, she was an angel. I’d be sailing along and she’d come swimming out from Coney Island with her clothes tied on top of her head. Not that the woman needed clothes. My gosh.

“Andy White used to come sailing with me sometimes and then I caught him below decks writing a Talk of the Town piece about the sea and the skyline and what not and I threw him over the side. The guy was what you might call over-sensitive. Wrote that crazy Elements of Style that screwed up millions of college kids. Cleanliness, accuracy, brevity — my aunt Sally. Somebody told him he was a great prose stylist and it went to his head and he devoted his life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk have screwed up more writers than gin and Scotch combined. You take that Elements of Style too seriously and you’ll get so you spend three days trying to write a simple thank-you note.

If I were teaching college composition, my first assignment would be: write something that would horrify E. B. White. Write a scene in which a man backs his pickup to the edge of Yosemite and dumps a load of empties into a stand of Ansel Adams birch trees. Make it gutsy and wild and to hell with brevity. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words — what a prissy idea of literature! Tell it to Tolstoy! Damn it, am I drunk or what? Pour me another.” I refilled his cup.

“I have spent my entire adult life trying to make writers look good. Salinger! Capote! Hersey! Rachel Carson! The world hailed them as visionaries! All I can say is: YOU SHOULD’VE SEEN THE FIRST DRAFT, FOLKS! Man is conceived in ignorance and born into squalor and grief and it goes downhill from there. I was Mama and Daddy to those guys, I lent them lunch money and balanced their checkbooks and fended off old lovers and saved their bacon more than once, meanwhile I took their manuscripts, which had all the elegance of wet cardboard, and pressed them into shape and they were hailed as giants, and I was scorned as a balding obsessive-compulsive dwarf with an agoraphobia problem. Writers come in here, hat in hand, hairy-legged realists and agony queens and cloud gazers, and their egos are frail and feverish and they expect to be treated like undiscovered geniuses and if you tell them the straight truth and say ‘I ain’t printing this shit!’ they never forgive you. They lie in ambush, dreaming up demeaning anecdotes about you, hoping to review your autobiography in the Times so they can piss on your shoes.”

“You’re the greatest editor of the twentieth century,” I said with a degree of sincerity. “You’re my main man, Mr. Shawn. If nobody else does it, I will write your autobiography myself.”

“I never wanted to edit,” he said. “All I ever wanted was to go out on a boat with a bottle of bourbon and fish.”

We got through the Verrazano Narrows and tossed out a line and he pulled in a fine sea bass (“Chilean,” he said, removing the hook from its lip) and he told me how he’d fished with Hemingway in the Keys and had to show him how to jig for grouper and meanwhile I cleaned the fish and grilled it on a hibachi in the cockpit as Mr. Shawn played Gershwin and Kern and Porter on his concertina and then I hollered, “Eats is ready, Mr. Shawn baby!” and he and I sat on the deck and ate the fish with raw onions doused in gin between slices of pumpernickel and got good and tight.

Mr. Shawn took me golfing at the Westchester Country Club. He had a beautiful swing. To correct for some bursitis in his left shoulder, he adjusted his stance about 18 degrees clockwise and turned his right foot in and pinned a lead sinker to the bill of his cap, which hung down like a plumb bob, helping him to keep his shoulders level.

“Some people only know me from people’s memoirs of life at The New Yorker, and in the office I try to impersonate a spooky little recluse who obsesses over commas and semicolons,” he said, “but my big loves are fishing and women and golf and what I obsess over is my swing.”

It took him a minute to set himself up for the shot. He picked up some grass and tossed it to test the wind, got his feet dug in, adjusted the plumb bob, and waggled the club a few times. “I whipped Updike’s ass but good. Many times. He’s a yakker, you know. Likes to stand behind you on the tee and just as you get your feet planted, he’ll say something like ‘That sand trap sure reminds me of the crotch of a woman I knew once’ and try to throw you mentally off your game, but here’s what you do to shut a guy up—” And Mr. Shawn hit a beautiful drive that flew straight and long and dropped and rolled and rolled, a dream shot, and he marched down the fairway and hit a five-iron to the green, and then a long putt that curved and caught the corner of the cup and fell in for a birdie, meanwhile I had topped my tee shot and sent it dribbling twenty yards and then laced it into the neighboring fairway and wound up with an 8.

He turned to me as he shoved the putter in his bag. “Writers like to think that writing is like Arctic exploration or flying the Atlantic solo but actually it’s more like golf. You’ve got to go out and do it every day and live by the results. You can brood over it but in the end you’ve got to take the club out of the bag and take your swing. You hit the ball to where it wants to go, a series of eighteen small steel cups recessed in turf, on a course that others have traversed before you. You are not the first. You accomplish this by making big mistakes and turning them into advantages and overcoming your damn self-consciousness.”

He teed up and tied the lead weight to his cap and turned 18 degrees and set the back foot and waggled the club and hit a 200-yard beauty straight down the fairway.

“I can tell that you’re of the self-consciousness school,” he said.

“Oh?” I replied.

“Guys who spend a lifetime lining up a four-foot putt, reading the bent of the grass, the wind, the planets, checking out the geologic formations below, and then they tap the ball and it rolls eighteen feet into a mud puddle.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, I said.

“Talking about your writing, Mr. Wyler. You’ve got the problem so many English majors have. You’re all fluttery inside. You suffer from a girlish sensibility. Your writing is all mannered and fussy and .”

“Girlish?” I was shocked.

I didn’t write much for a long time after that. Words wouldn’t come. I sat in my office and thought about writing but nothing happened. Every morning, walking along West 43rd Street, I saw men sitting in doorways on scraps of cardboard, begging, jiggling change in paper cups, and one old-timer with a sign against his chest, FORMER NEW YORKER WRITER DOWN ON LUCK. WILLING TO REMINISCE FOR FOOD. I gave him a five-dollar bill. “Once I was just like you,” he said, “and then I was on the street. Take it from one who knows, a person can fall a great distance in a short time. It happens all the time. Former stars of stage and screen hustling their next cup of java. Nothing fades faster than reputation, boy. Tempus goes fugiting along and your chins drop, your rave reviews turn dry and yellow and your name becomes a trivia question. So be kind to your inferiors because someday you’ll have to ask them for a dollar for coffee.”

