GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between. Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome! Send your own post to the host.

Dear Allison, I grew up in the Sanctified Brethren. I know very little about Lutheranism, as many Lutherans know, except what I gathered from growing up among them and from attending a Lutheran church when I lived in New York City. Sometimes it’s better for a storyteller to know less. Too much learning can stifle the expressive urge, don’t you know, and lead a person to constantly modify one’s statements, or opinions, and that is death for a storyteller.

Garrison:
The person you just described in your June 30 News from Lake Wobegon segment with the impulsive slapping of bald men's heads may have Gille de la Tourette's syndrome. It is just possible that a Lutheran upbringing could suppress the impulsive shouting of epithets and other impulsive behavior until an unusually late age. Did you have this in mind when you did the piece?

Jim Goodwin, MD

Dear Dr. Goodwin, Silly me, I didn’t make that connection at all, but of course you could be right. In Lake Wobegon, however, we are slow to apply a label to things and put them into a box; we remain fascinated by the oddity of the behavior, even as we try to hide the eccentric head-slapping aunt from public view.

G. K., Do you like sports?

Ryan

Ryan, I do. Baseball especially, but almost any other sport that one can find walking around in a park in whatever city one happens to be in. Everyday sports. You walk into Central Park in New York and you’ll find some soccer and dog Frisbee and fast-pitch softball and in the fall, touch football, and it’s fun to watch from ground level. And when it’s not so much fun, you move on. Watching sports is just a form of people watching, and you don’t want to make too much of it.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Please let me know what summer represents to you. Your thoughts, feelings, anything you'd like to share.

Thank you, Donna Rewick

Donna ---- It’s a little paradise that is over before we know it. We go to the co-op and buy an armload of vegetation and create some of those tall proud salads and sit and eat them and enjoy the heat and the twittering of birds and the languor and drowsiness, and then it’s time for the State Fair and doughnuts and giant hotdogs, and then there are snowflakes.

Hello!
Are there any people of hispanic culture in Lake Wobegon? Are there any residents there "without papers"? If so, what is the attitude regarding these people who are born in the United States or in Mexico, Central America ?

Delia Tarango-Haley

Dear Delia, None that I’m aware of. The migrant workers, who brought Hispanic culture to the Midwest, were more prevalent in the Red River Valley, on those vast sugar- beet and potato farms, than on the little dairy farms of central Minnesota, where Lake Wobegon is. Those farmers didn’t have farmhands, they had children to do the dirty work. As for people “without papers,” we don’t check for papers in Lake Wobegon, so we wouldn’t know. To us, people from Minneapolis might be considerably more foreign than, say, Mexican farm workers. Anyone who can make things grow and see to animals has a lot in common with the Wobegonians. And of course they are Christian people and the gospels tell them how to behave toward people “without papers,” whether they actually do or not.

Dear Garrison:
Have you ever thought about crossing storylines in any of your regular features? It would probably be pretty gimmicky, but sometimes it sounds like Guy Noir could use a week away from his gritty reality. Maybe he could go ice fishing on Lake Wobegon and drop in for a drink at the Sidetrack Tap.

Pat

Dear Pat, You may think it’s a good idea, but to me, it’s a prescription for chaos. I have a hard enough time keeping these things straight in their own little drawers, without mixing everything up. I am an old guy, Pat, and my faculties aren’t what they used to be and they weren’t that great to start with. But thanks for a truly terrifying idea.

Dear Mr. Keillor, I saw your show in Memphis and I thought it was wonderful. But I was wondering why you spend so much time with your back to the audience?

Joe Letson

Dear Joe, A bad habit, that’s all. Like twisting the rings on my fingers, which people tell me I also do. Or playing with my tie, or my watch, or staring down at my shoes.

Greetings from the True North:
I never listen to PHC reruns because I've heard them all before, and quite recently. But I would tune in if the reruns were shows from the 1980s. How come they aren't?

--Julie Penn

Julie ---- A good question. We run more recent shows because our contracts with performers permit us three usages of a show within a three-year period. But we could run older shows if we simply pay the musicians and actors. So we should. Let me see if we can include at least a couple of them. Any sorts of shows you’re partial to?

DEAR GARRISON-
THANKS FOR THE LATE SHOW FROM BEALE STREET SATURDAY NIGHT….THE CONTENT WAS RIVETING! AS A NATIVE MEMPHIAN, I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY FAMILIAR WITH THE TOWN, BUT YOU MANAGED TO EXPOSE A SIDE OF THIS BURG THAT RARELY IS SHOWN. PLEASE, DO THIS TYPE OF SHOW AROUND THE COUNTRY. THERE IS SO MUCH IN THE FABRIC OF OUR SOCIETY THAT PASSES WITHOUT COMMENT OR MUCH THOUGHT. BOSTON, new ORLEANS, CHARLESTON, SAN FRANCISCO. YOU COULD DO TEN SHOWS LIKE THAT A WEEK AND BARELY TOUCH THE SUBJECT. I'M REALLY ENVIOUS.

TOM CURTIS MEMPHIS, TN

Dear Tom, You sure know how to frame a compliment so that it sticks. I too liked the Late Show from Beale Street, not that it was necessarily any great shucks but that anybody would do it at all. There were some inspired moments and some awkward ones and some long moments when the host was simply treading water, but I love that idea of radio sticking a live microphone into a corner of the world and seeing what shows up. Mitch Hanley engineered the whole thing over an ordinary phone line and the idea came from my boss, Bill Kling.

Garrison,
Any chance of bringing back the Wonder Dog? I just loved those stories about the travels and adventures of the poor little rich boy, Timmy, and his priest friend. I miss those most of all on the show.

Ann Reiss

Ann, I sure could bring back Timmy and Buster and Fr. Finian but what about Sheilah the Christian Jungle Girl? She was played by Kate MacKenzie who is married and happy and in retirement out in Bend, Oregon. I suppose we could have Kelly the Jungle Career Girl.

Dear Mr.Keillor,
I must echo the request for the return of "Bob The Story of A Young Artist". I found the series very amusing and, to be blunt, I miss Pops and Rex. If you are met with resistance to bring Bob back, perhaps you could spin-off Pops into his own series or let him make a guest appearance on "Guy Noir".

Tom Cherry

Dear Tom, I could write a story starring Pops and Rex, with Berneice, and just leave the Young Artist out of it. That’s fine by me. It’d give me ten minutes to go backstage and re-do my hair.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
As a former flower child, I was wondering if the turbulent Sixties touched Lake Wobegon. Did any hippies ever travel to the town? I try to imagine how Wobegonians would have reacted to a commune appearing in their midst.

Susan Eleanor Engstrom

Susan, The Sixties did indeed come to Lake Wobegon and there was a commune that operated one summer north of town on a piece of land nobody had bothered with for years. People were quite amused to see apparently sensible young people give themselves over to back- breaking manual labor for a whole summer while living in tents and cooking over open fires. Eventually, of course, it wore them out and they went back to civilization. We miss them.