Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I went to the Met recently to see Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and hang out with 3,800 very well-dressed patrons to see a passionate story about political tyranny but mainly to see the soprano Lise Davidsen who is worth the price of admission and more, especially when surrounded by the Met chorus, mostly men, imprisoned for political crimes but nonetheless in gorgeous voice. As for Lise, architects have designed enormous opera houses and finally they’ve designed a singer whose voice fills it so you feel it even in the cheaper seats.
I like “Fidelio” because it’s Beethoven so it’s got soul and also the story is simple, there aren’t a lot of counts and countesses to keep track of or Wagnerian goddesses, and I think German sings better than Italian, it sounds more like my kind of folks. It has warmth. And there’s no need to bother with the English subtitles: Leonore dresses up as a man so she can rescue her guy Florestan from being hanged. That’s all you need to know. There’s some growling and hollering by some basses and baritones and there’s a kerfuffle with another soprano but when the 6’2” Leonore comes onstage you know you’re at an opera and you know what’s up. The tenor is going to be strangled if the soprano doesn’t save him. And when she strides across the stage and lets fly with that powerful loving tone that stuns even the brass section, you know she’s up to the job. This is no Mimi or Madame Butterfly, this is a Norwegian lyric dramatic soprano who’s pregnant with twins and canceling her schedule to deliver them –– “Fidelio” is her finale until 2026, and here she is singing so gorgeously while carrying two embryonic people — sometimes you see her put a hand on her abdomen as if to say, “Stille, stille.” This is a woman to reckon with. I married a woman like her. So have other men. After Lise delivers the twins, I wish she’d take over the Democratic Party.
Read MoreIt is highly informative to watch another marriage in a moment of stress and see how calmly they handle it compared to the hysterics that I’d go through in similar circumstances: 6:20 a.m., a nephew and his wife are assembling their bags to catch a cab to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight and the guy suddenly can’t find his wallet and so the search begins, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, as I stand watching in my pajamas — the two are guests in our apartment — and it amazes me how calm and cheerful they are. “Are you sure you saw it this morning?” she asks, matter-of-factly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he says and because he is a tech wizard, not a fiction writer, she takes him at his word.
I’ve been in his situation numerous times when I proceeded rapidly from mounting despair to self-loathing and having to be institutionalized in a locked ward and tranquilized, but this young couple doesn’t go there. The search proceeds. The wife makes a few helpful suggestions in a calm voice, no shrieking, no wild hand gestures. Minutes pass. No panic. The husband unzips a pocket on his knapsack and there is the wallet. All is well. No divorce lawyer got involved, no therapist, priest, or psychic.
Read MoreI’ve had an easy life, like canoeing down a river, one mile leads to the next, Tuesday follows Monday, obey the rules, portage around dams, don’t approach alligators unless their eyes are closed, and don’t argue with men with large eyebrows carrying shotguns.
I am a writer, it’s as simple as that. I wake up in the morning with an urge to use English rather than learn a new one and to do as Mrs. Moehlenbrock said: check for mistakes and read it aloud to hear if it makes sense. I was only ten at the time and she made me feel important as if I had something to say. I retain this confidence, despite having written plenty of dumb stuff. J.D. Salinger knew how to stop; I don’t. Being a writer by habit means that I spend time thinking to myself, which disturbs many women, who think I’m embittered, depressed, bored, or wishing someone would amuse me with anecdotes from the country club, but I’m not: I’m thinking. I’ve loved several women who didn’t understand that thinking would stop if I started talking. This happened on many occasions. Brilliant ideas one moment, small talk the next. But now I’ve found a woman who is up to the job: she is a Reader. She likes to be quiet for long periods of time without my engaging her in book club-type conversation about Themes and Interpretations nor the phone ringing and our offspring asking if we will stay at the hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, for two nights or three and will she have her own room. I can accommodate having a reader in the same room I’m thinking in, and my only qualm is simply this: why do I never see her reading one of her husband’s books and chuckling melodiously?
