Sir:
Last night I got to page 373 of "Lake Wobegon Days" and read your "95 Theses 95" manifesto. I laughed so hard I was just about shrieking. My cats jumped off the bed and hid! Thank goodness I wasn't on an airplane. Did the editor of the Wobegon "Herald Star" ever find those missing three pages? And did you ever play Curly in "Oklahoma!"? (thesis 89) God Bless You!

Karen

Karen,
I never got asked to play Curly because I can't dance a bit and I'm not good looking enough for Laurey to fall in love with. Gordon MacRae nailed that part in the movie, and now my daughter likes to watch it because she and I love the title song, especially the "We know we belong to the land" part with the whoops. Last month, at a show in Asheville, N.C., just because the caterer was a woman named Laurey Masterton, I got the whole audience to sing that and do the whoops and spell out O-k-l-a-h-o-m-a. As for the missing three pages, yes, he did find them, and I suppose if there's ever a new edition of the book, I should stick them in.

Dear Mr. Keillor:
I object to the phrase "my sweet old someone" in your opening theme song, it's like saying "my any old bimbo".

--FC

Dear FC,
The line is an odd slant reference to Meredith Wilson's "Goodnight, My Someone" from MUSIC MAN, a favorite musical of mine for the past fifty-some years, in which Marian Paroo sings a love song to someone she doesn't know, her "someone" who she dreams of. My "someone" is the radio listener, whom I love and do not know and do not consider a bimbo.

Dear Mr. Keillor:
I believe it may be time for you to give up wearing Hyde Brooklyn Bowlers and widen your horizions, dude! Try Birkenstocks. Wear them with thick cotton socks and keep an extra pair of socks in your coat pocket for when the ones on your feet get wet. The feeling of freedom and extreme bliss that you will get from letting your feet express themselves as God MEANT THEM TO ----I have only your welfare in mind.

Lenna

Dear Lenna,
Bless you for thinking of my welfare, but I am not a sandal type of guy. I go for what we used to call "dress shoes" or "street shoes," as opposed to "gym hoes". Nowadays people wear gym shoes everywhere, unless they're lawyers or U.S. Senators or mafiosi, because people find gym shoes more comfortable. My Brooklyn Bowlers are sort of like gym shoes except they're black and made of leather, so they pass for street shoes. A perfect deal. I just have to watch eBay for some size 13 Brooklyn Bowlers to come on the market. Meanwhile, I'm being careful not to step into puddles.

Garrison,
How much loot does Guy Noir get from his clients? The great Jim Rockford got $200 a day and expenses (sometimes) and other private eyes got by on a few bucks, a few shots of the old redeye and some leggy dame. Does Guy get the girl, the bucks or the shaft?

--Tom Lawrence

Tom,
He doesn't get the girl and usually he doesn't get the bucks. Guy is not good at closing a deal and signing a contract. He spends a lot of time fending off clients he doesn't want (lost cats, a search for a missing punchline, etc.) and some time chasing unavailable babes and then, of course, a good deal of time brooding. I am going to have to get him a $200 job just to prove that he can do it.

Dear Garrison Keillor,
My family and I have been listening to your show for a very long time and I really enjoy it! Thanks to you, traveling in the car is a very happy experience. I always enjoy it when Tim Russell does George Bush! My younger sister sings along with ketchup songs while my dad goes hysterical over the stories you tell.

--Sophie, 11

Dear Sophie,
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I don't listen to the show much myself, since I'm almost never driving in a car on Sunday morning when it's rebroadcast here, but I can imagine it could be fun. If you had a two-hour car trip from, say, Duluth to Minneapolis, the show would brighten those freeway miles. Unless you're the host of the show (me) and you listen to it and you think, Yikes! Why did I say that! There are quite a few Yikes! parts in a broadcast and if I were in the car with you guys, I could point them out, but I won't. I'm just glad you're having a good time. Don't forget to buckle up and if your dad gets really hysterical, tell him to pull over and stop. Soon you will be driving and he'll be sitting in the passenger seat and then he can get hysterical about your driving.