Three weeks after Mr. Shawn said my writing was girlish, he told me to go to Alaska and write about it. “Get out there in the Alaska wilderness and climb those mountains and cross those vast frozen wastes and camp with the migrating caribou and meet the aboriginal peoples and go north until you can go no farther and pitch your tent and look at death and spit in its eye. Don’t you come back here and write some fitful 1,500-word showpiece of puissant sensibility and irony and ambiguity, some half-assed feuilleton about Canada. Sit your butt down in the tent with a paper and pencil and a bottle of rock ‘n’rye and write your damn heart out and come back here with 100,000 words and none of them modifiers and I’ll print the whole damn thing, and if the boys at the Century Club don’t like it, let them shake their wattles all they like. You understand me, boy?”

So I flew to Seattle and sat in the airport and a girl sat down next to me. Her name was Alana, her high cheekbones were flush with vitality and her lips were broad and full. I didn’t want her to be attracted to me but she was. She sat next to me on the plane to Juneau. “I can’t talk to you,” I said. “I’m writing for The New Yorker, I have to focus on my experiences so I can write.”

“I’d love to be an experience someone writes about in The New Yorker,” she remarked. I said that I was already in a relationship, one that begins with the letter M, and had no interest in fooling around. “Life doesn’t always turn out according to plan,” she said.

It was a rough ride. Juneau was socked in by clouds and the plane hurtled down through 10,000 feet of murk into a narrow mountain pass, jagged ridges visible at three o’clock and nine—the wheels lowered, the ground still not visible, and then the plane began to shake violently—I caught a glimpse of a pale flight attendant weeping and holding a rosary to her lips—the cockpit door flew open and the copilot stuck his head into the lavatory and cast up his lunch—a serving cart tore loose from its moorings and careened down the aisle, scattering ice and hot coffee—the plane rolled over to one side, then the other—there was wailing and gnashing—and Alana took my hand and told me she loved me, and she felt we must affirm life in the face of death—and she unbuttoned her blouse as the plane groaned and rolled and we groped and kissed passionately as it pitched and bucked and her blouse was off and my face was crimson with lipstick when finally the plane bounced twice on the tarmac and rolled to the terminal and I zipped up my fly and staggered into the terminal full of profound feelings and she and I took a courtesy van to a place called Dave’s Wilderness Lodge and tumbled into bed for more turbulence and slept for twelve hours and did it all over again.

“It was a good experience for you, wasn’t it,” she said. “I certainly felt it had literary qualities.”

“Well, I don’t know. It strikes me as unreal.”

“I want to be as meaningful for you as any other wilderness experience,” she said. “And it’s okay if you use my real name and everything.”

Two weeks, day after day, night after night, Alana and I shacked up at the Wilderness Lodge. I walked up and down the trail a little but I have never been good at the identification of birds or trees, and after two weeks, the Alaska piece seemed to be mostly about me and Alana. It began:

“What the heck are you doing in Alaska?” the old-timer said to us at the urinal in the Malamute Saloon one Sunday night not long ago after we had come down from two weeks on the Chilkoot Trail and found the bar made famous by the late Robert W. Service in his poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” once a staple of amateur recitations, at least in this midwesterner’s boyhood, and ordered a pint of beer.

There was quite a bit about the Lodge and saunas and sleeping naked and and “taking Mr. Scroggins to town in the pink convertible.”

Mr. Shawn called me the next morning. “What does ‘getting the pole in the tent flap’ mean?” he asked. “And how about ‘parallel parking’?”

“I can tell that you don’t like it,” I said.

He said, “Don’t give it a thought. It was a warm-up piece. Alaska got your juices going. You’ll come back to New York and find something you really care about and everything will be jim-dandy.”

That was Mr. Shawn for you. The guy was a font of hope. He had unlimited faith in writers and their ability to work things out eventually, or if not unlimited, then darned near unlimited, certainly more than 65 percent.

I tiptoed out of the Pinecone Room while Alana was asleep and flew back to New York and took a taxi to The New Yorker to find the staff in ferment, people huddled in the hallway on the 17th floor whispering, office doors closed, secretaries weeping, urgent memos circulating and a petition to the publisher, Mr. Tony Crossandotti, pleading with him not to fire Mr. Shawn. And a note from Mr. Updike: “Keillor — Call me. John.” It thrilled me. A note from my hero, signed, by his first name.

I found Mr. Shawn in his office, his head out the window, elbows on the sill, watching a fire blazing out of control a few blocks away. Two hook and ladders were in the street, apparatus raised, pouring water on the blaze. Billows of smoke drifted westward.

Vanity Fair,” he said. “One of those dang celebrity rags. Somebody must’ve left a curling iron on and set fire to the glossies. Used to date a woman who worked there. A nice person but naïve. You worried about her having to cross busy streets. And of course the magazine is a piece of shit. Celebrity profiles, edited by the subject’s publicist.”

“Why were you fired, Mr. Shawn?”

“I wasn’t,” he said.

He reached down behind the galley proofs, the Webster’s 2nd Unabridged, and a photo of Dietrich, and took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a couple Dixie cups and poured us drinks.

“I fell in love,” he said. “I’m going to LA. to marry her. Ever hear of a songwriter named Joni Mitchell?” And he sang to me—

Pickle jars and foreign cars
The sun is setting here on Mars.
The saffron in the consommé
God, I love a rainy day
It’s raining on the jungle gyms
The tile roofs and spreading limbs
What can I say?
Just one more lonely lady in LA.

“How can you leave us in the hands of Tony Crossandotti?” I said. “The man is a beast. He doesn’t understand writers.”

“Neither do I,” said Mr. Shawn. “You, for example. You don’t learn from experience, Wyler. You’re a guy who’s capable of singing his song and doing his dance but you go crashing around trying to be all things to all people—and then suddenly you can’t write anymore. Big surprise.

“Anyway, I’m done with it. Meeting Joni changed everything. Life is too short to spend it trying to protect the inept from the insensitive. She and I are going to make a beautiful life in Topanga Canyon and enjoy the dappled foliage and the flickering shadows and water running over rocks, and you knuckleheads can edit yourselves.” He drained his cup of whiskey and grinned and shook my hand. “Go home, Wyler. New York is too rough for you. Go back to Minnesota. And learn how to fish.”

Updike’s office was packed with staff members when I got there and I had to squeeze in between Trillin and Salinger, who were perched on the windowsill.

“Here’s the situation,” said a lady with long braids who I think was Penelope Gilliatt or else it was Veronica Geng. “Crossandotti told Shawn that there were too many short stories in the magazine in which people take trains. Or they come back from Ireland and sit and recall a conversation they had with somebody in County Sligo. Somebody on a train. ‘Train travel is dead in this country,’ he tells Shawn. ‘And what’s the big deal about Ireland? You need more stories in which people fish and hunt and get laid.’ So Crossandotti is replacing Shawn with a guy from Field and Stream.”

