The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, March 30, 2021


When I Was Broke
by Jonathan Potter

When I was broke and money spent
I pawned my board to pay the rent;
To buy some beer to ease my ache
I sold my car for pity’s sake
And walked to where the road was bent.

When darkness hit and made a dent
Against whatever light had meant,
I laid down hearts and let them break
When I was broke.

When I awoke not to repent,
The sunlight seemed not heaven sent
But blinking in I let it make
My heart lick frosting from the cake
That someone left outside my tent
When I was broke.

 

Jonathan Potter, “When I Was Broke” from Tulips for Elsie. Published by Korrektiv Press, © Jonathan Potter. Used by permission.


It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote Black Beauty (1877), Anna Sewell (books by this author), born in Yarmouth, England (1820). When she was 14 years old she fell while running and injured her ankles so badly that she had trouble walking for the rest of her life. She became dependent on horses for transportation and drove her father to and from work every day on the family’s horse-drawn carriage.

She didn’t start writing Black Beauty until the final years of her life when she was confined to her house because of her ankle injuries. Black Beauty is subtitled “The autobiography of a horse, Translated from the original equine.” It’s narrated by the horse himself who was based on one of the horses Anna grew up with. The novel is full of detailed passages about how to care for horses, and it was largely thanks to Sewell that several laws against the mistreatment of horses were established in England.


It’s the birthday of the playwright Seán O’Casey (books by this author), born in Dublin, Ireland (1880). His father died when he was a boy, leaving behind a family of 13, and O’Casey struggled with poor eyesight. He left school at the age of 14, not long after he had finally taught himself to read and write. He went to work in the stockroom of a hardware store, then as a clerk, then a manual laborer, and during these years he fell in love with reading. He would buy or steal books every chance he could, and he had an amazing memory, so he could recite long passages from Shakespeare or Whitman to whoever would listen.

Over the years, O’Casey became interested in the Irish nationalist cause and in the struggles of working-class Dubliners. He taught himself the Irish language, and he learned to play a traditional Irish instrument called the uilleann pipes. He joined a pipe band that traveled around the countryside, and in a small town called Lusk he met Thomas Ashe, a school principal who had founded a pipe band there. Ashe was a nationalist revolutionary and he went on to fight in the 1916 Easter Rising, an uprising intended to end British rule of Ireland. Ashe was imprisoned and died in a hunger strike.

O’Casey was already dabbling in writing plays when Ashe died in 1917 and his anger at his friend’s death inspired an outpouring of writing, and his first published work. He wrote two poems, “Lament for Thomas Ashe” and “Thomas Ashe,” as well as two prose pamphlets. He wrote: “As you fought the good fight so we’ll fight to be free, / ‘Gainst all the vain pomp of their princes and powers, / Made strong by the thought of dear vengeance for thee!”

He continued to write, focusing on drama. The drama club arm of O’Casey’s pipe band commissioned a play from him, but once he had finished The Frost in the Flower they refused to stage it, fearing that it too obviously satirized some of their own leaders. O’Casey submitted it to the famous Abbey Theatre and they also turned it down, but encouraged him to keep writing. O’Casey wrote another play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), the story of a poor poet who is mistaken for an Irish Republican Army fighter and decides to go along with the confusion since it is getting him attention from a pretty woman. This was the first of three plays known as O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy.” All three were performed at the Abbey. The second was Juno and the Paycock (1924), and the third was The Plough and the Stars (1926).

The Plough and the Stars was set during the Easter Rising and some felt that O’Casey was too negative toward the nationalist heroes of the struggle — he mocked their leader as bloodthirsty, and showed the terrible effects that the violence had on working-class Dubliners. Others disliked his frank attitude toward sex and religion. For the first performance a huge crowd lined up outside the theater to get in, and afterward the audience shouted for the playwright to come on stage and gave him a standing ovation. But a few nights later, when the character of a prostitute showed up in Act II, the audience actually rioted. W.B. Yeats, who was attending the play, stood up and reprimanded his fellow audience members, telling them that they had disgraced themselves.

