I started writing sonnets that summer and fall, and a few years later PHC conducted a sonnet contest for St. Valentine’s Day and received piles of them. I was not eligible to win a prize, but I did enter one under the name Gary Johnson.
Up in the sky we lovers lie in bed
Naked, face to face and hip to thigh,
Your leg between mine, my arm beneath your head,
Our hands clasped together, up in the sky.
In the dark, Manhattan lay at our feet,
A blanket of glittering stars thrown down.
Beyond your bare shoulder, 90th Street,
Your elegant leg lit by the lamps of Midtown.
We came to the city for romance, as people do,
And with each other we scaled the heights
And now, united, we lie at rest, we two,
The bed gently rocking in the sea of lights.
Are you asleep? I think you are. So silently
I promise, my love, this is how it ever shall be.
That fall, the name American Radio Company was dropped and we resumed being A Prairie Home Companion, since it was really the same show, and we moved back to our old theater on Exchange Street between the Methodists and the Scientologists, looking up the hill at the great dome of Cass Gilbert’s state Capitol, and the Coffee Club was replaced by the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, or GAS band, with Pat Donohue and Peter Ostroushko, but mostly Jenny and I lived in New York. She went on another Asian tour. She returned to me.
The actor Sue Scott came aboard in 1992 to play all the female parts, smothering mom, Edith Piaf, witch, weary waitress, whispery New Age herbalist, and a year or two later, Tim Russell, a radio veteran, took over all the male roles, hipster, cowboy, punk, various pretentious gasbags, Winston Churchill (We will fight on the beaches and in the fields, we will hide behind the trees and sneak up on them from behind and we will poke them with big sticks), and when I wrote Unintelligible voice in the script, he did an amazing echoey voice of male authority so perfectly unintelligible it reduced the audience to rubble. Rich Dworsky at the keyboard improvised the music cues on the script—Urban Hustle—Big Western Horizon at Dawn—Aztec Liturgy—Parental Alarm—and Fred Newman at the sound-effects table with the bells and buzzers, coconut shells, gravel box did his vocal effects, the singing dolphins and bullet ricochets, deadly snakes, bagpipes, talking horses, jet flyovers, Southern evangelists, p.a. feedback, operatic loons, and growling stomachs.
Tim Russell, Sue Scott, Walter Bobbie, 2008.
The three of them covered the waterfront, though we brought in Erica Rhodes, thirteen, to play the daughter in “Raised By Psychologists,” the story of a child whose parents know too much. She came home sobbing, having been pushed by a boy and spit at, and her mother the Ph.D. said, “And how did that make you feel?” and talked about passive aggression that invites pushing and spitting. Erica also played an 85-year-old woman who, tired of being around elderly people and their incessant complaining, got a fabulous surgeon to pull her skin taut and do a larynx makeover and now she could pass for eighteen and enjoy being hit on by young men, but she said, “They can redo the face and the boobs, but it’s hard to pretend you don’t know what you know. You know? Just once I’d like to sit down and have lunch with people who remember Clark Gable and were around for V-J Day. August 14, 1945. Remember? Remember that?” And she sang, “Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again,” except it wasn’t Erica, it was Sue Scott doing a cracked old-lady voice. I said, “Are you okay?” and the old lady voice said, “I need to take a deep breath and let the vocal cords relax.” I said, “You still look great.” The old lady excused herself to go lie down. The sketch wouldn’t have worked on TV, but it was good on radio.