“How can he do this?” said Trillin. “Even for a publisher, this is insane.”

The lady laughed. “Publishers care about writing the way bears care about butterflies.”

“What in God’s name can we do?” said Powers. “We’re screwed. Might as well move to Ireland.”

Pauline Kael looked slowly around the room. “Imagine this as a movie,” she said. “You’ve got yourself a peaceful little town and this gangster moves in and pushes people around to see how far he can go. And then somebody comes in and sizes up the situation and walks across 44th Street and faces the bully down. And somebody in this room is that person.” She looked at me. So did Updike.

“Well, shoot,” I said. “It sure seems to me that we can’t sit by and let this fella wreck a great American magazine like The New Yorker.”

Updike said, “We’ve taken a vote, Mr. Keillor, and decided you’re the shooter. The rest of us have books coming out, lecture tours, awards to receive — you seem to be going through a dry spell. Maybe homicide can help. There’s a pistol in your desk. Head over to the Algonquin and when he’s not looking, perforate him two or three times. Being a tall person, you can get a good angle. Aim for vital organs. If you’re caught, the rest of us will testify that you were under horrible stress and that you simply snapped. You’ll spend a year or two in a mental hospital and be released and you’ll have material for a best-seller.”

How could I say no?

When I got to my office to pick up the gun, there was a note on my door:

Keillor: Understand you drew the assignment to shoot yrs truly. Well, I’m waiting, Mr Numb Nuts. So write out your Last Will and Testament and leave it on your chair where the mourners can find it and don’t worry about putting on clean underwear. It ain’t going to be clean for long. Tony

Updike stuck his head in my door to see how I was and I said I was fine. I was filling my mind with murderous thoughts and preparing to do the deed.

“Don’t screw this up. It’s extremely important. Everybody at The New Yorker is counting on you. American literature is counting on you. J.D. McClatchy at the Academy of Arts and Letters called to wish you well. Philip Roth wants you to whack this bastard and so does Edward Hoagland. And Michiko Kakutani from the Times.

“Miss Kakutani called? About me?”

“Yes.”

“Consider the trigger pulled,” I said.

“We don’t want to open up The New Yorker someday and find a photograph of two guys in a boat on Lake Mille Lacs holding up a stringer of walleyes, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“The magazine that was home to Edmund Wilson and Richard Rovere, telling people what kind of bait to use for rock bass?”

I promised to do what I said I’d do. I said, “After I kill him, could I possibly call you John? If the answer is no, I would certainly understand, but I’d love to be able to do that.”

“Yes,” he said. “Certainly.”

And so I stood up, cheeks burning, and crossed 44th Street and walked into the Algonquin, where the lobby was empty except for Tony Crossandotti sitting in a wingback chair near the door to the Oak Room surrounded by six empty beer bottles and a pile of pistachio shells on the floor. He had just sprayed himself with cologne and slicked back his hair. He stood up. “Mr. Keillor,” he said. It was right then, facing him ten feet away, I realized I’d forgotten my pistol in my desk drawer.

“I was afraid you had gotten engrossed in a long book,” he said. He looked me over. “You have broccoli on your lapel,” he said. He brushed it away with a pinkie. “How long you been going around with broccoli on your lapel? I would think someone would point this out.”

“You just did,” I said, “and I’m grateful. I wouldn’t expect an asshole like you to take an interest in my personal grooming.”

“I don’t think I heard you clearly.” His breath was very rank. It reeked of beer and pistachios and something else — actually, it smelled of blood.

“Assholes like you, Mr. Crossandotti. People who take a good magazine and beat the shit out of it.”

“Let me give you a word of advice,” he said. “You maybe shouldn’t have come here, seeing as you’re so upset. You maybe should’ve headed over to France on a Guggenheim for a couple years. You could easily get yourself shot in the ear hole for saying things like that. Not by me. I’m a pussycat. But maybe some person loyal to me might hear about what you just said and come after you and blow a hole in your skull.” There was an odd vibrato in his voice, a sort of throbbing in the pineal gland.

“What I’m going to do for you,” he said, tapping me on the chest, “is teach you about gun safety.”

I said, “Mr. Crossandotti, what you’re going to do is leave The New Yorker alone. It’s a great American institution. So tell your Field & Stream guy to go sit on his thumb and find somebody smart to edit the magazine.”

“Hey. Thanks for the opinion. But I’m concerned about you. Let me demonstrate the workings of a pistol and give you a tip or two about firearm safety. Let us step into the Oak Room so as not to alarm the tourists.”

The lobby was deserted except for a man and a woman, English majors by the looks of them, stealing a few coasters for souvenirs.

“Fuck off!” Tony yelled. “Or I’ll rip the lungs out of your chests. Hers first.” They flapped away like startled pigeons.

I said, “Right after you teach me about gun safety, I’ll call up the Times and inform them that you are taking a well-deserved sabbatical in Weehawken and that you’ve agreed to let the staff of The New Yorker elect a new editor.”

“Hey. I appreciate your interest, Keillor. All what you know about publishing would about fit in a cockroach’s left nostril, but never mind. Come this way and let me show you how to wrest a .45 revolver away from a crazed attacker.”

He grabbed my sleeve and started to pull me toward the Oak Room. He was pretty riled and that was my plan, insofar as I had one — to infuriate him until he was frothing at the mouth and pissing his pants and then—do something sudden and violent and unexpected like shoving my forefinger in his eye socket. Or tripping him. Or maybe a sharp blow to the nose with the heel of the hand, driving the nasal bone into the frontal lobe and causing extreme disorientation and then death. I had a number of possibilities in mind.

He towed me into the Oak Room and pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the ceiling and said, “The first lesson in how to deal with a guy who is stronger than you and smarter than you and who is just about to blow a big hole in your ear is not to let yourself be drawn into the type of situation where it’s you and him alone in a room with no other people, okay? That’s the thing you want to avoid.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Number two: don’t attempt to distract him with a sudden move or coughing fit or that old trick of looking over his shoulder and saying, ‘Hi, Jim!’—that works in cartoons, it doesn’t work in real life. Number three: don’t have illusions about your own strength. Some guys, from having watched Alan Ladd movies, get the idea that they could hurl themselves at somebody and knock him to the floor. In your case, this just fucking ain’t gonna happen. It would be like a parakeet hurling itself at a late-model Chevrolet. Strictly unproductive in the larger scheme of things.”

