Garrison,
Your tribute to Senator Wellstone, via Guy Noir,was very touching.
Thanks for sharing your thoughtful words, thus introducing your
non-Minnesota listeners to your 'champion of the people'. We
understand your sadness and the loss felt by his constituents.
Kathy from Kansas
Kathy, Paul Wellstone was a fine
man of principle and passion and Minnesotans were proud to have
him as a senator, though we’re actually a lot more conservative
than he was. He was a happy public man and that’s a rare
thing. I don’t know if it was right to do a tribute to
him on the show or not. But my wife and I were hit hard by the
tragedy, as was everyone in our neighborhood. Paul and Sheila’s
Minnesota address was a duplex two blocks north of us and we
sometimes saw them around, going to the gym, going to lunch
at a café on Selby Avenue. And two of their campaign
staff who died also lived in the neighborhood. St. Paul is a
small town in certain respects, and I did the show that Saturday
with a heavy heart, thinking about those good people getting
in a car on a cold fall morning and driving past our house to
the St. Paul airport and getting into a two-engine plane and
taking off over the Mississippi and flying north to their deaths.
I think of them every day.
Dear Mr. Keillor:
Please help us Wisconsinites settle a debate with some Minnesotans.
Seems you have a Mall in downtown Minneapolis named Nicolet.
Being from Wisconsin, we are very familiar with Jean Nicolet
of France who began settlement in the Green Bay Wisconsin area.
Thus we pronounce his name "Nicoley" or the proper
French pronunciation.
Who is more correct, Wisconsin or Minnesota and are we referring
to the same Nicolet?
Jim De Groot
Appleton, Wisconsin
Jim, Our Nicollet Mall, which is part
of Nicollet Avenue which runs from downtown Minneapolis halfway
to Iowa, is not named for Jean Baptiste du Lully de Nicolet
(Nick-o-LAY) but for James B. (Bud) Nicollet (NICK-let), an
early real estate developer. It was common for these tycoons
to name prominent features of their developments for themselves,
their wives and daughters, their major creditors, their dentists,
etc. Even the Mississippi River is a vanity name, for the shipping
firm of Mishkin, Simms, Sisco, Ishpeming, and Pierce. There
is so much we could teach you Appletonians about geography if
you’d only come over this way more often. We’re west
of you, you know.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
On the October 26 show you mentioned totally removing your
pants in a public restroom. I seem to remember another story
where your removed your pants in a public restroom while job
hunting. Are you sure that you are not just making excuses to
engage in this kind of behavior? I am not judging, just curious.
Sam Stecher
Nebraska
Sam, I don’t fault you for your
curiosity. The first pants removal was in the Greyhound Depot
in Boston in 1966, where I’d gone (on a bus) to apply for
a job at The Atlantic Monthly. I got off the bus around 7 a.m.
and needed to change my clothes and freshen up, and I took a
sort of sponge, or paper towel, bath in the wash basin, having
removed my pants, of course, so they wouldn’t get splashed
on. I didn’t get the job at the Atlantic, as you may recall.
Had I gotten it, I’d still be in Boston, no doubt, and
be a very different person, smart, eccentric, a natty dresser,
devoted to medieval dance or Romanian epic verse or painted
welkins or some other tiny interest, married to a desiccated
lady named Lydia, the father of a couple of brilliant and troubled
children.
The second pants episode was the one
detailed in the October 26 story, in the men’s room of
the restaurant in the Dyckman Hotel in downtown Minneapolis.
Those are, I believe, the only such incidents in my long (very)
life. And if I recall others, I will certainly tell you about
them in upcoming shows.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
My friend and I have a $50 bet which maybe you can help us
settle. He thinks that when we sign on to AOL it is your voice,
which says..."Welcome," and "You've Got Mail."
I bet him $50 that it wasn't you because you would come up
with much better lines than those.So...who's right? Are you
the "You've Got Mail" guy or not?
Myles Berkowitz
Los Angeles, California
Myles, you’ve just won $50 and
I hope you’ll use some of it to purchase a copy of my new
book.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
What advice do you have to offer a 56-year old lawyer, who wants
to write fiction (and no fair responding that legal writing
is already fiction)? Obviously, it's too late to do it for a
living, but I'd like to do it for fun. It's easy for me to write
stories when I'm emailing my friends, but I can't find the right
tone when it's just me and a computer. And how do you decide
what to start writing about when there are so many avenues you
could go down?
Molly B.
Molly, Don’t write on a computer.
Write in longhand on a legal pad until you get into a groove
and find a tone and the writing is coming along quickly, then
switch to a computer. Write the stories as if you were writing
to your friends and they had a great deal of time to listen
to you. It’s a game, to see if you can hold their attention.
That’s what you write about. The same thing you’d
tell your friends, except of course you can be more honest and
visceral and profane and wild in print.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
I have taught English composition in a community college for
15 years, and I still enjoy reading students' work. Over the
years, I have discovered that if I talk very little and give
students most of the time to write in a quiet place what is
in their heads, they find out they are a whole lot smarter than
they suspected. Other teachers think this is weird; they probably
think I am just lazy. Do you have any suggestions for teaching
writing? Thanks!
