Garrison Keillor’s farewell to Lake Wobegon is not shown above. That’s a 30-year-old clip from the Letterman show. It’s my intent to weave the two together, so hold on tight.
Like many people who commented on Keillor’s farewell, I was not a regular fan of A Prairie Home Companion. However, whenever I stumbled across it, Keillor almost always made me laugh. The meta-folksiness of the show could fill you up fast, like a double helping of Powdermilk Biscuits, but the first few always went down real easy.
However, the “News from Lake Wobegon” rap with which Keillor always ended the show was another matter. Jokes about the statue of the Unknown Norwegian and Norwegian bachelor farmers went down real easy, but sometimes Keillor’s free-form format would lead him into some very dark cul-de-sacs—accounts, perhaps, of bitter marital quarrels offering almost no hope of reconciliation—so that Keillor himself seemed to grow as nervous as his protagonists, his pauses growing longer and more desperate, searching for a way out that just might not be there, the account ultimately ending without resolution, followed by Keillor’s customary wrap-up “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong ….”1
Keillor’s last “news” was, unsurprisingly, far less than his best. The emotions he must have been feeling, at the end of a 40-year saga that had surely brought him most of what he had ever dreamed of,2 could hardly be expressed in a farewell bit. After a brief visit to the Chatterbox Café, where, unfortunately, everyone seemed to be dead, Keillor went off on a seriously tedious tangent about bathroom humor limericks, without which I could have done entirely.
But what about Garrison and Dave? Well, Garrison’s there to plug his latest book, whatever it was,3 and muse about being, like Dave, an old Midwest boy. Noting that the time of the year (late November) makes you think about “home”, Garrison remarks “You can almost smell the turkey cooking,” and the two old Midwest boys grin like Hell, as if the smell of turkey cooking were Hell—a lot worse than Hell, as a matter of fact. Compared to home, Hell wouldn’t be so bad! Compared to home, Hell would be a pleasure! Thank God we made it out! Thank God!
- It was my impression that if you listened to the show regularly, you would get to know many of the people in Lake Wobegon, but, since I didn’t listen to the show regularly, I never did. ↩︎
- Or, perhaps, should have brought him almost everything he ever dreamed of. ↩︎
- Keillor’s spot is quite entertaining, though unintentionally so, because folksy, lovable Garrison spends most of his eight minutes with Dave whining about the no-good son of a bitch who pushed his book off the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list. Even funnier (if you’re a geezer) is the name of said son of a bitch: James Michener. Utterly forgotten today, Michener was a remarkable man who never published anything until the age of 40, hitting box office gold with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, winning the 1948 Pulitzer prize for fiction. Tales was then quickly turned into box office platinum by Rogers and Hammerstein, who used it as the basis for their Broadway classic South Pacific. For the next forty years, Michener turned out a seemingly endless series of massively researched, virtually unreadable tomes, almost all of them huge best sellers, the combination making him one of the most envied, not to say loathed, (by other writers) novelists in America. By the time he died, Michener had gifted Swarthmore, his alma mater, with over $100 million. ↩︎