He was about to get to No. 4 when a man walks in with a big Leica around his neck and says, “Is this the room where Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Woollcott and George Kaufman and Marc Connelly and Harpo Marx and Edna Ferber and their friends used to gather for the famous Algonquin Round Table? Which table was that, exactly? I’ve read so much about them and their witty bon mots and how much Harold Ross admired them but it was he, the roughneck from Colorado, who started The New Yorker and those great wits are largely forgotten today.” And Tony yells, “Who gives a fuck! Get your ass out of here or I’ll blow it off you one cheek at a time.”

The guy says, “I’m sorry, but are you talking to me?”

“Get your ass out of here, I said.”

“We came all the way from Minnesota to see the Round Table. Is that a problem? Is now not a good time?”

Tony yells, “Get the hell out!”

“I’m sorry” the guy says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just came in to take a picture. We’re New Yorker readers, going back years and years. My gosh, I grew up with the magazine. A big fan of A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs and Frank Sullivan. And I loved Benchley. And all of them.” And then he recognized me. “Aren’t you an author yourself?” he said.

“Yes, I’m Garrison Keillor,” I said. “I’m from Minnesota as well.”

“Right,” he said. “You used to do that radio show. What was it called? We used to listen to it sometimes.” He turned to ask his wife, but she was gone.

Tony held up the gun so the guy could see it. “This ain’t some book club or discussion group you walked into, this is a gangland-style execution. This is something you definitely don’t want to be a witness to because if you are, I would need to blow you away too. You hear me?”

“I loved when you used to tell stories about that little town, Lake Wabasso or whatever it was,” the guy said. “I grew up on a farm near Morris. You ever get out that way?”

“Not as often as I’d like. I wish I were there right now”

Tony is miffed. He stamps his foot.

“Hey,” he says. “You ever hear of the fucking Mafia?”

The guy said he had seen The Godfather, the first one, but thought the book was better.

“Brando was good and Duvall, but the rest of it was a piece of crap,” says Tony. “Only guy who can write about that stuff is Elmore Leonard.”

“Is he an actor?”

“Elmore Leonard?” Tony looks at me. “I cannot believe this yahoo never heard of Elmore Leonard.”

“Does he write for The New Yorker?” the guy said.

“You never heard of Elmore Leonard? You’re bullshitting me.”

Tony was saying something in Italian that sounded like a curse for when somebody spits in your mother’s tomato sauce. Either that, or a recipe for ground glass. And he was poking the gun in the guy’s ribs.

“Hey,” the guy said. “I can take a hint. Don’t get all hot and bothered. I can come back another time. We’re here for the whole week. I apologize for the trouble. Have a nice day, okay?”

And that was when I killed Tony, when the man said, “Have a nice day, okay?” Tony sort of lost control of himself at that point. He threw his head back and snarled and his arm twitched, and I grabbed the wrist of his gun hand and he yanked with all his strength and in the process pulled the gun down and shot himself in the forehead. The room goes boom and Tony falls down like a load of fresh sod and the guy says, “What happened to him?”

I said, “He tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet. It happens all the time.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s better than he’s been in a long time. He’s resting now let’s tiptoe out and leave him to his thoughts.”

And Tony opens one red eye and says, “You’ll never write for my magazine again, Mr. Keillor.”

I tried to think of a witty retort—Oh? Really? Who died and made you editor?—and his head rolled to one side and he was out of here, he’d left the building. A powerful publishing tycoon murdered by a second-rate writer. Accidental, in a way, but in another way, quite deliberate. I certainly had homicide in mind when I entered the Algonquin, but the manner in which it happened was unintended so probably it’d be second- or third-degree manslaughter. My defense lawyer would argue that Tony, in resisting my attempt to disarm him, had caused his own demise, and the jury would deliberate for ten minutes and I’d go scot-free and soon thereafter would be waylaid by a van full of shooters and my bullet-riddled body lie on 90th Street, with punctured containers of chicken salad and tabouli strewn from hell to breakfast.

“Should we call an ambulance?” the guy says.

“The hotel will take care of it.”

I leaned down and opened Tony’s jacket and got a roll of bills out of his breast pocket. No sense leaving it for the cops. “Just making sure he’s got cab money,” I say to the guy. I’d never seen ten-thousand-dollar bills before. I didn’t know Reagan’s picture was on them. “I sure never expected something like this,” the guy says to his wife, and then remembered she wasn’t there, so he went to look for her.

The money came to $128,656. I stuck it in my pocket and thought to myself, This whole thing would make a good story, except I’d change it and make the murder more deliberate. I’d have the writer struggle with the tycoon and trip him and the tycoon’s noggin would bonk the leg of the sideboard and the tycoon eyes glaze and the writer snatch up the pistol and kill him. Or hold him until the cops arrive. Or maybe kill him, but with a fork. And I wouldn’t have me be a writer. Maybe a choreographer or composer. A more lethal line of work.

I walked out through the lobby. A bellman had locked the front door and pulled the drapes, and waiters had put up partitions to shield the brunch crowd in the Rose Room. A man in a black suit got off the elevator pushing a wheelbarrow He went in and got Tony and covered him with a tablecloth and wheeled him out to the curb and laid him in the backseat of a taxi and gave the cabbie some bills and away he went. The janitor tore up the carpet Tony died on and laid a black rug there and set a table on the rug. The place was back in business in ten minutes. That’s New York for you. When we die, we leave a hole behind that it takes them less than half an hour to fill. I turned left on 44th Street past the man with the sign FORMER NEW YORKER WRITER DOWN ON LUCK and I dropped $40 in his lap. I felt good. While I as a Christian am opposed to homicide, nonetheless the death of Tony Crossandotti was for the good of journalism. The New Yorker would live on, thanks to me. But I would have to leave New York. Publishing tycoons would be gunning for me after I offed one of their own and I’d be safer in St. Paul because New Yorkers are not sure exactly where it is. They keep getting it mixed up with Omaha.

So R.I.P. Tony Crossandotti. Good-bye to Manhattan and 25 West 43rd. Goodbye, Rainbow Room and Tower Records and H&H Bagels and Scribner’s beautiful bookstore on Fifth Avenue with the wrought-iron railing around the balcony. Goodbye to all that. I return to Minnesota, home of humorous, charitable, modest, soft-spoken people. A state on the same longitude as Italy, with the same slant of light that moved Raphael and Michelangelo illuminating our trees in the afternoon. A state of passionate hockey teams and world-class choirs where, God willing, I shall gain some clarity and lead a happy productive life.

