Editor’s note: Writer and radio humorist Garrison Keillor
of A Prairie Home Companion fame will play the North
Charleston Coliseum on Monday, March 12. He sat down recently -- with tongue planted firmly in cheek -- and answered 10 e-mail questions from Friday 5 guy Dan Conover...
Q: There's a soothing quality to your on-air persona, which makes me wonder: When long-time listeners meet you in person, do they seem either comforted or alarmed by your actual personality?
A: I wasn't brought up to expose strangers to my actual personality. In public I am calm, unfailingly polite, soft-spoken, and modestly intelligent. My actual personality is rather different and involves velvet bellbottoms, heavy oak furniture and torches in wall sconces, the consumption of absinthe, and an obsession with the tango. That is all I care to say about it at the moment. Tall languid olive-skinned women are attracted to me for reasons I can't fathom, and I am putty in their hands. Hours, days, pass in a whirlwind of passion before we return to our senses and for that reason, I am way behind on home maintenance chores.
Q: The average daily high temperature for March in Minneapolis-St. Paul is 39.2 degrees. In Charleston, it's 65.4. Does this strike you in any way as unseemly?
A: Thirty-nine sounds warm to me. It's actually much colder than that. The
Weather Service thermometer is rather close to a vent -- somebody
told me that. Really. We live here by choice, as I'm sure people do in
Charleston, and every choice has an upside and a downside. In
Minnesota, people say, "I prefer winter here to summer there,"
referring to Arizona or Florida or Texas -- or, perhaps, Charleston.
As I write this, I look out my kitchen window in St. Paul toward the
neighbors' backyards, a series of carriage houses and shrubbery, all of
it deep in snow, snow falling, which summons up Chekhov and Tolstoy and
James Joyce, which strikes me as serenely beautiful. I would never try
to persuade someone to move here from Charleston, and I can't imagine
living anywhere else. And from that come stories.
Q: I read somewhere that you converted from Lutheranism to Episcopalianism. Is this because Episcopalians are somehow more fun?
A: I grew up in a fundamentalist sect that was anti-liturgical and separatist in spirit and I ran away from it as fast as I could. The liturgical church, in which we say the same words together, words that we did not invent, is a unifying church that minimizes the power and influence of leaders. Fundamentalism has always been susceptible to the power of personalities, and all of these megachurches today are gathered around a charismatic guy who makes everybody feel good. In the Episcopal church, as in the Catholic church, it doesn't matter so much who is standing up front. He or she is our servant, not our guru, and we go through the holy rite of the Mass and communion with our hearts open to the Spirit, which is the beauty of ritual: it says, "You cannot approach the Lord God through force of language or reason. So say these words and bring your heart along."
I attended a Lutheran church when I lived in New York City and I get to
attend one every year or so, but I married an Episcopalian and so I go
with her.
Q: What is it that Southerners typically fail to grasp about Midwesterners?
A: I don't sense that Southerners take a keen interest in the Midwest, which is OK by me. We northerners listen to southern music all the time and read southern writers and love to drive around the South. As the accent becomes more rare, we cherish it more. A southern humorist has an eager audience waiting in Minnesota and has the great advantage of a wealth of stereotypes to work against. We Midwesterners by and large are too private and polite to have made a big impression. You have Jerry Lee Lewis and Flannery O'Connor and Bear Bryant and Robert Johnson and Lester Maddox, and we don't have anybody comparable. You're the show and we're the audience.
Q: Has the FDA ever evaluated the ingredients in Powdermilk Biscuits, specifically as they relate to shy people?
A: The Florida Department of Agriculture has enough on its plate without worrying about a little old baked product from Minnesota.
Q: Here in Charleston, we've recently concluded that this whole automobile fad is probably here to stay. What kinds of high-tech gadgets are hot these days in Lake Wobegon?
A: The computer, of course, and Google and caller ID, the list just goes on and on. Cars with screens on the dash on which you see a map of the environs and a blue dot representing your car -- the very one you are driving at this moment! -- and the dot moves as your car moves and you can track your progress through the gridiron of streets of St. Paul, Minnesota. Many drivers have died out of fascination with these maps.
Q: On the one hand, we've got satellite radio and podcasts. On the other, the commercial wavelengths are homogenized to an unprecedented extent. Are these good days or bad days to work in the non-visual medium?