Kate
Kate, Your method sounds good to me,
so long as the result is good. That’s your job, to get
young people to write something they wouldn’t have thought
themselves capable of, and you don’t necessarily do that
by lecturing. The best thing is to help students individually:
read their work, take it seriously, see what’s good, praise
what’s good, tell them what’s missing that you the
reader would really want to know about, suggest new turns, new
vistas, and get them enthused for the job of rewriting. Writing
is rewriting. Most writers, young or old, start out with some
long wind-up introduction that only gets in their way, and if
a teacher can help them lop that off, the result is often dramatic
and encouraging. You want to encourage the writer that’s
inside every person, while stimulating the editor inside them
too.
Mr. Keillor,
For a project in my advanced senior English class, my friends
and I selected authors to represent. There are three of us and
I was chosen to represent you! So far I have been able to answer
all the questions put to me by my friends Twain and Thurber.
All the questions except one, that is. I need to know which
of your works is your favorite and what you like about it. Can
you
help?
Jennifer Harrington
Jonesboro, Arkansas
Jennifer, you drew the short straw and
I’m sorry about that. But I’m glad that you know so
much about me. (And gratified that Twain and Thurber are curious.)
My dear, I don’t mean to be coy when I say that my favorite
work is the one I’m working at now, a little novel called
The Meaning of Life. It’s not like anything I’ve done
before and I’m curious to know how it’s going to come
out. As for the old books, I never go back and read them. Someday
I will, probably, when I’m in the Good Shepherd Home and
have lost some of my marbles and want to know about my own life.
I’ll check out Wobegon Boy and the Book of Guys and study
them.
Dear Garrison,
It always seems to be a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Even when
you talked about the upstart replacement organ player at the
local church you claim it was a quiet week. What would be a
loud week in Lake Wobegon?
David D.
Chandler, Arizona
Well, there was the night the grain
elevator blew up. That was in 1941. There were some exploding
chickens about twenty years ago. There was the Halloween that
the boys let the livestock loose and they blocked the road and
the railroad track. There was a tent caterpillar panic some
years ago, rumors of a deadly virus carried by insects. Give
me time, I’ll think of others.
Dear Mr. Keillor
I am living overseas and listening to your program online
brings me back to my youth and to growing up in the Midwest.
Is there any hope that the show will continue on after you've
retired from it? Of course I don't mean to presume you are retiring
soon, but in the advent of your departure what may happen to
A Prairie Home Companion?
Paul Nickodem
Heidelberg, Germany
Paul, I hope the show will continue.
I’d like to see that. It might be even more of a Midwestern
show if someone else ran it. I’m a writer and I’m
60 years old and that sort of shapes it, but someone else who
was more of an improviser and a musician could do an even better
job, I would think. Tell me if you think of someone and if I
agree with you, we’ll hire him or her to come stand in
the wings and watch.
Garrison -
I wish that David Frishberg would have kept the song he performed
on your 10/12 show locked up forever [“My Country Used
To Be”]. Our great country doesn't need out of touch liberals
projecting a negativity at this crucial juncture in our history.
We instead need to promote an image of Americans standing shoulder
to shoulder united for the common good. I am usually open-minded,
but his song was inappropriate.
Dave from Missouri
Dave, I guess you didn’t care for
Dave’s song. I don’t think it was his best song ever,
and I certainly don’t share the sentiment of the title,
but I don’t know what “projecting negativity”
means. It seems to me that conservatives have been among the
most negative people ever with their anti-government rants (even
when they’re running the government), and I don’t
recall them united behind the previous President in any way,
shape, or form. I agree on the need to unite for the common
good, and if you will just line up behind me, we can do that.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
A man who has recently become the object of my affection told
me: "You give my stomach butterflies."How should I
respond to this?
Mauren N.
Binghamton, NY
I think it’s a good thing, Mauren.
Moths would be something else, or locusts. Butterflies sounds
romantic to me.
Hi Mr. Keillor,
Just one little question. I have always wondered if sometimes,
in the dark of night when no one is around and no Lutherans
can hear you, do you feel just a little smug about having once
been a tall, awkward Christian kid and now being one of the
most well-known and well-respected personalities on Public Radio?
Daphne Gooding
Masontown, PA
Daphne, in the dark of night when no
one is around, I sometimes allow myself the fantasy that Renee
Fleming wants me to come to New York to sing some harmony on
her new album of love songs. I imagine staying at the Carlyle
Hotel and after breakfast (croissant, coffee, caviar) the limo
bringing me down to a rehearsal room at Carnegie Hall where
Miss Fleming and I go through “Love Walked In” and
“That’s The Way Love Goes” and “Love Me”
and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and others, and I am
the compleat professional backup singer. I wear a black turtleneck
and corduroys, I mark her phrasings on my score, I am patient
and I am letter-perfect every time, and everybody loves me.
She sometimes reaches over and touches my left arm, she is so
caught up in our duets. This is my fantasy. Everyone wants what
he can’t have. Being a radio personality is (to me) a small
hill of beans next to singing a perfect tenor harmony to Renee
Fleming. A man wants what he wants. I can’t help it. That’s
what I want.
