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.

A Return to Town Hall this week (Click Image)
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Bringing people along with me 101

So the news is out. Harvard will be offering a course on Taylor Swift in the spring. The professor, who is 52, is a Swift fan and describes her interest in Swift — “she’s someone who worked to become herself and makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people.” I suppose you could say the same about Shakespeare, though he did alienate some people who then wound up in engineering or medicine.

In the course, Swift’s work will be compared to other writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.” Students will write three term papers but there may not be a final exam. “I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun.

The professor came across Swift about 12 years ago. “I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was ‘You Belong With Me.’”

That’s the song whose chorus goes:
“If you could see that I’m the one who understands you,
Been here all along, so why can’t you see?
You belong with me, you belong with me.”

Some people may prefer “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken,” and other people prefer “Why can’t you see you belong with me.”

Oh well. I was an English major back in the Classics Era, but I don’t care if English professors teach pop songs or the backs of cereal boxes and produce Artificial Intellectuals with a doctorate in self-realization. I am minding my own business. As James Thurber said, “Let us not look back in anger or look forward in fear but let us look around us in awareness.” It’s plain old sensible Midwestern stoicism and they should put it on the dollar bill in place of “In God we trust.” The progressive left looks back in anger and the regressive right looks forward in fear, but the old man walks down the street and is aware of bustling enterprise, delivery e-bikes, little storefronts striving to survive, tight clusters of families, the woman in full stride announcing into her iPhone, “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” the man and woman stopping because their dogs wish to talk to each other.

I live in New York City because my wife likes it here, which is the best reason: to live with a happy woman. I like it too. I walk down the street and every so often someone grins at me and says, “Hey, I’m from Minnesota.” People didn’t do that back in Minnesota all those years I lived there. We shake hands and I ask, “Where you from?” and “What do you get to do there?” and from Hometown and Occupation, we formulate a conversation. I’ve met people that way whom, back in Minnesota, I’d never have gotten to talk to, a chemical engineer, a pediatric dentist, some retired cops, a couple writers, and a retired special ed teacher who’d listened to me on the radio since we were each in our twenties.

It was a sweet, unexpected encounter. She said she missed listening to me; she wept as she said it. I put an arm around her. Now I wish I’d said:

       For true wisdom and authentic feeling

       Don’t listen to songs that come out of a ceiling.

       “No wise man ever longed to be younger.”

       If for self-knowledge, you hunger,

       Postpone success and learn from failure.

       You belong with Jonathan Swift, not Taylor.

       He said, “Every dog will have its day.”

       And so she does and hip hip hooray,

       But put away anger, put away fear,

       Sweetheart, you belong with Shakespeare.

       Your sweet love is such a gift,

       I would scorn to trade places with Miss Swift.

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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Singing to the Lord to save Herschel

The Communion hymn in church last Sunday was “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” which I cherish for the lines “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice: serve him with mirth,” which is the only time comedy is mentioned in our hymnal, I do believe. There’s joy and rejoicing and gladness, but the thought of serving our Creator with jokes is rather rare and, I think, beautiful. I’m not sure I know exactly what joy is but I do know the one about the engineer who sees another engineer rolling a little pellet between his fingers and saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is more rubbery or more like plastic,” and the first engineer takes the pellet from him and says, “There is plasticity to it but there’s a viscosity, a sort of liquidity too” and he puts it in his mouth and says, “And there’s a salinity to it as well. Where did you get it?” The other engineer says, “Out of my nose.”

A joke is a friendly transaction between two persons and even if it falls flat, it conveys a generous spirit. I have four friends who still tell me jokes, three men, one woman, all of them old enough to remember the Helen Keller jokes (How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.) and the lightbulb jokes (How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Define “light.”) or the “What’s the difference” jokes (What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.) and the “What did the blank say to the blank” (What did the maxi-pad say to the fart? You are the wind beneath my wings.) and double-amputee jokes (“What do you call a man with no arms or legs hanging on your wall?” Art.) and old guy jokes (Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. Old actuaries never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.) and the Ole and Lena jokes (So Ole died and Lena called up the undertaker to come get him, and he said, “I’ll be there in an hour,” and she said, “I’m having my hair done in half an hour, how about I drag him out to the curb and you can pick him up there?”). And there were Viagra jokes but they petered out.

