Today Garrison Keillor brings his popular "Prairie Home Companion" radio show to Baltimore. They'll be doing the show from the refurbished Hippodrome Theater downtown, along with special guests Carole King and Jearlyn Steele, the Minneapolis gospel singer who is a frequent guest on Mr. Keillor's show. It will be an excellent show, without a doubt. Details:http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/My Dad was always fond of Mr. Keillor (my awe-filled respect for him is such that calling him by his first name would be an ineffable breach, as opposed to how easy it would to call the "current occupant" at 1600 Pennsylvania Av. "George"- or "Boy George"- or worse - in any setting). Dad marvelled at the fact that GK was able to find work at The New Yorker right out of college and Minnesota, which would be analogous to becoming a big league pitcher right after 11th grade. Dad listened to the show for many years, and often recommended it to me, but in those days my tastes in radio ran more to the Casey Kasem style of Top 40 countdown shows. It wasn't long after Dad died that I stumbled across "PHC" one Saturday evening, and found it a remarkable way of communing with Dad. And, since I view Heaven as a place with the ultimate cable and radio selections available, I figure it's something Dad and I can listen to at the same time. That's quite pleasing to me.
I once read of the week-long preparations for the radio show, how exhausting it is for Mr. Keillor to write the entire thing (he modestly credits "Sarah Bellum" as the writer sometimes) and perform in most of it. The person describing the show said there is no one who can pinch-hit for GK, because there is not another person alive who possesses the same set of skills. Mr. Keillor writes the show, he is the emcee, he performs in virtually all of the skits, he sings solo and in harmony with others on all types of songs, and he delivers an extemporaneous monologue called "The News from Lake Wobegon" that is, for me, the weekly high point of the show. It would be one thing to perform this enchanting, entrancing piece from a script, but all he does is have a few ideas to talk about, bits of life in his mythical home town, and off he goes.
Film producer Robert Altman's last movie was a cinema version of the radio show, and it was a great movie, starring GK, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones and Lindsay Lohan. I recommend it highly, if you can stand to see a movie without Angelina Jolie or international terrorists.
Baltimore welcomes you, Mr. Keillor. Tickets for the show were sold out long before most of us even heard he was coming to town. The Sunpaper says he will be reading from his new novel Pontoon and signing books at the downtown Enoch Pratt Library tomorrow night at 6, but I'll be content to hear the radio show tonight. My dislike of downtown-post-Ravens crazy drunk traffic will mean missing that event as well, but since Lake Wobegon is all in the mind anyway, I can just as easily be there by being here.
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