We were America’s Last Live Radio Variety Show and, as if that weren’t enough, we became America’s Only Live Outdoor Broadcast From Unlikely Places. There was a thunderstorm show in an outdoor arena in Oklahoma, the audience holding garbage bags over their heads. At the Starlight outdoor theater in Kansas City, we did the show in 105-degree heat and 78 percent humidity as stagehands sprayed the audience with a cold mist. There were blizzard shows, like the one in Birmingham, Alabama, with thirteen inches of snow by showtime. I stood on the stage of the Alabama Theater with the Shoe Band looking at an audience of a hundred who’d managed to make their way downtown. No guests had arrived, the soundman’s mother and girlfriend were working the lights. The audience kept straggling in and a gust of wind blew in as the stage door opened and Emmylou Harris came in, just off her bus, and she and I sang “From Boulder to Birmingham,” no rehearsal. A gospel group, the Birmingham Sunlights, made it in by the end of the monologue and finished the show. A fine show backed up by sheer heroism, and it gave Minnesotans a chance to admire Alabamans. At the Kansas State Fair, on a stage on a dirt track, a mighty wind came up during the Guy Noir sketch, featuring Governor Kathleen Sebelius, and blew the scripts out of everyone’s hands and we had to improvise while blinded by a cloud of dust that made your hair stand straight up. At a country ballroom in Gibbon, Minnesota, we did a polka show with four bands and hefty couples in bright matching outfits twirling on the dance floor, and there was dissension between spectators who’d come to see and dancers who’d come to dance and twirl, and so that was the last polka show we ever did. Couples in matching outfits are not shy about defending the right to polka. At a tent show in Wyoming, the lights went out and a dozen men ran to get their pickups and park them around the front of the tent, and we did the show by headlights. At Yellowstone, a buffalo lay down by the satellite uplink dish, and a stagehand asked a park ranger how to move the animal and the ranger said, “We don’t try to tell them what to do.” In Juneau, I did the News from Lake Wobegon in which someone’s aunt went to Alaska and found gold and I got tangled up in storylines and could not extricate myself, and I could hear the Inuit dance troupe behind the curtain, getting warmed up for the closing number, as I kept talking and finally the stage manager came out and pointed to the clock and said, “Just say goodnight,” and I did and the ON THE AIR light went dark. One could mention the Walker Art Center rooftop broadcast, which went dead at 6 p.m. when a museum guard turned off the power at the usual closing time: it took five minutes to dash down three flights and find the circuit box and flip the switch on.
There are several reasons why you’d rather record a show and edit it rather than perform live. (I’d rather you read what you’re reading now than the first draft of three years ago.) But the audience loves liveness, and so you take a deep breath and do it live, which makes the show extraordinary, which means you can do a show about ordinary things. You can sing about coffee: Coffee helps you do your duty in pursuit of truth and beauty. No reason to debate it, just be sure it’s caffeinated black coffee. You can pay homage to sweet corn and egg salad, the pleasure of sitting beside a river, the beauty of snowy mornings, the joy of friendship. I sang:
Friendship is a beautiful blessing as through life we are progressing.
Be kind to strangers, high or low—you were a stranger once, you know.
Life is just a brief rehearsal, then we go to the universal.
And there, my friend, you will find out:
Love is what it’s all about.
Outsiders assumed it was stressful to do a weekly show, and I let them assume that because to me, a flatlander, it is unbecoming to show personal pleasure lest you cause pain to the sorrowful. But it was mostly a great pleasure. We had a few unhappy employees who wanted the show with its big audience to advocate for noble causes, but every time I did that, it felt creepy whereas when the audience got happy it felt right as rain. I did 1,557 performances and walked downstage without a script— who needs a script to talk about your family—and told Lake Wobegon stories, and because I was so nearsighted, I never felt stage fright. There wasn’t another show like it. It was like owning the only root beer stand in town: if people liked root beer, they came to us. For a sermon or a discussion about parenting or a gin ma
rtini, you went elsewhere.
Public radio kept a lectern between it and the audience. Prairie Home removed the lectern. Public radio wanted to sound literary, and Prairie Home spoke in a Minnesota voice and people remember when they are spoken to. Sometimes, people walked up to me weeks, months, later and repeated an elaborate Lake Wobegon episode involving multiple characters and transactions and misunderstandings and it astonished me. With New Yorker stories, people might say, “I liked that story about the mid-life crisis of Dionysus,” and that was all, but with radio, they remembered the story itself. Once I talked about Pastor Charles Ingqvist, and a hundred people reminded me that he is David, not Charles. Also, that Roger Hedlund’s wife is Cindy, not Elizabeth. “Or did he dump Cindy?” someone wrote. Nope. My mistake. People told the Tomato Butt story back to me and the truck stop and the twenty-four Lutheran pastors on the pontoon boat for the weenie roast and their ecclesiastical dignity as the boat sank slowly under their weight—it showed me that I was in the right line of work. Literary prizes look nice on your bio, the Booker, the Hooker, the Pullet Surprise, but what matters is saying what you have to say to people who hear it and hold onto it. I’ve been in The Atlantic and Harper’s and The New Yorker to be glanced at by people in neurologists’ waiting rooms, and I prefer to stand on a stage in Worthington, Minnesota, and tell stories to 700 people to whom this will mean something.