O’Casey went to London to help with a production of Juno and the Paycock, and he fell in love there and got married. Soon after, the Abbey Theatre rejected O’Casey’s next play, The Silver Tassie. Furious, O’Casey decided to remain in England, and he never returned.

His other works include The End of the Beginning (1937), Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), and Niall: A Lament (1991).


It’s the birthday of the artist who wrote, “To do good work, one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe, and drink one’s coffee in peace”: Vincent van Gogh, born in Groot-Zundert, Holland, in 1853. Not much is known about his childhood, except that he was one of six children, a quiet boy, not especially drawn to artistic pursuits. He worked for a time in an art gallery in The Hague as a young man then left to follow in his clergyman father’s footsteps as a sort of missionary to the poor. His behavior was erratic, but his family supported him as best they could. And while he didn’t last too long as an evangelist, he felt a kinship with the working classes — an affinity demonstrated again and again in his painting.

It was his brother Theo who urged Vincent to become an artist. Vincent had never had any formal training, nor displayed any overt talent, and he was doubtful about his chances for success, as were his parents. But Theo was persistent and he would prove to be Vincent’s unfailing source of financial, emotional, and artistic support. Vincent taught himself to draw, and later took lessons. By 1886, he moved to Paris to live with Theo and discovered that the muted palette he had used in his early work was woefully out of date. He adapted without too much trouble to the more vibrant hues of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and it wasn’t long before he began to view color as the chief conveyer of emotion, even using it to illustrate abstract themes.

In 1888, he moved to the south of France, to Arles, in search of light and sun, hoping to form an artists’ colony with his friend Paul Gauguin. He began painting sunflowers to decorate Gauguin’s bedroom, and later Gauguin would write of their time together:

“In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out against a yellow background; the ends of their stalks bathe in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In one corner of the painting, the painter’s signature: Vincent. And the yellow sun, coming through the yellow curtains of my room, floods all this flowering with gold, and in the morning, when I wake up in my bed, I have the impression that it all smells very good. Oh yes! he loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth. When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? He, taking his yellowest brush, wrote on the suddenly purple wall: I am whole in spirit. I am the Holy Spirit.”

He wrote to Theo constantly from Arles, describing the landscape and his work in vivid terms. In 1888 he described his work on his painting “Night Café”:

“I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. In short, I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis XV-green and Veronese green with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern.”

Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum in 1888. His behavior is consistent with what we now call manic depression, or bipolar disorder, and he also suffered seizures due to temporal lobe epilepsy. He worked at an incredible pace during this time, although painting for long stretches was difficult for him, and he produced “Starry Night,” one of his most famous works. Two years later he left the asylum but his frenetic pace continued and he produced a painting almost daily. He believed himself a failure, although he never gave up hope of success; he wrote to Theo:

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”

He walked out one July afternoon in 1890 and shot himself, dying of the wound two days later. Theo died six months later, and the two are buried side by side in Auvers-sur-Oise.


On this day in 1858 Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia patented the first pencil to have an attached eraser. The eraser-tipped pencil is still something of an American phenomenon; most European pencils are still eraserless. The humble pencil has a long and storied history, going back to the Roman stylus, which was sometimes made of lead, and why we still call the business end of the pencil the “lead” even though it’s been made of nontoxic graphite since 1564.

Pencils were first mass-produced in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662, and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century really allowed the manufacture to flourish. Before he became known for Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau and his father were famous for manufacturing the hardest, blackest pencils in the United States. Edison was fond of short pencils that fit neatly into a vest pocket, readily accessible for the jotting down of ideas. John Steinbeck loved the pencil and started every day with 24 freshly sharpened ones; it’s said that he went through 300 pencils in writing East of Eden (1952), and used 60 a day on The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Cannery Row (1945).

