Lake Wobegon? It's Where Men Are Persistent
December 21, 2004
By DAVID CARR
On the second floor of the Adoré, a cozy little coffee shop
just below Union Square, a large man was snugged into the
corner. He appeared every inch the writer, with a clutch of
papers, a steaming cup of café au lait, and a look of
intense concentration framed beneath bushy eyebrows, even
though he was just staring at the menu.
Garrison Keillor, 62, is a very accomplished writer. A
former staff member at The New Yorker and the author of
several novels, he takes his role as a writer very
seriously. But he has this side job, as ringmaster of "A
Prairie Home Companion," a live radio show he founded on
Minnesota Public Radio 30 years ago, that has at its very
center a monologue, "The News From Lake Wobegon," that he
makes up each week on the fly. There is never a written
script.
Mr. Keillor is on a bit of a media tour in support of his
program's anniversary, and the celebratory DVD that has
been made to recognize it, but is not one to get excited
about quality time with the press. In fact, he seems about
as cheerful facing a press interview as someone wedged in
next to the pastor at a supper in a church basement in Pine
River or Cloquet, Minn., straining to make conversation
about the upcoming handbell choir performance. He hasn't
even seen the DVD.
It is not that Mr. Keillor lacks interest in people - his
show and writing are full of nuanced, sometimes devastating
examinations of the human condition - but he appears not
all that keen on their actual presence. (Then again, in
August, Mr. Keillor will be a host on a one-week "Prairie
Home Companion" cruise to Nova Scotia. A deluxe suite for
the week can cost more than $6,000. "I can't think of a
better way to spend the dog days of August than sailing to
the Canadian maritime provinces with like-minded odd
people," he wrote on his Web site. Go figure.)
Part of the reason Mr. Keillor loves New York, he says, is
that it is full of people, but not long on human
interaction. "It's great peace and quiet here," he said.
"In St. Paul I know a lot of people, and it's always kind
of tumultuous." Continuing, he added: "New York is a city
where when I walk down the sidewalk and hoof it around
town, things come to me, things just strike me. Can't
really explain that. Maybe if I walked along a gravel road
in North Dakota things also would strike me, but New York
is pleasanter than that gravel road. So I love to come
here."
He still has an apartment on the Upper West Side, he said,
a legacy of the time he spent here, when he left behind the
radio show in Minnesota in 1987, moved abroad and then
settled in New York when he came back to the United States.
He was sincere in his effort to leave "Prairie Home
Companion," but quickly found he missed the weekly grind of
building a show from scratch.
"I knew almost right away," he said. "I had the idea that I
had really made a bonehead move. One of the great bonehead
moves of my life. There have been two or three. And that
was one of them. I went off to Copenhagen. And I tried to
write a novel, which was really pretentious, and I was
digging a hole and getting deeper into it. But I managed to
find my way back." Mr. Keillor currently lives in St. Paul,
where he is married to a Minnesotan, Jenny Lind Nilsson,
and 33 weeks out of the year, he spends the week coming up
with a live radio show.
Four million people tune in each week for "Prairie Home
Companion," a show that in addition to its genre-defying
musical selections - bluegrass, folk, gospel and classical
music all show up - uses the prism of Lake Wobegon, a
mythical Minnesota town full of taciturn Norwegian
bachelors, as a way of talking about life for the rest of
us. There is nothing modern, or sassy, or particularly
universal in it, which makes its pleasures and its success
all the more unlikely.
And it has been thus for three decades. On July 6, 1974,
Mr. Keillor first broadcast the show in front of 12 people.
Now, each year, 100,000 people buy tickets to see the
program live at its base in the Fitzgerald Theater in St.
Paul, or in its sold-out performances around the country.
Mr. Keillor is a charming, winning radio host, mixing
self-effacement and an increasingly musical bass - "I just
like to sing harmony with younger women" - to make a show
that swings though all sorts of improbable musical
collaborations and the kind of radio drama that died
everywhere else 50 years ago.
"Prairie Home Companion," some of its listeners believe, is
a civic and cultural good, a throwback that manages to be a
church of the air without ever being preachy, narrated by
an apocryphal, but totally believable Minnesota Lutheran
persona who rarely drinks, never smokes but still manages
to describe the world in wry, funny ways.
"It's keeping something alive that otherwise might perish,"
Mr. Keillor said. "And that is the idea of live variety
entertainment on the radio. But it's also the separate
parts of it, I think. Some of the dramatic sketches, the
cowboys and Guy Noir, keep alive a certain kind of comedy
on radio that otherwise might disappear. And so we're
keeping our finger in the page for other younger, finer,
handsomer people to come along and discover and make
something really good out of it."
Mr. Keillor is a version of the American personality who
ends up stapled to something bigger than he is, a kind of
contemporary Walter Winchell, though less interested in
dirty linen than making merry about clean living. "In the
beginning, your career is all about you," he said. "You
crave awards and recognition. But then you come to realize
that you played some small part in bringing up people.
Small people went to sleep to the sound of your voice,
riding their cars with their parents. They looked forward
to the monologue because when it began, the parents stopped
arguing and turned up the radio."
And indeed there is something about that monologue - his
voice, then and now, is an amazing instrument, powerful
enough for him to step up to the microphone and simply wing
it, knowing only that it will always end the same way:
"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are
strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children
are above average."
Although the strength of the monologue varies from week to
week, it is a feat that makes the scripted jokes of a Jay
Leno or David Letterman very much besides the point; it is
a timeless, extemporaneous document of how we live that
proceeds without the crutch of actual news. If you listen
close, you can almost hear Mr. Keillor's heavy lidded eyes
dropping closed beneath huge eyebrows as he slips into a
narrative reverie. Mr. Keillor, who is not prone to
bragging - he is a Minnesotan, after all - is convinced
that spoken words are what most people remember best.
And then he proceeds to demonstrate that the storyteller's
voice, unannotated by visual information, can paint a
picture that will not soon be forgotten. In explaining why
someone who makes part of his living by being resolutely a
Minnesotan could be so riveted by New York, he recalled his
first trip to the city in 1953, with his father. He was 11.
"In Brooklyn, people would bring their families down into
the park with blankets and sheets," he said, his voice
slowing. "And they would stake out a little spot on the
grass. And they would lie there and sleep. Thousands of
people in the park. And a few men sitting on benches around
the perimeter sitting and smoking and talking. I never saw
anything like it before or since."
As much as he loves New York with the fervor of a
Midwestern immigrant, his loyalty is clear. After Mr.
Keillor concluded his interview with a reporter at the
Adoré, a woman from rural Minnesota dropped by his table to
declare herself a fan. He was genuinely interested in what
she had to say, and the fact that she is from where he is
from, and yet was standing there in a restaurant in
Manhattan.
"What appeals to me about Minnesota is that it has a
stubbornness, it has a persistence. It treasures its own
landscape," he said. "People who live in Minnesota really
love to stay. They're not migrants. They're not people who
are going to fold their tent in another year and go
elsewhere."
Or even when they do, they will always be back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/arts/21keil.html?ex=1104637235&ei=1&en=bc6ecf976df55e8a
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