Read MoreI once walked down Wabasha Avenue in downtown St. Paul and was stopped by an old wino who asked for something to eat and when I gave him a couple bucks, he said, “You’re Garrison Keillor, you can do better than that.” The man had bad habits but his thinking was clear. I was a nobody from Anoka who got his picture on the cover of Time and my notoriety should mean profits for the needy. But that was many years ago and fame fades fast. I haven’t been recognized by a wino for at least thirty years.
There’s a new and larger crop of instant celebs every year and if I got drunk and needed dough, I wouldn’t know Naomi Nobody from Louise Illustrious, due to my not watching TV except for baseball all those years. I was too busy being well known but it’s okay, ordinary daily life can be fascinating too.
Read MoreChurch was fairly full Sunday, the second in Lent, and I stood in back before the organ prelude, enjoying a cup of coffee and a couple introduced themselves, Tom and Jean, visiting from Washington, D.C. Interesting people. He is newly retired from the Defense Department, responsible for maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, and they were visiting New York simply because they like the city. I didn’t introduce myself: I like the city because I’m anonymous here.
So we sat together in the third pew and I read the bulletin and the Gospel reading caught my eye, from Luke, the verse in which the Lord gathers His own like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, so I scribbled a limerick:
Read MoreI’ve gotten a rave report from Bayfield, Wisconsin, that relatives of a friend slaughtered a hog and put on a pork feast for neighbors and that fresh pork compared to store-bought is like gin compared to turpentine, but I dare not mention this in my own home because my love looks down on pork due to fairy tales she was read as a child. Those stories omitted the fact that pigs are omnivores and will devour a rat or lizard as readily as plants and flowers, and does the size of the prey place the Three Pigs on a higher moral plane than I with my bratwurst? Does a lizard not have feelings? Is a baby bunny not capable of loyalty?
I will say this for our Current Occupant, he has never come out against pork — he feasts on it and so does his man Musk — a herd is but a appetizer, billions of dollars’ worth of hog go down that gullet, he devours the tusks too, and the Man is the first Occupant in my lifetime who’s taken a swing at the Canadians, who due to their northernness consider themselves uppermost but who are trying to transport their chaos south — five political parties, two languages, an unsingable national anthem, round bacon — by way of a porous border.
Read MoreI became a cheerful person when I was in my twenties and got a job in radio. I’d been a mediocre student and was trying to be a poet but was averse to poverty so I needed a job and I landed the early morning shift because nobody else wanted to get up at 4 a.m. I come from somber fundamentalist stock, but I knew my job was to be lighthearted on cold dark Minnesota mornings, which is sort of like being a chaplain on Death Row, and I learned to impersonate lightheartedness and got good at it. And now I’ve been doing it for sixty years and actually love it.
I did a show at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, last week that was one of the happiest of my long career, had a couple wonderful hours with a thousand Kansans, many of whom may have voted for this disaster of a president and his tycoon in the black cap and shades who’s running the government. But we didn’t talk about that. We sang “My country ’tis of thee” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, including the verse about the circling camps and the dews and damps and dim and flaring lamps. We omitted political commentary entirely.
Read MoreAs we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.
We’re living in Mencken’s world now. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Read MorePlease tell me that our current Occupant is not going to take over the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and that the Met will continue to do opera and not celebrity tribute shows and Lincoln’s statue will not be given a movable jaw to speak posts from Truth Social and Cooperstown will not switch to enshrining owners of ball clubs.
Let him have the Kennedy Center and turn it into a country pop dinner theater with a motel and casino but please let the Smithsonian continue keeping history and not be purged of history the Occupant doesn’t care for.
Read MoreI seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.
The genuflection disturbs my fundamentalist ancestors. I can hear them mutter, “Oh please, not that again.” Genuflection they regard as Catholic, papist, alien to the pure faith, and my Anglican church they consider decaffeinated Catholicism, and though I love my ancestors, I tell them to shove off. I know my own heart. This is my home.
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