Our common pencils are hexagonal to keep them from rolling off the table, and they’re yellow because the best graphite came from China, and yellow is traditionally associated with Chinese royalty. A single pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, or write around 45,000 words. And if you make a mistake, thanks to Hymen Lipman, you’ve probably got an eraser handy.

 

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

On the Road to Mandalay (click image)
That Time of Year softcover by Garrison Keillor!

That Time of Year coverThe "revised" softcover version of  Garrison Keillor's memoir, That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life will be available wherever you get your books on March 7, 2023.  It is available for pre-order in our shop now.

From the author:
I sat down and looked at my memoir THAT TIME OF YEAR when it came out and was put off by the sadness, the opening chapter about how much I missed doing “A Prairie Home Companion,” so I sat down to fix it. That’s why a writer shouldn’t read his own work. But I did and so I sat down to cheer it up a little and wrote a new first paragraph.

I am a Minnesotan, born, bred, well-fed, self-repressed, bombast averse, sprung from the middle of North America, raised along the Mississippi River, which we spelled in rhythm, M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i, a sweet incantation along with the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 and our school fight song about v-i-c-t-o-r-y. We sang it with a sense of irony, knowing we weren’t winners in the eyes of New York or L.A. or even our football rivals, but we were proud of our North Star State, the flatness, the fertile fields, the culture of kindness and modesty, our ferocious winters, when white people become even whiter, and to top it all off, we were the origin of the Mighty Miss. Wisconsin wasn’t, nor North the

Dakota. It was us and strings of barges came up to St.Paul to haul our corn and beans to a hungry world.

I wrote a new preface and a cheerier first chapter, which came (literally) from the heart I having undergone heart surgery at Mayo to replace a leaky mitral valve and I felt good. I did this for readers who missed the hardcover edition, to give them a lift, and also myself. The revision led to SERENITY AT 70, GAIETY AT 80 and a new book in progress, CHEERFULNESS. It’s a happy phenomenon, an author still ambitious at 80, and I give credit to my wife Jenny. If I were teaching Creative Writing today, I’d teach my students the importance of marrying the right person.

Garrison Keillor

From the Publisher:
With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story.

In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty years, 750 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renee Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation.

He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”

 

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The six-minute video speaks louder than words

When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes. An expert operation carried out by dedicated public servants. And when you watch members of Congress tiptoe away from their duty to deal with the danger those men faced, you see cowardice in a pure form.

Everyone should look at that six-minute video of men moving down the hall of the Covenant School. Body cameras were meant to guard against police brutality and instead they show pure professional courage — they don’t stop to confer, discuss options — lives are in danger, terrified children in lockdown, and they run forward toward gunfire shouting “Police!” and giving the shooter a chance to surrender. This is something most of us would be incapable of. As for the heartlessness of politicians who decline to say what needs to be said and then carry it out, the language lacks the contempt that’s needed.

What horrifies a person is the coolness with which this is accepted. The Nashville congressman who has sent out Christmas cards with a picture of his family around the tree holding weapons and who said that as a father he was “heartbroken” but that we shouldn’t rush to conclusions and there is a larger mental health issue involved that requires more study. Well, if someone should shoot a congressman I might be heartbroken but I also think there is a larger issue of the callousness of public officials whose heartbreak seems routine and who get to the “but we shouldn’t rush” much too quickly.

I am also waiting for the progressives on the Minneapolis City Council and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to express full public remorse for their “defund the police” idiocy after the George Floyd killing by patrolman Chauvin in 2020 and the riots that terribly damaged the city. It still hasn’t recovered. If any of them look at the six-minute video of Nashville cops storming the school, running toward an active shooter, her gun going off, cops prepared to take a bullet to save terrified innocent people, I’d be very interested to hear their thoughts about defunding.