CHEERFULNESS by Garrison Keillor!

Garrison Keillor's newest book, CHEERFULNESS, now available.

Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his eighties, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor. “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil,” he tells us; “it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.” Funny, poignant, thought-provoking, and whimsical, this is a book that will inspire you to choose cheerfulness in your daily life.

1. CHEERFULNESS

It’s a great American virtue, the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: enthusiasm, high spirits, rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, wake up and die right, pick up your feet, step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Smile, dammit. Dance like you mean it and give it some pizzazz, clap on the backbeat. Do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, hang by your thumbs and write when you get work, whoopitiyiyo git along little cowboys—and I am an American, I don’t eat my cheeseburger in a croissant, don’t look for a church that serves a French wine and a sourdough wafer for Communion, don’t use words like dodgy, bonkers, knackered, or chuffed. When my team scores, I don’t shout, Très bien!! I don’t indulge in dread and dismay. Yes, I can make a list of evils and perils and injustices in the world, but I believe in a positive attitude and I know that one can do only so much and one should do that much and do it cheerfully. Dread is communicable: healthy rats fed fecal matter from depressed humans demonstrated depressive behavior, including anhedonia and anxiety—crap is bad for the brain. Nothing good comes from this. Despair is surrender. Put your shoulder to the wheel. And wash your hands.

We live in an Age of Gloom, or so I read, and some people blame electronics, but I love my cellphone and laptop, and others blame the decline of Protestantism, but I grew up fundamentalist so I don’t, and others blame bad food. Too much grease and when there’s a potluck supper, busy people tend to stop at Walmart or a SuperAmerica station and pick up a potato salad that was manufactured a month ago and shipped in tanker trucks and it’s depressing compared to Grandma’s, which she devoted an hour to making fresh from chopped celery, chives, green onions, homemade mayonnaise, mustard, dill, and paprika. You ate it and knew that Grandma cared about you. The great potato salad creators are passing from the scene, replaced by numbskulls so busy online they’re willing to bring garbage to the communal table.

I take no position on that, since I like a Big Mac as well as anybody and I’ve bought food in plastic containers from refrigerated units at gas stations and never looked at the expiration date. And I am a cheerful man...

Read the first Chapter>>>

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BOB DOUGLAS (click image for audio tribute)

Bob Douglas (April 22, 1948 - December 1, 2022)

SONG LIST:
Irish Fiddle Tunes
Is It Time
Canaan's Land
Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures
There's No Hiding Place Down Here
Anchored in Love

Bob Douglas was cheerful, the mandolinist in the Powdermilk Biscuit Band in the early days of A Prairie Home Companion, who loved gospel songs, having grown up with them, even “It’s G-L-O-R-Y to Know That I’m S-A-V-E-D,” and he dove into bluegrass and swing tunes and played a driving backbeat on the fiddle standards, a dedicated devotee and serious folkie, but audiences get restless and earnestness only goes so far, and Bob’s ace card was playing spoons. He kept them in his back pocket, ordinary kitchen spoons. No silver spoons, the tone was clanky. He held two spoons back to back an inch apart in his right hand, did elaborate rolls against the spread fingers of his left hand, and the rickety-tickety-bop glittery-flibbertigibbet shave-and-a-haircut drove the crowd wild. It never failed.

He worked hard to master a complicated instrument, the mandolin, but it was the parlor trick of spoonerism that blew them away—there’s a lesson in humility here.

Bob wasn’t eager to play the spoons, he was a mandolinist, not a clown, but he did it when it was needed and did it with a beautiful big smile, syncopating around, percussing hand-to-knee and off his forehead, bopping on the guitarist’s shoulder, rapping on the knees of a kid in the front row, then the kid’s father, he made solemn hippies whoop like third graders. Sometimes he’d switch to wooden spoons for the clackety tone. It was cheerfulness at work.

Garrison Keillor from Cheerfulness

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O Frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

Some libs wanted the White House to be renamed the Big House but I was not one of them. I simply feel that the nation should make good on its debts and if the Repubs want to tinker with American culture, good luck. It’s like trying to replace Tina Turner with Ted Turner: it ain’t gonna work, buddy. Making war against the culture is punching the air. We are a curious, lively, rambunctious people. Freedom has a big effect on people and it’s hard to squelch it, you pound on the bubbles and they pop up elsewhere.

I am not putting down the Repubs; some of my best friends, etc. I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of reason, certainly not an octagon or Oregon. Utter stupidity has been a recurrent fact in my life and now and then I find myself reviewing the Five Dumbest Things I’ve Done, which is brutal punishment but it does highlight the Five Luckiest, which take me into the realm of gratitude.

I was married twice before to women who were near total strangers, back when I imagined romance to be a mystery, the more mysterious the better, and in 1987 I did the No. 1 Dumbest when I gave up a radio show I dearly loved in order to make a woman happy — a woman who had married me imagining it would make her happy and it didn’t, of course, and I knew it was a mistake the night I announced my departure on the radio, and I sat in the kitchen with a friend and he said, “I think you should change your mind. You’d make a lot of people happy.” I didn’t do it. That was No. 2.

I’ve lost money on every real estate transaction I’ve done: if I told you the whole story you’d introduce legislation to put me under guardianship. I’ve thrown fistfuls of money into the wind but you can hire smart people to keep you away from the cliff. I am illiterate about the Christian faith that I subscribe to but I feel that God forgives this. Any third grader knows more about the natural world than I do and yet some very smart people are somewhat fond of me.

No, I’m referring to Dumbness in its pure form, when you walk with complete confidence into a brick wall and you don’t learn from this that bricks are solid, solider than flesh.

But stupidity has given me sympathy for other knuckleheads and also admiration for the beautiful competence of American medicine, which has extended my life dramatically, making it possible for me to beat myself up for my mistakes and not just take up space in a cemetery. And eventually it leads to this beautiful revelation: I will never be so dumb again. I’m too old and I adore the woman I married who is also my best-informed critic. This is an outcome devoutly to be wished for.

In the extra time that medical ingenuity has granted me, I intend to walk carefully, mind my manners, do my work, embrace friendship, sleep with my beloved critic, and put aside enmity and grudges and biases. Eighty is too old to be angry. Even seventy is.