A: It's never been better. There is freedom here that you won't find in
visual media. I get to say what I want and if I want to talk about
families and Lutherans and a small town in Minnesota, nobody can stop
me and insist that I toss in a story about methamphetamine use among
transvestite soybean farmers visited by creatures from other galaxies.
I don't have to shoot anybody or torture people. It's lovely. When I
was in college, all of the smart ambitious people in broadcasting were
heading for TV and they sneered at radio, but it doesn't take much
brains to see the difference: one person can create audio that is
daring and inventive and keeps your attention: all he has to do is open
his mouth. Video, though it's gotten more manageable, requires a
committee and sometimes a small army to create imaginative drama. And
the beauty of audio is that you can carry it around and do other
things. To watch TV, you have to plant yourself in a small dark place
and camp.
Q: Is nostalgia what it used to be?
A: No, it's not. Growing up in the Fifties, we could dream about the Thirties and the Great War and feast on stories told by our aunts and uncles and think about FDR, a beloved man, and Churchill, a giant whose voice we could imitate, and the heroes in uniform and all. The cars of the Thirties were handsome, and the tractors were fun to drive. There still were plowhorses on my Uncle Jim's farm, and outhouses, and woodstoves, and milking was done by hand, and the snow was higher in the winter. I could go on and on. There were no seat belts so you stood on the front seat next to Daddy as he drove down the highway and that was exciting. Your parents weren't worried about you. You went out the door and ran around with other kids and nobody watched what you did. It was lovely. Kids nowadays look back at the Beatles with nostalgia, I guess: OK, but that's just a bunch of songs by some very talented people who, alas, didn't get along very well or know how to manage their own careers. I'd a lot rather be nostalgic about FDR. He was a great man who just got better and better.
Q: What is better than it used to be?
A: Literacy, for one thing. The Internet is advancing the English language at warp speed. Who needs a guitar if you have a laptop and a high-speed connection and also a cellphone to text on? You sit and write your blog and maintain a website and drift in and out of chat rooms and contribute to threads and chatter over the keypad of your phone and it's all words, words, words. My old generation was a serious rocknroll generation but that was an eternity ago. The kids are funnier, quirkier, and more eccentric, and it's all about language.
10. I've got a movie script concept for you: "A Prairie Home Companion II: Back For Vengeance." Interested?
Q: Sorry. I'm already in pre-production on "A Prairie Home Companion II:
The Axeman Returns" in which Tommy Lee Jones returns from the grave to
team up with Virginia Madsen and bring the show back on an ultra-high
radio frequency that can pulverize mortar and bring down tall buildings
unless America is willing to hand over nuclear secrets. Virginia turns
bad in this version, and Meryl Streep is very very bad (think "The
Devil Wears Prada" but this time in black leather and with a riding
crop and monocle). I am the last person standing between them and world
domination, and I believe that, for this picture, I will be played by
George Clooney.
Oh Dan, I got such a giggle out of your second question. You see, I moved from Charleston to the Twin Cities and five years later, I drug my husband here.
I cried the first time it snowed in April, I thought Spring would never come. I have yet to see my husband get misty because there's no snow to be found.
Also #4, my MIL and I watched Drop Dead Gorgeous, which mocked Midwestern beauty pageants. She turned to me and said, "Heather, that's just not nice, Southerners don't have such awful stereotypes to put up with."
I'm not even paraphrasing.
Posted by: Heather | March 13, 2007 at 06:01 AM
My mother is a Midwesterner (specifically small-town Iowa), and she has all the wonderful qualities of the breed. She has adapted well to North Carolina, which -- as author Will Blythe points out -- has a lot of Midwestern sensibilities and niceness blended into its cultural identity.
But neither place -- not the Midwest, not North Carolina -- has much in common with Charleston and its environs. We might as well be from another planet as far as such places are concerned. I've lived here for 13 years and I'm only beginning to get a feel for this place.
Posted by: Daniel | March 13, 2007 at 11:11 AM
Good interview. I enjoyed reading it. I also had a chance to send Garrison some questions. Enjoy:
http://everydayyeah.com/?q=content/interview-mr-keillor
Posted by: everydayyeah | December 19, 2007 at 09:27 AM