I’m an outsider. My dad didn’t hunt nor did any of my uncles. They grew up on a farm. A gun was kept to use against varmints who’d come after the chickens. Grandpa Keillor woke his kids up one winter night to go out and see a silver timber wolf howling at the moon. The wolf wasn’t bothering him and he didn’t shoot it.

After the shooting, I had dinner with a friend who said, “My granddads were both hunters, one a Republican, one a Democrat. They’d be horrified by what we’re seeing today. People walking in and buying an AR-15 as casually as you’d buy a sofa. This isn’t a hunting weapon, this is designed to kill people. Hunters aren’t the problem. Hunting is a sport. You want to make a clean shot in order to gather meat. This is a deadly weapon that’d destroy the meat. This is a problem of crazy people who on an impulse walk into a gun shop and walk out with an instrument of brute force. It’s got to stop.”

The press needs to tell the full story and it hasn’t yet. The woman who did the shooting apparently gave plenty of signals and there is some morning-after wisdom to be gathered from her friends and family. It’d be good to hear from the gun shop salesperson. This shooting didn’t happen in a vacuum. And gun collectors — does their fascination with deadly weaponry now strike them as ever so slightly BIZARRE? And the head of the school, Katherine Koonce, who gave her life for her kids: there is a genuine story here. The 2024 election is a non-story. There’s no there there.

The six minutes are real. Look at the video. And the mayor of Nashville, John Cooper, who said, “Let us praise our first responders. Fourteen minutes, fourteen minutes, I believe under fire, running to gunfire.” An elected official who says the exact right thing. Remarkable.

 

A plate of rigatoni with friends

The newspaper sets out to cover the full gamut of experience, from the Personals (Man, 45, seeks younger woman for mutual adventure and comfort) to the 50th anniversary party, George and Francine in their old tux and sparkly suit, and also the Letters of the Lovelorn (“He flirts with old friends of mine and our children’s teachers.”). If the rich and famous wind up in divorce court, the story can get very thick, and if one lover shoots another, the story becomes a novel. What the newspaper can’t cover very well is ordinary happiness because there is much too much of it and for us happy people, that is completely proper. You want to be able to eat your eggs and hash browns and sausage in the Chatterbox Café without a man with a pad and pencil interviewing you as to the cause of your good temper.

One cause is that you look back at your mistakes and know for a fact that you won’t do anything that dumb again.

The world is in constant crisis, the prospects for catastrophe are ever favorable, the cruelty of dictators and the confusions of democracy are well-known, but as one gets older and even older than that, the front page starts to fade and you cherish your moments of ignorance, such as when I sit with Buddy and Carl and the world devolves to just us.

A table of women is thirty feet away and they are shrieking and all talking at once and we men do not shriek. A shriek would indicate a need for CPR. We sit and gently rag on each other and inquire as to each other’s beloved grandchildren, not mentioning the son in rehab or the QAnon sister.

We reminisce about our impecunious youth and the crummy jobs that put us through college and we avoid politics because we’re all wishy-washy liberals so what’s to talk about?

I love these lunches. Wish there were one every day. But life went off in other directions and the old gang is scattered and some came to a sad end. Our classmate Ben was electrocuted fifty years ago while installing a water pump in his basement and Buddy mentions that Ben’s daughter called him to ask about her dad — she was five when he died and hardly remembers him — and Buddy lauded Ben’s good qualities, not mentioning that he died because his little daughter, wanting to help Daddy, had plugged in the power cord to the pump. Life is perilous. All the more reason to take pleasure in what’s left.

True friendship means not feeling obliged to impress each other and so we don’t. We do light sarcasm and gentle mutual deprecation, we’re old Midwestern guys, we see that we’re all in the same boat, the equality of old age prevails. Health is what matters, not money, not prestige.