 

Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

The tablets that God handed down to Moses did not constitute Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. I don’t oppose posting the Ten Commandments, I only propose that they be taken seriously. And it’s hard to see how allowing people to shop on Sunday and order alcohol in restaurants is keeping the Sabbath holy. I am just saying it because it’s true.

I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath, which goes against Scripture. I do it again and again. Like you, I am a bundle of contradictions.

Like many of my fellow Episcopalians, I maintain a progressive enlightened exterior while guarding my simple peasant biases such as my loathing of the use of fancy words like “ubiquitous” in simple conversation, it makes me want to give them a knuckle sandwich if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an author and must protect my hands. Or people who kill conversation by delivering extensive synopses of an article about political polarization that they’ve read recently — POW, right in the kisser.

I absolutely despise the little quiz that pops up on the screen when I finish a transaction online — “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience ordering from Goodwill? Have you been satisfied with the used clothing you’ve purchased? How likely are you to recommend Goodwill to your friends?” — this sort of thing makes me want to throw my laptop out the window even if it might mean hitting an e-biker on the noggin and he hits the pavement and is run over by a guy on an e-scooter. But the T.C. forbid murder so I simply click Delete and move on. Scripture is very much in favor of deletion; deletion is crucial in matters of faith. Love and kindness are fundamental and the acquisition of wealth and power are not.

The verse I would paint on the walls of the Texas legislature is “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” A good verse for me and you too. To put it another way, “We’re too old to be this stupid.”

I was having lunch not long ago with two guys I’ve known since grade school and one said, “I hope I haven’t offended you” and the other said, “We’re too old to take offense, we’re eighty for gosh sakes.” It’s true: we’ve reached the age of gratitude at last, no more time for anger.

I believe that in 2024 the American electorate will start to wise up to the sort of performance-art politics of the T.C. sort and decide that public servants should serve the public good by dealing with actual problems.

California, Nevada, and Arizona did not deal with the Colorado River emergency by painting a verse on the walls of the Grand Canyon, “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Nor did they curse the problem. They agreed on a (temporary) solution.

And if, on a scale of one to three, you give this column a two, I’m okay with that. Let’s go be wise and forgive Texas for its doggone stupidity and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. You kids stop hitting each other or I am going to send you to your rooms and I mean it.

Manhattan man living in the past

I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”

Doing the same thing I did when I was important. I do a sort of ventriloquism in which I talk in the voice of old relatives who are all dead, but the voice is in my head, and as long as I keep using it, I keep them alive. I also stay sane. Twitter is not part of my world, I am not an influencer, I used to drive under the influence but don’t anymore.

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.

They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching the passing humanity, the great variety of gaits, brisk and propulsive, ambling, toddling, sidewalk surfing, window shopping, touristy uncertainty, geezerly gimpiness, and the aimless shuffle of people like me whose heads are full of irrelevancies.

What’s on my mind is family history, the seven children of James Keillor and Dora Powell, and in all of Manhattan there’s not a single soul who has the slightest interest, nor should there be. Heredity, the streaks of tragedy, the guarded secrets, a family of good gardeners and Bible believers, sworn to modesty, dry humor, intensely loyal.

My dad once drove up to Anoka to see his brother Lawrence who was president of the First National Bank. I asked him if he had an appointment. He said, “I don’t need an appointment, he’s my brother.” And when he got to the bank, Lawrence put everything aside and they sat down and talked. That was my family in a nutshell.

James was not a good farmer. He’d go out cutting hay, holding the reins in his right hand and a book in his left. He was of another world. Dora was a schoolteacher and demanded that we make the grade. I’m descended from them, careless and ambitious at the same time. I sit in the café eating salad and remember going to Lawrence’s where he and Dad and Eleanor sat around the piano and sang “It Is Well with My Soul” — “in our ancient ruined voices,” Eleanor said, and that was the end, within a few years they were all gone.

I’ve been telling stories all my adult life and this is one that mystifies me: where did we come from. My shelves are packed with books I’m no longer interested in but I had a dream last night in which I visited James and Dora on their farm after the house burned down and saw their seven kids and little Eleanor had a terrible fever and the family sat praying for her — a fleeting dream but I would give anything to revisit it. I feel the same way about the picture of my mother, 17, with sister Elsie and friend Dorothy, three girls in summer dresses standing holding their bikes by Lake Nokomis in 1932, so happy — I want to ask her, “Do you realize you’re going to have six kids and not much money and they’ll cause you a lot of problems? Is this really what you want? I’m a writer, I can send you to Hollywood. You’re very charming, very funny. What he loves about you, millions of others would love too. What do you say, kid?” And she gets on her bike and wheels away.

Spring once more, what a surprise

I hear from back home that the wretched winter has concluded and the trees blossom and people are allowing themselves to think about resuming normal life though of course Minnesotans know that winter, like COVID, can return at any time and as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what shall be. One generation comes as another departs. We shovel the walk and the wind blows the neighbor’s unshoveled snow over us, making our labor meaningless. It is what it is.” It’s not a sunshiny view of life but it serves us well, the stoical It Could Be Worse perspective. Yes, we’re flabby, uncool, discouraged, not flossing regularly, our mental acuity is somewhat diminished from when we were in the eighth grade, we can’t remember passwords, we need a paring knife to try to pry NyQuil out of its tight plastic pods, but at least wild bears are not rampaging across Minneapolis, snarfling up small children. The Mississippi still flows south. We have not been invaded by Wisconsin. The yellow goldfinches come to the feeder. The ducks swim in the pond. The frogs are croaking at night. It stays light later and later. Nobody I know has been caught paying hush money to a porn star. Life is good. Sex is less frequent than when we were young and couldn’t keep our clothes on for more than an hour; now we make love only on birthdays and anniversaries if there is a full moon and the Twins are ahead in the eighth inning, but it’s all the more pleasurable for being rare. It’s like Paris that way: if you lived there you’d just be complaining incessantly the way the French do, but a biennial visit can be marvelous. Fishing season opens, which gives men a chance to eat bad food, go without bathing, pee outdoors, and sit in a boat for hours and be monosyllabic, but misery makes for good company as I recall from back when I went to political fundraisers. I’m a Democrat and at our events you wind up standing in a bunch of people talking about economic injustice or declining test scores in secondary ed. Not what I’d call a fun evening. Trump’s success is simple: entertainment. He knows his crowd and tells them what they want to hear: the system is rigged against them and it’s time to overthrow the government. He says stuff you never heard in high school civics class and it’s thrilling. They get to whoop and yell for revolution, knowing this is theater, only intended to terrify Yalies and Times columnists and the book club ladies. I went to a Trump rally in New Jersey last week. I wore a fake moustache and dark glasses. I loved it. He came out collecting donations — for a hundred bucks you get a degree from Trump University and a round trip on Trump Air. He was raking it in. He yelled, “You people are dumber than stumps. I may be a mad hatter but you have the brains of a box of hammers. You couldn’t find your way home if you were standing in the driveway. Without me, you’d be hopeless.” And he pulled out a pistol and fired into the crowd and a fat man fell down dead and the crowd cheered. “See what I mean? I knew you liked me,” he said. I never saw a candidate do that before. I read that younger and younger people are now going around with hearing aids and is it any wonder, what with the world clamoring for their attention as they turn up their headphones to shut out the clamor and now baseball, our sacred national pastime, is employing DJs to make rock ’n’ roll racket to engage people who get bored sitting through the outs, waiting for a grand slam. Nonetheless it is spring, the trees blossom, birds sing, some things remain the same. I saw neighbor kids waiting on the corner for a ride Saturday evening, she was very elegant in a ball gown and he wore a tuxedo and was trying to make conversation. I wanted to warn them about vodka, that it can go down very easily and then be painful coming up, but why would they listen to an old man? I hope they like each other. Friendship is a good start for romance, better than the zing of the strings of your heart. And now I miss my sweetie, far off in Minnesota. She’s the butter on my bagel, the syrup on my toasted waffle. I count the days until she returns.
A Prairie Home Companion An Evening of Story and Song Humor Love & Comedy Tour Old Friends Poetry Prairie Home Christmas Show Solo Songs Stories The Gratitude Tour
Schedule