Back when I hung out in saloon, in a booth stuffed with guys drinking whiskey, all of us in our twenties, trying to get an angle on our lives, any one of us could change the music by saying, “Twelve years in analysis and finally yesterday I got in touch with my emotions and I broke down and cried.”

“What happened?”

“My analyst looked at me and said, ‘No hablo ingles.’”

It was Minneapolis, some of us were grad students, I was a radio DJ, there were a couple of Army vets, we were a tight bunch squeezed in the booth, ambitious, reasonably serious, but there was a patter of jokes to remind us — life is good, don’t take your troubles too seriously — and I miss that tightness. It was a booth for six and we were eight or nine because we really wanted to be there.

So what happened to joke-telling?

For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but nobody laughs.

I’m not giving up. I was on the phone with a pal who’s in chemo and we spent 58 minutes telling jokes back and forth, including the one about the priest asking the widow, “Did your husband have any last request?” and she said, “Yes, he asked me to put down the gun.” The pal laughed so hard she almost split a seam. Later she called me back to tell me one more. Herschel was swept out to sea by a tidal wave and Mama cried out, “God, you can’t do that to my boy! Bring him back!” and another wave washes Herschel back and Mama cries, “Thank you, God” and then looks at Herschel and looks up at the sky — “He was wearing a hat!” I’ve heard that joke many times and I’m starting to get it. A guy needs a hat.

Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago

The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.

So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.

I relaxed in the backseat as we inched through the 70s and I remembered the day — I think it was in 1971 — when I flew to New York from Minnesota and got a room at a fleabag hotel, the Seymour, on 44th, which I chose, thinking of Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” a book I loved lavishly in college, and the next day I walked around the block to 25 West 43rd Street and took the elevator up to the 17th floor to the office of Roger Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker who had bought some stories of mine, the dream of every college writer in America at the time. Back then, I was living in a rented farmhouse near Freeport, Minnesota, just one more impoverished 27-year-old, and I spent the money he sent me for the stories on a flight to New York, where, after telling me how much he liked my stuff, he took me across the street to the Algonquin Hotel for lunch. I felt like the King of the Hill. I think it was one of the most magnificent days of my life, that and the day a nurse handed me my tiny naked daughter in 1997 and my 80th birthday last year when she, my wife Jenny, and I ate breakfast on the porch of a little summer house in Connecticut.

To me, this impromptu recollection of magnificence, while sitting in a guru-driven taxi going 3 mph in Manhattan, is the very embodiment of happiness. I’m a Midwesterner and we’re brought up to recollect our transgressions and wrong turns and here I was, having stupidly chosen taxi over subway, coming late to an important appointment, and that day in 1971 came back, crossing 43rd with a great editor to lunch where he told me that a New Yorker “first reader” named Mary D. Kierstead had pulled my stories off the ”slush pile,” the stack of unsolicited fiction, and sent it upstairs to him. Had she not done that, I imagine I might be an old cabdriver myself these days, or maybe a short-order cook, or a parking lot attendant, but instead my dream of writerdom came true, thanks to an angel named Mary and Roger Angell.

“So what happened when you finally got to the lunch?” you’re wondering. I was somewhat late, they were understanding, I made my pitch, they listened, we had a nice lunch, crab cakes and soup for me, and I could sense that around the room other pitches were being made and you could tell who was who — the pitcher was leaning forward, the pitchee was leaning back. My pitch was caught and they agreed to think about it and we shook hands and parted.

It was about a book project, of course, and at the age of 81, the outcome is not so crucial as Mary Kierstead’s rescue of my stories fifty years ago. I believe in the book I pitched, I really and truly do believe the world needs this book, especially with a liar and crook headed for the White House: this makes beauty all the more important.

But the high point of the day was the cab ride in the parking lot, being late due to my own blunder, and being at peace with it, and remembering the beauty of 1971. Thank you, Ms. Kierstead, wherever you may be.