Carl mentions that his miserable ex-brother-in-law died, a thief and a hustler, a bad father who ran off with another woman years ago and who, in his final illness, returned to the family he’d abandoned and they took him in. Carl says, “I’m tired of crazy people. I grew up with a bunch of them, drunks and sociopaths, narcissists, they were a blight on the lives of others. I hate craziness. If the SOB had come to my door, I would’ve shot him. Accidentally, but cleanly.”

Carl is a Democrat and Democrats aren’t allowed to say “I’m tired of crazy people” or talk approvingly of gun violence but we let him talk. The SOB was a blight on the lives of his children and at the age of 82 he threw himself on their mercy. A moment of silence. And then Buddy says, “So a guy went to his brother-in-law’s house to beg for help and the brother-in-law pulled a gun on him and the guy ran away and the brother-in-law chased him and he was getting closer so the guy reached back and grabbed some and threw it at him.”

I love this joke. “Grabbed what?” I say.

“Oh. It was there. A whole lot of it.”

Friendship is what it’s all about. What it’s always been about. As Mr. Trump awaits indictment on one or more of four different charges, I hope he has at least a couple of close personal friends. Not managers, lawyers, admirers. Friends. They know he’s guilty but they still love him and they’ll have lunch with him and he won’t rant and rave, just reminisce about his wretched father.

Music as a means of detecting a heart

At least once in your long and delicious life you owe it to yourself to go hear Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie” and don’t wait until you’re 80 as I did but finally last week went to hear the New York Philharmonic take us on this wild 90-minute roller-coaster ride in which Catholics are kidnapped and Baptists go Buddhist and you think in French and fly in a formation of geese and get a taste of molecular physics as horses go galloping down the aisles, and in the gorgeous slow passage “Garden of Sleeping Love” you will fall in love forever with the person next to you so be very careful where you sit. I sat next to my sweetheart and after years of thinking I was averse to modern music, here was a hymn to joy and time, movement, rhythm, life and death, with big Wagnerian chords, delicate intervals, a dozen percussionists, a genius pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and we’ve been happily married ever since. It’s not often a person gets to experience euphoria. For years I imagined alcohol could do the job if I could just find the right brand but eventually I gave up on that. Sometimes in church I’ve felt it. When I was 11 I got to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I sang the Dead’s “Attics of My Life” once with two women and got a little high from it. And one night before the Philharmonic I experienced it at the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street listening to Aoife O’Donovan and Hawktail and the phenom fiddler Brittany Haas and it made the big crowd go wild to see artists overcome gravity and simply float. Aoife and Messiaen, two transcendent tours on successive nights: it makes living in Manhattan worth the trouble and expense. You can eat expensive mediocre food in loud restaurants, almost get run over by e-scooters, deal with surly salesclerks, cabs stuck in dense traffic, extortionate rents, impenetrable bureaucracy, but the museums and trains and tulips in spring and the occasional transcendental experiences make up for it. Two nights of mind-blown beauty make me want to start my career all over again. But the world has changed, of course. Taylor Swift, the middle-aged 14-year-old, has kicked off another tour, taking self-absorption deeper than ever before in human history, standing on a stage in front of 70,000 fans who each identify deeply with her, saying, “Tonight is so special and you have led me to believe, by your being here, that it is special for you too and it’s so nice that this is mutual. I don’t know how to process this and the way that it’s making me feel right now.” Who in the entire history of show business has ever talked like this? A woman adoring her fans for their adoration. The iconic emptiness of it is phenomenal. How does she maintain her powerful insecurities despite being a billionaire? The mind is boggled. Did Elvis tell the crowd he was so overwhelmed by their coming to see him that he was confused by it? No, he was Elvis. But you walk out the door and across the street, into the park, and bubblegum disappears, and you’re among real people watching their kids, walking their dogs, jogging, looking at birds, reading the paper, enjoying city life. The city relieves you of the burden of narcissism. People look out for each other in the crowd, make way for the elderly, for people with kids, pay attention to the musicians playing under the trees. And then you remember that night at the Philharmonic, the moment the symphony ended, the maestro relaxed, and the crowd jumped to their feet to whoop and applaud. Messiaen is dead. He didn’t create a cult, he created a masterpiece, and it lives on. It can’t be played by any orchestra in town, it’s too ferocious, but in the right hands it is a priceless gift to the audience. Same with Brittany Haas. I’ve heard hundreds of fiddlers in my day, all with their virtues, and they strove hard to find something and she simply has got it in her pocket. She stands on their shoulders. She can do it all and a ballroom full of people got their socks knocked off. Messiaen and Haas, you hear the music, you don’t envy them or admire them, the music simply goes through you like radio waves and proves that you’re alive.

