Word: keillor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Keillor clearly has touched people with something more than a deft comedian's cleverness. Maybe they are transplanted Midwesterners, hoping sentimentally that the small towns are still there. Maybe they think that even if the nation is curling up and turning brown at the edges, the great Heartland still endures and is strong. Whatever the case, to be a Midwesterner, or to know someone who is, suddenly is almost fashionable...
...When Keillor appeared at the Boston University bookstore last month, a long line wound through the foreign-language and dictionary sections, and each soul in it carried one or two or half a dozen copies of Lake Wobegon Days. (Half the book's royalties, says Keillor, go to Minnesota Public Radio.) The old joke about the Midwest in Boston, the Hub of the Universe, used to go "Ohio? Here we pronounce it Iowa." No more. A small woman at the head of the line, wearing an ALL THIS & BRAINS, TOO! T shirt, held her book up for Keillor to sign...
...Keillor was raised in Anoka, Minn., a town of about 15,000 that is now a suburb of Minneapolis but was not then. As far as he knows, Anoka people do not see caricatures of themselves in Lake Wobegon's sound burghers, possibly, he thinks, because they do not listen to his show, which suggests that they are like Lake Wobegonians, who would be the last people in the world to listen to A Prairie Home Companion. So he says. The small town of Isle, Minn., on a lake called Mille Lacs, suggested some of the physical characteristics of Lake...
...meeting." He has rebelled against the narrow sectarianism of his upbringing, but although he has no church affiliation, religion is serious and real to him. As his friend Roy Blount says, "He's been off to college, gotten divorced, learned to drink. But he hasn't severed his roots." Keillor likes the old hymns, he says, because "they express faith, which I lean towards as the basis of the good life...
There is a long pause after he says this. The gaps in his discourse are so chasmodic that even friends who are accustomed to them are unsettled. An interviewer wonders, "Have I just said something that sets the North American record for stupidity?" No, Keillor is just doing a monologue, only this one is going on silently, in his head. Eventually he returns to the here and now and speaks. In this case it is to say, without explanation, "If you believe in the existence of a loving and merciful God, then life is a comedy...