(GK: Garrison Keillor; SS: Sue Scott; TR: Tim Russell; FN: Fred Newman; RD: Rich Dworsky)
GK:--after a word from the Ketchup Advisory Board.
TR: These are the good years for Barb and me. We volunteered at a food drive at church and I was looking through a box of donated cereal and found a baseball card of Babe Ruth as a rookie, which I sold for $300,000. We're going to France for vacation ---- or Freedomland, as we call it ----- and we've bought an electric car and now we can come and go without the neighbors knowing it. I learned how to use two-sided adhesive tape to hold my combover in place and I gained twenty pounds so as to hide the mermaid tattoo on my stomach. And then we invested some of our baseball card windfall in manufacturing a combination hamburger and hot dog bun and that business has done extremely well. We should have been happy. Then one day I found Barb twisted like a pretzel on the living room floor. Honey, what are you doing?
SS: I'm doing yoga. I want to hurt myself, Jim.
TR: Why? You've got your legs way up behind your neck.
SS: I want to see if I can still feel. I'm--so-- numb. I feel utterly desensitized.
TR: Are you sure it's not your pantyhose cutting off your circulation?
SS: I'm numb inside ---- nothing seems to affect me anymore.
TR: You're not numb. You're just from the Midwest. And you were raised Presbyterian.
SS: Oh, Jim. I have no sense of moral indignation. We're still in the midst of a war I don't understand, our health care system is going bonkers, our civil rights are being lost a little more each day, and all I can think about is new recipes for exciting summertime salads.
TR: Maybe you're not getting enough ketchup, Barb.
SS: What?
TR: Ketchup has natural mellowing agents that help us to accept the fact that the big problem with democracy is that it depends so much on people like us.
SS: Oh, I don't care. Sure. Give me some ketchup.
RD: (SINGS)These are the good years to live within the box.
. To read the funny papers and check up on our stocks.
Life is flowing like ketchup on the rocks.
GK: Ketchup. For the good times.
RD: (SINGS) Ketchup--ketchup.
© Garrison Keillor 2003