The longer you live, the better it gets

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment.

I came home from the Bowery to learn that a dear friend, Christine Jacobson, had died — amazement and mortality in one evening, and it’s a rare privilege to be aware of both, the beauty of life and the brevity. I look down from my balcony seat on the heads of young people excited by an artist and in their behalf I am worried about our country, with so many of our countrymen in favor of resuming the Civil War, with our history of trillions spent on wars in Vietnam and Iraq from which no benefit whatever was gained, but the exhilaration of the young is better than bourbon, more wonderful than wine.

Two young people called my wife recently and she put the phone on Speaker and I could hear the quiet joy in their voices that told the story, no explanation needed: she was pregnant, a child is on the way, she can feel it moving. Someday, I trust, my grandson will call me and I’ll hear that joy in his voice, and the Keillor line will extend into the 22nd century.

I am descended, in part, from William Cox, a British seaman aboard a man-o’-war docked in Charleston harbor in the early 19th century, who jumped ship, which was a capital offense, and made his way to Pennsylvania and settled among Quakers who were unlikely to turn a man in for desertion, and married Elizabeth Boggs who bore a daughter, Martha Ann, who married David Powell from whom my paternal grandmother, the one who beheaded the chicken, was descended. I sat by her bedside when she died in 1964, tended by her daughters. She and her twin sister had been railroad telegraphers, a rare thing for women in 1900 — they had learned Morse code as kids to give each other the answers to tests in school — and she became a schoolteacher and married my grandfather, who was on the school board.

Having a grandma who’d taught school was a big factor in my childhood: I wrote her letters and was very careful about spelling and grammar. I write this sentence now and I am aware of Grandma Dora. If I came home with a poor grade, my mother said, “Grandma would be disappointed,” and her possible disappointment weighed very heavily on me. I became a professional journalist at age 14, writing sports for a weekly newspaper, and my grandma read them and approved. And so a man finds his career.

I wrote a magazine piece about a radio show, which led me to start my own, which is how I came to know Aoife and I’d sung with her before, and now, sitting in the balcony, I was dazed with admiration. Admiration of her artistry and also of the openhearted enthusiasm of the crowd below. To me it’s all connected somehow, the desertion of Mr. Cox from the cruelty of life below decks, my good penmanship writing to Grandma, the old radio show, and the woman on stage bestowing enormous gifts on us all.

Mortality is what makes the gifts enormous. That afternoon I got a phone call from my old pal George, who is 87 and who announced that he’d been bounced out of hospice because he’d failed to die and was feeling very chipper about it. He recalled eulogies I’d given at funerals for our friends Arvonne and Martin and he seemed to be angling for me to eulogize him. I said, “George, if I do it for you then everyone’s going to want it for them. I used to think death was a tragedy and now it’s a trend.”

A necessary trend. There are people standing in the crowd who will need to sit down and we in the balcony need to make room for them.

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

March 31, 2023

Friday

7:30 p.m.

Avalon Theater, Grand Junction, CO

Grand Junction, CO

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

April 27, 2023

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.

April 29, 2023

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.

April 30, 2023

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 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

buy tickets
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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 31, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 31, 2023

Today is the 87th birthday of poet, novelist, and activist Marge Piercy. In 1976, she published “Woman on the Edge of Time,” a work of speculative science fiction about a working-class Latina woman who is committed to an insane asylum, and whose experiences with time travel lead her to understand that her actions will influence the direction of the future. It became regarded as a feminist classic of science fiction.

