Word: keillor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HAPPY TO BE HERE by Garrison Keillor...
...Garrison Keillor is the somewhat moonstruck and lately much celebrated rustic whimsyfier whose monologues from Lake Woebegon, Minn., embellish Public Radio's Saturday evening country-music broadcasts. The first response of an uninitiated listener is likely to be, "That fellow is being funny," and the second, uttered with reproach, "No, that fellow is being serious...
...befits a variety show, A Prairie Home Companion has a little bit of everything, or everything that interests Keillor. There is a lot of music: bluegrass, folk, opera, jazz, blues, and visitors like Bill Staines, a yodeler, or Dr. Tom Weaver, who taps out the William Tell overture on his teeth. There are also letters from listeners and mock commercials. (The main "sponsor," Powdermilk Biscuits, promises to give shy people "the power to get up and do what needs to be done.") But the backbone of the program is Keillor's gravelly narration of the goings-on in Lake...
Over the years, the shy, slow-speaking Keillor, who has written all the scripts, has peopled Lake Wobegon with enough walk-on eccentrics to fill an English garden party. Father Emil, the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, for instance, who has not paid much attention to Vatican II, figuring there is only one Vatican and that is enough for him. And Jack, who runs Jack's Head Stop Center, which teaches intellectuals things like bowling. There is also the fellow who runs the Fearmonger Shop, which caters to paranoids of all persuasions. The shop offers...
Such goings-on could not be contained in Minnesota, and in May 1980, Keillor's two-hour Prairie Home Companion, aired live from an auditorium with 1,000 seats, became an almost instantaneous hit on National Public Radio. Now heard in most parts of the country on Saturday night, it has acquired a devoted band of a million or so fans. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun is one. Says he, urging a dose of Home Companion for the power brokers: "Washington, I suspect, could use a good bit of Lake Wobegon." Like Brigadoon or Camelot-Lake Wobegon has become...