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A Reflection of 25 Years: Garrison Keillor
on the Spirituality of Radio
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS people reach that milestone
pretty regularly - but in the Darwinian world of radio broadcasting
it's an eon, and the long life of "A Prairie Home Companion"
is a real accomplishment, just like the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
You keep on winding your twine, and it gets bigger and bigger, and pretty
soon your home town erects a sign, "Home of Wilfred Sneed and His
Twine Ball - 100 yds straight ahead on left," and I suppose you
should feel some pride, but you should know that it was not for brilliance
or sheer imagination that you accumulated this monstrosity. It was lack
of imagination masquerading as perseverance. Most people would've tired
of winding twine back when the ball was ten feet in diameter and taken
up license-plate-collecting or joined a polka club or gone off on a
bus tour of Civil War battlefields. But I am a horse, which you need
to be in radio, I guess. You stay in harness and remain focused on the
end of the row you are plowing - focus, in my case, on Saturday, and
as your colleagues drop out of radio one by one and go into arts administration
or public relations, and the creepy little guy who used to mix the show
starts up an Internet company and takes it public for a couple hundred
million, you plod up and down the rows whinnying, and suddenly one day,
they present you with a plaque. It is a chunk of Lucite with the number
25 etched into it.
I have almost no memory of those twenty-five years because I'm on a
weekly schedule. I can tell you about Thursday afternoon or Saturday
morning, but I don't recall annual stuff, like 1982. On Friday, I write
scripts, Friday night I rewrite them, Saturday we go on the air and
stumble through the drill, I do my dance and sing my song, and do the
News from Lake Wobegon, which is mostly about muskrats and pouring concrete
and annuities and my boyhood pal Skippy and his hilarious mispronunciations,
and meanwhile a white mist of powdered sugar falls around me from the
doughnut of the stagehand on the catwalk above who is retying the sandbag
hanging over my head, and now I have forgotten the end of the Skippy
story so I wind it up, and there is a big commotion in the wings and
a clatter of hooves as the Guy's Shoe Band rushes onstage and strikes
up a tune and the stage manager brings me a note ("Go to Credits")
and now I cannot remember the names of the guests I should thank, I
can only remember the end of the Skippy story (he kept the chicken,
whom he named Fred, in the garage, and gradually it became just like
a member of the family), so the show peters out
on a long drum solo and tepid applause, and I go back to the dressing
room and weep bitter tears.
Sunday morning I forget the whole thing. In this way, a man avoids melancholy
and regret and stays forever young.
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