June 22, 2023 (NEW)

Thursday

7:30 p.m.

Cary Memorial Hall, Lexington, MA

Lexington, MA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Lexington, MA. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

buy tickets

June 24, 2023 (New date)

Saturday

7:30 p.m.

Park Theatre, Jaffrey, NH

Jaffrey, NH

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Jaffrey, NH. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

buy tickets

June 25, 2023 (NEW DATE)

Sunday

7:00 p.m.

Paramount Hudson Valley, Peekskill, NY

Peekskill, NY

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Peekskill NY. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unite us.

July 5, 2023

Wednesday

8:00 p.m.

Ramshead Onstage, Annapolis, MD

Annapolis, MD

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Annapolis, MD. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

buy tickets

July 6, 2023

Thursday

8:00 p.m.

Sellersville Theatre, Sellersville, PA

Sellersville, PA

Garrison Keillor and Robin & Linda Williams come to Sellersville, PA for an evening of poetry, gospel, sing-alongs and the News from Lake Wobegon.

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July 8, 2023

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

Lime Kiln Theater, Lexington, VA

Lexington, VA

Garrison Keillor and Robin & Linda Williams come to the Lime Kiln Theater in Lexington, VA for an evening of poetry, gospel, sing-alongs and the News from Lake Wobegon. 8:00 PM

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August 4, 2023

Friday

7:30 p.m.

The Opera House, Boothbay Harbor, ME

Boothbay Harbor, ME

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Boothbay Harbor, ME. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 6, 2023

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Ctr, Old Saybrook, CT

Old Saybrook, CT

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Old Saybrook, CT. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 7, 2023

Monday

7:00 p.m.

Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Ctr, Old Saybrook, CT

Old Saybrook, CT (2nd show)

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Old Saybrook, CT. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 27, 2023

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

Big Top Chautauqua, Bayfield, WI

Bayfield, WI

Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Friends return to Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield WI. Singalongs, stories, duets, comedy and a hot band. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, June 1, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, June 1, 2023

On this day in 1974, Henry Jay Heimlich published his “Heimlich Maneuver” in the Journal of Emergency Medicine. The article was called “Pop Goes the Café Coronary.” Less than three weeks later, the maneuver was used successfully in a restaurant in Bellevue, Washington. As of 2006, the American Red Cross recommends the “five and five” approach: five sharp blows to the back, followed by five abdominal thrusts if the back blows are not effective.

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 31, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 31, 2023

It’s the birthday of Walt Whitman, born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father’s trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, May 30, 2023

On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, May 29, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, May 29, 2023

It’s the birthday of comedian Bob Hope (1903), born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, near London. His family moved to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1941, he performed his first show for soldiers, a group of airmen stationed in March Field, California. It was the beginning of nearly 60 years of shows at military bases at home and abroad

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A Prairie Home Companion: June 3, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion: June 3, 2006

Our Hollywood Bowl 2006 feature celebrating the release of our movie with guests Meryl Streep, Virginia Madsen, and John C. Reilly; Sally Dworsky, Shelby Lynne, and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, May 28, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, May 28, 2023

Today is the birthday of American poet May Swenson, born Anna Thilda “May” Swenson, in Logan, Utah (1913). Swedish was the primary language in her house, and Swenson was an avid reader from a young age, with one of her favorite writers being Edgar Allan Poe. Swenson worked as a stenographer, ghostwriter, secretary, and finally, at a publishing house.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, May 27, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, May 27, 2023

Today is the birthday of marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania (1907). She was an English major at the Pennsylvania College for Women, but in her junior year, she took a biology course. President Kennedy read Silent Spring during that summer in 1962 and formed a presidential commission to re-examine the government’s pesticide policy. The commission endorsed Carson’s findings.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, May 26, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, May 26, 2023

Today is the birthday of photographer Dorothea Lange, born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey (1895). She contracted polio when she was seven, and her left leg was noticeably weaker than her right for the rest of her life. During World War II, the War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the government’s internment of Japanese Americans.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, May 25, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, May 25, 2023

Today is the birthday of philosopher, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was born in Boston in 1803, and his father’s unmarried sister, Mary Moody Emerson, was a great influence on him. In his book Nature (1836), Emerson first introduced the concept of Transcendentalism — the idea that spiritual truth could be gained by intuition rather than by established doctrine or text — and he would become a leader of that movement.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 24, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 24, 2023

It’s the birthday of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota (1941). He grew up in the declining mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. He started performing in Greenwich Village clubs and coffeehouses, using the name Bob Dylan (he denies that he took his name from Dylan Thomas). He released his first album, Bob Dylan, in 1962. Dylan won a Nobel Prize in literature in 2016.

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Writing

O Frabjous Day! Callooh, Callay!

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

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Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

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Cheerfulness preview

Read the first chapter of Garrison’s newest book, CHEERFULNESS and find out where to purchase.