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

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

It’s the birthday of the artist who wrote, “To do good work, one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe, and drink one’s coffee in peace”: Vincent van Gogh, born in Groot-Zundert, Holland, in 1853.

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

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

It was on this day in 1944 that Anne Frank made the decision to rewrite her diary as an autobiography. She wrote: “I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the ‘Secret Annex’ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but whether I have real talent remains to be seen.”

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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, March 28, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, March 28, 2023

“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” –Nelson Algren born on this day in 1909.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, March 27, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, March 27, 2023

It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote “Happy Birthday to You,” Patty Smith Hill, born in Anchorage, Kentucky (1868). Most of her life was spent as a kindergarten teacher. Her song gained popularity before she copyrighted it. After copyright the song produced about $2 million in licensing revenue for years. In 2015 it finally entered the public domain.

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A Prairie Home Companion: April 1, 2000

A Prairie Home Companion: April 1, 2000

The 2000 Joke Show from New York City with Aly Bain & Phil Cunningham and Monteria Ivey.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, March 26, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, March 26, 2023

Today is the birthday of Robert Frost. Born in 1874, his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” was published in the New York Independent in 1894. His final work of poetry was published in 1964, the year after his death, “You Come Too.”

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The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, March 25, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, March 25, 2023

It’s the birthday of American short-story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). O’Connor had a short life, dying of lupus at the age of 39, but she profoundly influenced literature in the 20th century with dark stories about religion, redemption, sin, and guilt in the American South.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 24, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 24, 2023

It was on this day in 1882, German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch announced that he had found the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, historically one of the most dangerous and deadly diseases. Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize, in Physiology or Medicine, in 1905 for this work with tuberculosis.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, March 23, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, March 23, 2023

Today marks the first day in 1942 when the U.S. government began moving Japanese-Americans from their West Coast homes to internment camps. Between 110,000 and 120,000 people were forcibly relocated. Some Japanese-American men were drafted into the War even as their families remained incarcerated. The camps remained open until 1945.

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Writing

The six-minute video speaks louder than words

When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes. An expert operation carried out by dedicated public servants. And when you watch members of Congress tiptoe away from their duty to deal with the danger those men faced, you see cowardice in a pure form.

Everyone should look at that six-minute video of men moving down the hall of the Covenant School. Body cameras were meant to guard against police brutality and instead they show pure professional courage — they don’t stop to confer, discuss options — lives are in danger, terrified children in lockdown, and they run forward toward gunfire shouting “Police!” and giving the shooter a chance to surrender. This is something most of us would be incapable of. As for the heartlessness of politicians who decline to say what needs to be said and then carry it out, the language lacks the contempt that’s needed.

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A plate of rigatoni with friends

The newspaper sets out to cover the full gamut of experience, from the Personals (Man, 45, seeks younger woman for mutual adventure and comfort) to the 50th anniversary party, George and Francine in their old tux and sparkly suit, and also the Letters of the Lovelorn (“He flirts with old friends of mine and our children’s teachers.”). If the rich and famous wind up in divorce court, the story can get very thick, and if one lover shoots another, the story becomes a novel. What the newspaper can’t cover very well is ordinary happiness because there is much too much of it and for us happy people, that is completely proper. You want to be able to eat your eggs and hash browns and sausage in the Chatterbox Café without a man with a pad and pencil interviewing you as to the cause of your good temper.

One cause is that you look back at your mistakes and know for a fact that you won’t do anything that dumb again.