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

December 9, 2023

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

Town Hall, New York City

Town Hall, New York City

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Town Hall in New York City with Elle Dehn, Heather Masse, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Fred Newman and Tim Russell.

January 11, 2024

Thursday

7:30 p.m.

Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN

Nashville, TN

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Nashville with Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Rich Dworsky, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Sue Scott, Fred Newman and Tim Russell.

January 13, 2024

Saturday

7:30 p.m.

McCain Auditorium, Manhattan, KS

Manhattan, KS

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to the McCain Auditorium in Manhattan, Kansas with our favorite regulars, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

January 21, 2024

Sunday

7:00 p.m.

Ashwaubenon PAC, Green Bay, WI

Green Bay, WI

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Green Bay, WI. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon.

buy tickets

February 10, 2024

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

Kravis Center, West Palm Beach, FL

West Palm Beach, FL

Garrison Keillor brings his A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary tour to West Palm Beach with our favorite regulars, Aoife O’Donovan, Christine DiGiallonardo, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

February 23, 2024

Friday

8:00 p.m.

The Grand 1894 Opera House, Galveston, TX

Galveston, TX

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, TX with our favorite regulars, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

February 25, 2024

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

ACL Live at The Moody Theater, Austin, TX

Austin, TX

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, TX with our favorite regulars, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

March 24, 2024

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

Wilson Center Cape Fear Community College, Wilmington, NCX

Wilmington, NC

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Wilson Center at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, NC with our favorite regulars, Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

March 26, 2024

Tuesday

7:30 p.m.

Peace Concert Hall, SC

Greenville, SC

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Greenville, SC with our favorite regulars, Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

March 28, 2024

Thursday

8:00 p.m.

Carolina Theatre, Greensboro, NC

Greensboro, NC

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Greensboro, NC. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets
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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, December 7, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, December 7, 2023

It’s Willa Cather’s birthday, born near Winchester, Virginia (1873). She and her family moved to Nebraska when Willa was 8, and she grew up in Red Cloud. Her books include My Antonia (1918), and O Pioneers! (1913).

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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, December 6, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, December 6, 2023

It was on this day in 1917 that an accidental explosion destroyed a quarter of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the height of World War I, and Halifax was serving as an important port city for many of the ships carrying supplies for the battlefront in Europe. One of the ships coming into the port that day was a French munitions ship called the Mont Blanc, carrying 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of other explosives, as well as 10 tons of cotton and 35 tons of highly flammable chemicals stored in vats on the ship’s upper deck.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, December 5, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, December 5, 2023

It’s the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, “I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it. … I thought about the atomic bomb a lot … after there was one.” At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation she heard.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, December 4, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, December 4, 2023

It’s the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague (1875). He spent most of his life traveling, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. And since he only wrote in spurts, he supported himself by getting rich noblewomen to fall in love with him and support his work. He apparently wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, but women found irresistible because he was so romantic and poetic.

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A Prairie Home Companion:  December 9, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion: December 9, 2006

A New York Prairie Home 2005 classic with Irish traditional vocalist Karan Casey, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and a titan of the jazz tuba Howard Johnson and Gravity.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, December 3, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, December 3, 2023

It’s the birthday of writer Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Naleca Korzeniowski, in Berdyczew, Poland (1857). He joined the French marine service when he was sixteen, and spent the next four years shipping out of Marseilles. Next he went to England, shipping out as an ordinary seaman and working his way up to master in the British Merchant Service. When the novelist John Galsworthy was one of his passengers, he showed him a manuscript he had been working on.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, December 2, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, December 2, 2023

It’s the birthday of soprano Maria Callas, born Maria Anna Sophia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos, in Brooklyn, NY (1923). Her father shortened the family name soon after Maria was born. At 11 she sang “La Paloma” on a radio contest. Her parents separated when she was 13, and her mother took her back to Greece to live, where she attended the Athens National Conservatory. Her first important role was that of Tosca, one of the many with which she would be identified. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1956, in the role of Norma. She’s the subject of two plays Terence McNally: The Lisbon Traviata and Master Class.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, December 1, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, December 1, 2023