Read Chapter One here

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Manhattan man living in the past

I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”

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Spring once more, what a surprise

I hear from back home that the wretched winter has concluded and the trees blossom and people are allowing themselves to think about resuming normal life though of course Minnesotans know that winter, like COVID, can return at any time and as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what shall be. One generation comes as another departs. We shovel the walk and the wind blows the neighbor’s unshoveled snow over us, making our labor meaningless. It is what it is.”

It’s not a sunshiny view of life but it serves us well, the stoical It Could Be Worse perspective. Yes, we’re flabby, uncool, discouraged, not flossing regularly, our mental acuity is somewhat diminished from when we were in the eighth grade, we can’t remember passwords, we need a paring knife to try to pry NyQuil out of its tight plastic pods, but at least wild bears are not rampaging across Minneapolis, snarfling up small children. The Mississippi still flows south. We have not been invaded by Wisconsin. The yellow goldfinches come to the feeder. The ducks swim in the pond. The frogs are croaking at night. It stays light later and later. Nobody I know has been caught paying hush money to a porn star.

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What we don’t know we must invent

The past is so fascinating to me now that I have so much of it and last Monday night at a New York nightclub I listened to a big band of men in tuxedos playing 1920s jazz that I heard when I babysat the neighbors’ kids when I was 10, which I did for the chance to watch TV, which we, being Sanctified Brethren, did not have in our home, but these were Lutherans so they did, and after I wore the kids out and got them to bed, I watched old movies about sophisticated people dancing to syncopated rhythms just like what the band was playing. My Brethren considered this music wicked, apt to lead to gin, maybe fornication, but at the age of 10 I found it joyful and I still do.

Brethren music was draggy, even the hymns about joy were sung lamentfully, and the recognition of the happiness of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Tiger Rag” and “Shreveport Stomp” was a tiny step toward independent judgment.

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A day in May sitting in the Park

I go to the park because I don’t read the paper because there are too many celebrities to keep track of like Madonna, My Maia, Meghan Markle, Marla Maples, Mary Murray, Marilyn Manson, Marsha Mason, Marky Mark, Mike Marcus, Melissa McCarthy, Mo’Nique, Moses Maimonides, Lin-Manuel Miranda, not to mention Mitch McConnell and Miss Minnesota — the mind spins at the multiplicity of eminence and immortality that I’ve moved away from mass media and the megaworld and simply go walk in the park and admire the nameless walkers. benchwarmers, birdwatchers, ballplayers, and realize that celebrity being so widespread, it is anonymity that is special. Fame is an old story and the nameless are a delightful mystery.

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Why I am not joining the strike

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

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It’s a good time, there’s none better

I remember when I was six and was allowed to do dishes with my older brother and sister while Mother cleaned the kitchen with Lysol: it was a ceremony, a step into maturity, being entrusted to handle the family china, a mark of maturity for a little boy, and, busy, crowded around the sink, we talked a lot, a big pleasure in a family in which children were not encouraged to speak up. And I made my brother and sister laugh, describing my teacher’s upper arms that bounced as she wrote on the blackboard, that we named Hoppy and Bob, and also when I said that Washington looked like Lincoln’s wife. To think I could amuse my elders was a real spark of self-esteem.

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The beauty of being a guy

When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humorist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch. You understand.

Why should two people be miserable? One is enough.

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Whether solo or accompanied by Richard Dworsky, Heather Masse, Prudence Johnson, Dan Chouinard, Dean Magraw, or others, Garrison Keillor delivers an extraordinary, crowd-pleasing performance.

Garrison Keillor’s celebrated radio broadcast A Prairie Home Companion ran for forty years. He wrote the comedy sketches and more, and he invented a “little town that time forgot and the decades could not improve.” These days, his shows are packed with humor and song, plus the audience-favorite News from Lake Wobegon. He has written dozens of books — recently, Boom Town (a Lake Wobegon novel), That Time of Year (a memoir), a book of limericks, and Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 (reflections on why you should keep on getting older). Garrison and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, live in New York City.

Trained as a jazz singer at the New England Conservatory of Music, Heather Masse is equally versed in a variety of traditions — folk, pop, bluegrass, and more. As member of Billboard-charting group The Wailin’ Jennys, she has performed at hundreds of venues across the world. She was a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, both solo and with The Jennys. One reviewer rightly lauded her “lush velvety vocals, capable of melting butter in a Siberian winter.”

 Prudence Johnson‘s long and happy career as a singer, writer, and teacher has landed her on the musical theater stage, in two feature films (A River Runs Through It and A Prairie Home Companion), on a national radio show (several stints on A Prairie Home Companion) and on concert stages across North America and occasionally Europe. She has released more than a dozen recordings, including albums dedicated to the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Greg Brown, and a collection of international lullabies.

 For 23 years, Richard Dworsky served as A Prairie Home Companion’s pianist and music director, providing original theatrical underscoring, leading the house band, and performing as a featured soloist. The St. Paul, Minnesota, native also accompanied many of the show’s guests, including James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, Chet Atkins, Renée Fleming, and Kristin Chenoweth.

 Dan Chouinard is a St. Paul-based honky-tonk pianist, concert soloist and accompanist, street accordionist, sing-along enabler, Italian and French teacher, and bicycling vagabond. He’s been writer and host of a number of live history-with-music shows broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television. He played on a dozen live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companions plus a half dozen APHC cruises, and served as rehearsal pianist for Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan on the 2005 APHC movie. He’s featured on a number of recordings with Prairie Home regulars Peter Ostroushko, Prudence Johnson and Maria Jette.

 Composer/arranger/producer/guitarist Dean Magraw performed and recorded extensively with Ukrainian American virtuoso Peter Ostroushko over several decades, and he has worked with some of the finest musicians in the North America, Europe, and Japan. As one of his collaborators commented, “Dean Magraw’s guitar playing transcends, transports, and lifts the soul to a higher level as he weaves, cajoles, and entices every note from his instrument.”

Recent reviews:

“Fans laughed, applauded and sang along throughout Sunday night’s two-hour show” -Jeff Baenen, AP News

“His shows can, for a couple of hours, transform an audience of even so-called coastal elites into a small-town community with an intimacy only radio and its podcast descendants can achieve” -Chris Barton, LA Times

“[Keillor is] an expert at making you feel at home with his low-key, familiar style. Comfortable is his specialty.” -Betsie Freeman, Omaha-World Herald

 

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