A Prairie Home Companion was the result of purely fortuitous timing: the satellite uplink system made it a national broadcast in 1980, and twelve years later public radio still had an amateur spirit and people who loved radio were still in charge, people like Bill Kling. Eventually he retired and the coroners took over, but Bill was a man who got excited about what he admired and wasn’t afraid to show it. His successor would’ve been happier as the CEO of a dry-cleaning chain. Kling loved a good time. He encouraged our annual season-opening street dance with meatloaf and mashed potato dinner, a series of contests (loon-calling, Bob Dylan impressions, Minnesota accent, Beautiful Baby, a joke-telling contest for kids, a dance contest, an overacting contest) and then the street dance and the host got to sing “Great Balls of Fire,” which once almost came true when the piano player’s coat caught on fire from a space heater on stage. It was festive and friendly and it was free. People looked forward to it year after year. We did it because we enjoyed being around our listeners—the sheer variety of them, including a great many who don’t look at all like public radio listeners but they were. The coroners felt insecure out in the open and preferred to work behind closed doors among familiar male faces and nobody speaking out of turn.
Street dance on Exchange Street, 2007.
The show’s success gave us the luxury to ignore management and all we needed to do was to have fun. The show observed all the major holidays. On Labor Day weekend, we honored working people, especially those unlikely to listen to public radio:
O the plumber is the man, the plumber is the man.
Down into the cellar he must crawl.
He is not sleek and slim but we don’t look down on him
For the plumber is the man who saves us all.
When the toilet will not flush and the odor makes you blush
And you cannot use the sink or shower stall,
Then your learning and your art slowly start to fall apart
But the plumber is the man who saves us all.
We celebrated Halloween with a menagerie of monsters, demented dentists, psychotic school bus drivers, evil evangelists, and “Her Blood-Crusted Fingers Tore at His Throat,” in which a lady director auditioned actors for a horror movie, had them do blood-curdling screams and blood-chilling gasps and evil chortles, and when they failed the audition they were hurled into a vat of boiling oil or eaten by rabid banshees, their choice. It was thespianism at its best. A month later we did Thanksgiving with Brunelle and Sutton and Janis Hardy improvising a gratitude cantata from slips of paper collected from the crowd, which was so much better than your standard cantata about love and peace, etc.—ours got into favorite recipes, useful skills, new appliances, specific behavioral traits. We moved to New York City for December, with a version of “Hush, Little Baby” with new verses about Papa taking Baby to see the sights, and new rhymes (hayseeds/ Macy’s, oysters/Cloisters, solemn muse/St. Bartholomew’s, blue cheese/Balducci’s, etc.). We did the annual Talent from Towns Under Two Thousand show with an array of giddy performers thrilled to stand on the Town Hall stage in front of a New York crowd unafraid to show wild enthusiasm. We did a Christmas show in which we ridiculed holiday songs we hate: I sure hate this song, pa rum pum pum pum. I hear it all day long, pa rum pum pum pum. I think it’s awfully dumb, goes on ad nauseam, I’d like to kill the bum who plays the drum. Let’s break his thumbs. And it ended with the audience singing “Silent Night” a cappella, four verses, which made everyone mist up; I got tears in my eyes and could hardly sing the words about radiant beams and redeeming grace. I couldn’t talk afterward, so we hummed a verse and I said, “Merry Christmas, everybody,” and the band struck up “Joy to the World” as a fiddle hoedown and we clapped ourselves off the air. We came back to St. Paul in January to earn the right to talk about winter, which our Southern audience was eager to hear. We did a Joke Show, the radio audience our main research resource, skirting the danger zones of humor but Unitarian and Norwegian jokes went over well. And a medley of sung jokes, all of them dark:
My daughter brought home a boyfriend
With great big ugly tattoos
And long black greasy hair
And Lord how he hit the booze.
I said, “Darling, I’m sure he’s nice,
But something makes me nervous.”