On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. She was an assistant tailor at a Montgomery, Alabama department store, and a longtime civil rights activist. She often walked home from work in order to avoid the segregated buses, but on this day she was too tired. A boycott ensued that went on for 381 days: it ended segregation on Montgomery’s buses, and heralded the start of the modern civil rights movement.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, November 30, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, November 30, 2023

It’s the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835). He left school at 12 to work as a printer, then as a riverboat pilot. During the Civil War, he went to Nevada where he tried gold mining and then edited a newspaper. When he was 29 he went to San Francisco as a reporter, and achieved his first success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865). He took a trip to Europe and the Holy Land, and described his experiences in The Innocents Abroad (1869). When he returned to America, he settled in the East, married Olivia Langdon, and had four children. They built a distinctive house in Hartford, Connecticut, and he won wide popularity with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and later, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, November 29, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, November 29, 2023

It’s the birthday of novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, born Clive Staples Lewis in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He grew up in a big house out in the country. He said: “I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

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Writing

Bringing people along with me 101

So the news is out. Harvard will be offering a course on Taylor Swift in the spring. The professor, who is 52, is a Swift fan and describes her interest in Swift — “she’s someone who worked to become herself and makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people.” I suppose you could say the same about Shakespeare, though he did alienate some people who then wound up in engineering or medicine.

In the course, Swift’s work will be compared to other writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.” Students will write three term papers but there may not be a final exam. “I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun.”

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Singing to the Lord to save Herschel

The Communion hymn in church last Sunday was “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” which I cherish for the lines “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:
serve him with mirth,” which is the only time comedy is mentioned in our hymnal, I do believe. There’s joy and rejoicing and gladness, but the thought of serving our Creator with jokes is rather rare and, I think, beautiful. I’m not sure I know exactly what joy is but I do know the one about the engineer who sees another engineer rolling a little pellet between his fingers and saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is more rubbery or more like plastic,” and the first engineer takes the pellet from him and says, “There is plasticity to it but there’s a viscosity, a sort of liquidity too” and he puts it in his mouth and says, “And there’s a salinity to it as well. Where did you get it?” The other engineer says, “Out of my nose.”

A joke is a friendly transaction between two persons and even if it falls flat, it conveys a generous spirit. I have four friends who still tell me jokes, three men, one woman, all of them old enough to remember the Helen Keller jokes (How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.) and the lightbulb jokes (How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Define “light.”) or the “What’s the difference” jokes (What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.) and the “What did the blank say to the blank” (What did the maxi-pad say to the fart? You are the wind beneath my wings.) and double-amputee jokes (“What do you call a man with no arms or legs hanging on your wall?” Art.) and old guy jokes (Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. Old actuaries never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.) and the Ole and Lena jokes (So Ole died and Lena called up the undertaker to come get him, and he said, “I’ll be there in an hour,” and she said, “I’m having my hair done in half an hour, how about I drag him out to the curb and you can pick him up there?”). And there were Viagra jokes but they petered out.

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Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago

The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.

So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.

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My personal journey toward self-minimization

I went to see “La Bohème” the other day, such a great opera, it doesn’t matter that the singers aren’t, and let me just say this — at the beginning of the first and last acts, set in the garret, you’ve got Rodolfo and Marcello and the guys and there’s no story, no purpose, nothing but vague bohemianism until Mimi shows up and then the lights come on, and it’s like that in life too. My opinion, okay? Message plays that preach justice and equality are okay for college sophomores but the real story is about two opposites who fall in love and she’s charming and he’s jealous and they come crosswise and hurt each other deeply but in the end they’re tied to each other. Lovers are real, families are real. Demonstrators, not so much.

These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of indigenous peoples. If I’d been given the NBA for Brief Amusing Essays, I would’ve needed to accept it on behalf of recovering fundamentalists or overlooked Midwesterners or the marginalized octogenarian and nothing would be said about literary quality.