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Music as a means of detecting a heart

At least once in your long and delicious life you owe it to yourself to go hear Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie” and don’t wait until you’re 80 as I did but finally last week went to hear the New York Philharmonic take us on this wild 90-minute roller-coaster ride in which Catholics are kidnapped and Baptists go Buddhist and you think in French and fly in a formation of geese and get a taste of molecular physics as horses go galloping down the aisles, and in the gorgeous slow passage “Garden of Sleeping Love” you will fall in love forever with the person next to you so be very careful where you sit.

I sat next to my sweetheart and after years of thinking I was averse to modern music, here was a hymn to joy and time, movement, rhythm, life and death, with big Wagnerian chords, delicate intervals, a dozen percussionists, a genius pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and we’ve been happily married ever since.

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The longer you live, the better it gets

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment.

I came home from the Bowery to learn that a dear friend, Christine Jacobson, had died — amazement and mortality in one evening, and it’s a rare privilege to be aware of both, the beauty of life and the brevity. I look down from my balcony seat on the heads of young people excited by an artist and in their behalf I am worried about our country, with so many of our countrymen in favor of resuming the Civil War, with our history of trillions spent on wars in Vietnam and Iraq from which no benefit whatever was gained, but the exhilaration of the young is better than bourbon, more wonderful than wine.

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Marriage is a game and two can play it

BANK STOCKS SKID was the scary headline days ago sending shivers of 1929 and old newsreels of breadlines on Wall Street and Dorothea Lange photographs of migrant women and naturally the thought of a Crash makes me think we need to go out for entertainment, of which New York has plenty.

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks are playing at Birdland, a 12-piece band reliving Twenties stomps and blues with Vince’s bass sax honking at the head of the formation. The New York Phil is playing Messiaen’s Turangalîla symphony. There’s an Emo Ball with DJs playing disco hits and an All-Night Singles Party at which ladies drink for free. (How do they make sure you’re single? Or a lady?)

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Thanks to Lutherans I skipped ballet

I talked to a friend last week whose Lutheran church in Minneapolis is trying to attract people of color. Lutherans have been white for centuries, coming as they did from Scandinavia and Germany, countries that were never great colonial powers and didn’t grab big chunks of Africa and Lutheranize the indigenous people. Some Lutherans are more gray than white, but if you go to a Lutheran church you sense a monochromaticism due to the fact that people in the pews tend to be descendants of Lutherans, the faith was handed down, it’s like farming — most farmers grew up on a farm — not many Manhattanites develop a passion for soybeans and head for North Dakota to buy 400 acres and a John Deere.

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The worst play I ever saw: a landmark

In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, so it was odd to wind up in comedy, but my mother loved Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, so there’s the hitch. I started the show to amuse her, and I succeeded. And the one Saturday night in Omaha did too. A tall woman and I sang love duets while a piano player with wild hair kept the beat and I did octogenarian stand-up and the audience accepted this pretty well.

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Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson – The Family Car

Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson – The Family Car

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The old man’s winter weekend

In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, so it was odd to wind up in comedy, but my mother loved Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, so there’s the hitch. I started the show to amuse her, and I succeeded. And the one Saturday night in Omaha did too. A tall woman and I sang love duets while a piano player with wild hair kept the beat and I did octogenarian stand-up and the audience accepted this pretty well.

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Thinking about that woman in Kentucky

I was down in Frankfort, Kentucky, last week and sat in a café one morning and a fortyish woman in a white uniform approached and said, “What can I get you, Hon?” and I, being a Northerner, was rather touched because female food service workers up North don’t go around Honning male customers. I’ve been Deared a few times but only by women older than I and they may have Deared me from dementia. Once a waitperson in Minneapolis Friended me and I almost spilled my coffee.

(Notice that I don’t refer to them as a “waitress.” The “-ess” is a diminutive, it’s a patronizing relic of male dominance; she is a Waitperson, even though that term could be mistaken as “Weight Person,” meaning “fat lady.” Anyway, female service personnel in Minnesota do not address a man as “hon” or any other term of affection and if he addressed her as Hon, he could be arrested, handcuffed, and taken downtown.

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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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