urban@trwspp.UUCP (07/05/84)
The following item appears in the July issue of the KUSC (NPR Los Angeles) monthly Program Guide. This is a minor copyright violation, so I'll just recommend that you support your local NPR station so you can read this stuff for yourself. `PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION' IS A 10 [To its millions of fans, "A Prairie Home Companion" scores a "10" every Saturday night. But, in fact, the two-hour variety program, written and hossted by Garrison Keillor, is actually a "10" (years old) this month, an occasion that will be celebrated on the July 7 broadcast. To acknowledge the passing of the first decade, we present some frequently-asked questions about "PHC", with Keillor's own "not-given-previously" answers.] Q. How did you come to start the show? A. In 1974, I was trying to support a family by free-lance writing, and beyond the difficulty of selling enough fiction to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, I had another problem that is common among writers and that was Stupor. You can sit in an empty room and look at blank paper for only so long each day for seven days a week before your eyes glaze over and your mind turns to meringue. Other writers learn to take up carpentry or gardening or golf. I took up this show. Writing keeps you honest, performing keeps you sane. Q. How did you come up with Lake Wobegon? A. I figured that if I was going to do anything well on the show, it would probably be comedy. I figured that comedy is at least a form of Writing so I would stand a chance. Over the first couple of years, failure at stand-up comedy drove me towards story-telling. I started out telling true stories from my childhood, dressed up as fiction, and then discovered Lake Wobegon as a place to set them so as to put more distance between them and the innocent persons I was talking about. Q. Is there really a Lake Wobegon? Are any of the things you mention on the show real, such as Powdermilk Biscuits, Bob's Bank, Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Fearmonger's Shoppe? A. I don't mean to be cute when I say, "this is not an easy yes-or-no question." No, there is no town in Minnesota named Lake Wobegon that I could show you, at least I'm not aware of one. But I would also have a hard time showing you the Ninth Federal Reserve District, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Big Ten, or the Upper Middle Class. Most people deal very comfortably with abstractions much more far-fetched than Lake Wobegon, e.g. the Moral Majority, secular humanists, Hollywood, etc. Compared to any of those, Lake Wobegon is as real as my hands on this typewriter and sometimes more real than that. I once dreamed that I drove over a hill in central Minnesota and found it. In the dream, they weren't particularly happy to see me, but they managed to be fairly polite. I was invited to someone's house for supper and then I woke up. Q. Are the greetings you read on the air real or made up? A. Real, every one. We get a couple hundred or so messages every week and try to read about 70 or 80 on the air. They're mostly chosen at random, though I do give preference to funny messages, to Happy Birthdays to very old people, and to serious messages such as "I'll be on flight 79 at 5:20 p.m. Sunday--not flight 151 as I told you in the letter." Q. Will "A Prairie Home Companion" ever make the jump to television? A. I think our show would suffer from a jump into television. The sheer mechanics of television could sink this pretty slim little show, and I don't see that we'd have much to gain from the risk. Besides, a lot of people cook while listening to our show, and you cnn't cook and watch TV at the same time and enjoy it. Good television tends to drive out good cooking. Our show is heard in thousands of kitchens amongst fabulous aromas by people dizzy with pleasure at the prospect of dinner, for which we are a lead-in. I'd hate to replace that happy gang with a bunch of people lined up facing one way and eating TV dinners. We have more freedom in radio; so does the audience. Q. Why did you get into radio if you're as shy as you claim to be? A. I needed a part-time job to pay for tuition at the University of Minnesota. I was a parking lot attendant from 1960-62. I dropped out of college for a year because I was broke and, in the fall of 1963, saw an ad offering a job announcing at the University radio station for $1.85 an hour, 50 cents more than I had gotten for parking cars. And the radio job was indoors. I think I was the only person to apply for it. All the bright, creative people were going into television then. I liked radio just fine, even though I was so shy I could hardly bear to be looked at when I was on the air. In time, I learned that the engineers looking at me from the control room didn't really care what I was saying, they only watched out of habit. Even a shy person learns to bear up under pressure when money is at stake. At first, it is agony to press the microphone switch and say, "You're tuned to KUOM, 770, the radio voice of the University of Minnesota. It's 10:30, and time for Highlights in Homemaking." Gradually, you learn to do this with a high sense of style, making your voice deep and vaguely British. Then gradually you learn to let yourself talk somewhat naturally. And from there, you just keep digging potatoes and hope for the best. Q. How do you select performers for the show? A. Some are old regulars, like Butch Thompson--I don't remember ever selecting Butch, he seems to have always been there at the piano--and others are people I've admired on records, such as The Boys of the Lough, Helen Schneyer, Claudia Schmidt, Jean Redpath, Queen Ida. So when they come through Minnesota, we grab them. And a few are people who sent us tapes of themselves, we liked what we heard, had room for them, and booked them. Nothing mysterious about it. Q. When did you shave off your beard, and why? A. Once, in February, 1981, while on vacation in California, out of curiosity. Then, finally, that October, coming home from a tour back east. I had had a beard for so many years, I thought of it as natural and even inevitable, just as toenails are inevitable. But a bearded man tends to be much more solemn. A man my age needs to shed solemnity as much as he can, there is enough that comes with the territory. So off it came. For months afterward, I enjoyed near-anonymity, even among old pals and relatives.