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Thank goodness for Minnesota

Winter is here, people, and let’s face it — somebody has to live up here in the north, we can’t all sit around Mirage-a-Lounge, Florida, and play golf every day, somebody has to raise the soybeans and defend the border against the insatiable Canadians, and so here we are, putting on our puffy coats that make us look fat and stocking caps that destroy our hairstyle and heading out into the frigid blast and going to work and getting important stuff done, and not passing nuclear secrets around to our pals at the club or doubling the size of our penthouse on loan applications. I don’t know any Minnesotans who do that sort of thing.

When Hubert Humphrey was LBJ’s vice president, I’ll bet you anything he didn’t sit around Murray’s steakhouse in Minneapolis and show Canadian tycoons the formula for the H-bomb.

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Finding harmony in the midst of chaos

I flew into New York last week into JFK, which would not be my choice but that’s where the plane landed. LaGuardia has been remade into a marble palace and JFK is an obstacle course to find out if you really really really want to come to New York or if you might rather go to Cleveland. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and that’s JFK, huddled masses yearning to claim their baggage and find a taxi.

Your best strategy in dismal circumstances is militant cheerfulness. You say “Thank you” and “God bless you” to anyone who holds a door for you or lets you pass, you ask the taxi starter how he’s doing today, you address the cabbie as “My friend” and it really does brighten your day.

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“Stand up for yourself,” I keep thinking to myself

I ate breakfast with a woman last week who, in the course of twenty minutes, sent four cups of coffee back to the kitchen because they didn’t meet her standards, a drip-brewed cup with milk, two lattes, and a latte with oat milk. (Her name does not begin with J.)

I’m not a newcomer to this world and I have never met a person with such exquisitely fine taste in the coffee realm. Wine, yes. Coffee, no. I say this with all due admiration. It’d be so easy to reproach her, what with wars and starvation and natural disasters and global warming and doxing and polls showing that a majority of Americans support blatant dishonesty and corruption, but I don’t go down the shaming road.

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The comedian’s thoughts at the wedding

I went to a wedding in California last week, a beautiful wedding out under the eucalyptus trees, a rare pleasure for me, being at the age when friends are not vowing “till death us do part” but watching death part them, and it was fun. It being California, the men were very mellow, the women were all glamorous in bright strapless gowns and hugged each other and cried, “Oh my god, you look fabulous,” and effusiveness was the rule. The men were all socially engaged, tolerant of differences, committed to social justice. The parents stood up and gave speeches praising the bride and groom so lavishly, it made me wonder if the couple had been diagnosed with a fatal disease.

I’m from Minnesota where weddings are solemn and parents do not speak admiringly of their children. Not lavishly anyway. They worry. They wonder if the marriage will last. They wonder if the guests are having a good time. In Minnesota, it’s hard to tell.

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On the phone with my people

A balmy, even summery, fall in Minnesota and then suddenly snow fell and my aging homeowner pals back home are reconsidering their options. The supply of teenage labor to shovel walks is spotty and you hear horror stories about ice buildup in the attic, water dripping from the ceiling, tons of ice inside the roof because the vapor barrier was put in wrong, and then of course there is the ever-present danger of slipping on a frosty sidewalk and twisting your back as you fall and something cracks and suddenly you are on the waiting list for Cripple Creek Care Center. A friend told me about a squirrel who’d climbed down the chimney to get warm and fell into the old coal furnace and tore around the house in a panic, scattering soot everywhere until they finally chased him out: “I got a .22 and I could’ve shot him but he was moving pretty fast and anyway the kids were watching and they were cheering for the squirrel.”

These are true Minnesotans, stalwarts, stoics, not summer soldiers, and the thought of decamping for the Florida swamps or the Arizona desert is for them something like gender transition or conversion to Zen Lutheranism, something to be postponed as long as possible.

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The memory is alive with old roots

The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.

I’d gone there to give a speech — don’t remember the occasion, only that afterward, a man in a shiny blue suit said to me, “It’s so hard to get good speakers to come to Saginaw.” And it wasn’t clear if this was a compliment or an insult.

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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.

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 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.”

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