She said, “He’s extremely nice.
He’s doing 500 hours of community service.”
For Valentine’s Day, we wrote new love songs:
I’ve got you under my skin.
You are some kind of a skin disease.
I’ve taken drugs and other remedies
And now you’re in my heart,
And I may need surgery—
I’ve got you under my skin.
We did a couple shows down South, took a break in March, during which I generally came down with the flu, and then back to Minnesota for the spring run, broadcasts from Moorhead, St. Cloud, Bemidji, or Duluth. And thereafter, a June Picnic Tour of big outdoor venues, the old amphitheater in Chautauqua, New York, Wolf Trap on Memorial Day weekend, Ravinia near Chicago, Marymoor Park in Seattle, the Greek Theater in LA, Red Rocks in Denver, and we wound up at Tanglewood in the Berkshires. When you play to 3,000 or 6,000 or 8,000 persons outdoors, you must focus on Clarity, do joke jokes, lean on the SFX man for buzzard shrieks and elephant cries, but keep an opening for sheer beauty—the crowd sits holding their breath as the soprano sings “Ave Maria”—so familiar, so brave, so perfect—or a guitarist plays the Don McLean tune “Vincent”— or a solo cello plays a Bach adagio and nobody talks and no dogs bark. At Tanglewood, the crowd spread their blankets on the sward of grass beyond the Shed and after the broadcast they pushed down front as the swells headed home and we stood around singing old campfire songs for an hour or so. It was pure pleasure. We sang Amazing grace, how sweet the sound and I saw a young woman with a crooked arm in a wheelchair, her mother leaning close and singing into her daughter’s face, looking into her daughter’s eyes. There were several families with young adult children with severe disabilities, their parents’ arms around them. It felt like a healing service, which I don’t offer, but music works in its own mysterious ways.
In the course of time I learned that people like to be paid attention to so I tried to write a song about every city we performed in. Baltimore, for example:
John Waters, Pimlico
Little houses in a row
Mencken, Tyler, Mister Poe.
Oyster buffet on the Bay
Crabs fried or sautéed
Fifty different combinations
In the city of crustaceans,
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Baltimore.
Many people have written songs about Milwaukee, but when I sang mine in Milwaukee to Milwaukeeans, they felt warm inside.
Down on Polish Flats,
Near the brewery where they made Blatz,
And there is a bar on every block.
So you’d never drink and drive, you’d walk.
You could make some stops
At Leon’s or Kopp’s
For brats with mustard
And frozen custard
And deep-fried cheese curds,
Maybe seconds or thirds.
Which is why people in Milwaukee
Tend to be stocky,
Not delicate like me the poet,
But when Milwaukeeans put their arms around you, you’re going to know it.
No city got off song-free: I sang,
I could sing about the glory that was Greece, or Rome, or Florence in the time of Lucrezia Borgia
Or the glory that is Columbus, Georgia.
A good life, flying around, doing shows hither and yon, talking about my hometown on the edge of the prairie—“Not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.” A big tent with a circus of musical talent, and we prized old songs (The little boy stood in the barroom door and he cried, “Oh Papa, come home. Benny is sick and the fire has gone out and Mother is waiting alone. We’ve sent for the doctor and he cannot come, the fever’s a hundred and two. Benny is worse and is likely to die and, Papa, he’s calling for you.” ) and it ventured into the near-bawdy (There was a young girl of Madras who had a remarkable ass—not soft, round, and pink, as you probably think—but the kind with long ears that eats grass.) and gospel songs (There’ll be joy, joy, joy, up in my Father’s house) for an audience that included a goodly portion of ungodly. Gospel is what I grew up with, and I am moved by His Eye Is on the Sparrow and He Wipes the Tear from Every Eye. I don’t feel the same for Gershwin as I feel for How Great Thou Art because Gershwin wrote for the handsome and prosperous and gospel is for people who know distress up close. The comedy didn’t require that you be a Democrat or a college grad or under forty. So we rolled along broad avenues with the redoubtable Tim Russell, the sterling Sue Scott, fearless Fred Newman, and dependable Rich Dworsky, and mostly it was clean but then I’d toss a verse into “Deep Blue Sea”—
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