Dear Garrison:
I'm here to report on the dismal state of dating for the divorced woman of 46. I love ballroom dancing, flying, and gardening. I go dancing every weekend with my friends, frequent Home Depot, take classes in things that interest me and never meet anyone dateable. I finally joined an internet dating service. All of the men that interested me didn't find my profile (wittily written, I might add) compelling enough to respond to, and the men who were interested in me left me cold. So I quit and have decided to throw my fate to the wind. Perhaps God will push a guy in front of my car and I can narrowly miss running over him, then we'll discover that we have a lot in common and he'll offer to buy me coffee while we talk over the merits of shade gardening vs. sun, East Coast Swing vs. West Coast Swing.

So if you come across a guy 46-55, tall, thin, witty, intelligent, non-smoker, rare drinker, who likes to fly, travel, dance, garden and would like the company of a pretty, intelligent woman, please send him down to Acworth, Georgia. I fear I am destined to die old and alone with 40 cats. I only have one so far.

Nancy

Nancy,
I have a suspicion that you're going to find somebody and love him and complicate your life in wonderful ways, but I will say that the person you find may not fit your specifications. A great many happy married people are married to people who don't match the Ideal but who go well with their spouses. I never sat down to make a list of what I wanted in a woman, and if I had, would it describe my wife? I don't know. For some of us, romance needs to have an element of the accidental, the hand of fate moving us together, and so the internet dating service would be too calculated ---- our hearts would not be able to make that big leap, we'd be perusing other people as if they were books on a shelf. Next time you're in Home Depot, wander out of the gardening department up toward sporting goods and see what's happening there. Or the magazine rack. Or men's clothing. And if we hear from a man who thinks he fits your specs, we'll shoot him right down to you.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I don't know who writes the View from Mrs. Sundberg's window, but it's good. Keep it up. And Russ Ringsak is a gem; isn't it just a great thing for someone to be a truck driver and a wonderful writer at the same time? Makes you kind of proud to be human. And maybe once in awhile, when you feel like it, could you sing the Guy Noir song again? It set the atmosphere so, made you want to turn off the lights and sit close up to the glow from the radio dial.

Cornelia Fleischman
Wroclaw, Poland

Cornelia,
I'll sing that song again. I didn't know that radio dials still glowed.

Dear Mr. Keillor:
We saw the show in San Diego in November and were impressed by the way you presented the news from Lake Wobegon. Do you do that entirely from memory? I did notice that you dropped sheets of paper on the floor from time to time during the show. So I wondered, as you sat on that stool gazing down in an apparent trancelike state, if you were actually reading from notes on the floor. Not that it really matters that much. Just curious.

Richard

Richard,
The News from Lake Wobegon is ad lib, which is no great feat. People do the same thing at dinner tables all the time --- somebody asks you what happened on your trip to Toledo and you look at them and tell them. The dropped papers were scripts. For some reason, we have no wastebasket on stage so we throw stuff on the floor. The stagehands don't pick them up being naturally hesitant to bend over in front of thousands of people, so they just lie there. If I had read from them, I'd be doing a Guy Noir story or talking about ketchup. No, sir, it's all ad lib. Easier for me because I don't talk much all week.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Since your weekly news from Lake Wobegon and your novels are so jam-packed with details, it makes me wonder if you have had to employ (for pay or otherwise) a continuity expert, as they do in films. (I'm the first to notice poor continuity in a movie, but never in you).

Just curious.

--Christine

Christine,
Continuity is a constant irksome problem when a 61-year-old man tells stories about his hometown and nobody dares interrupt him and say, "Wait a minute, that couldn't have happened in 1979 because she would've only been ten years old so how could she be driving that Chevy, you must be thinking of her cousin Sheila." So the poor fool just spins his wheels and digs himself in deeper. I once hired a bright young St. Olaf student to listen to old Lake Wobegon stories and try to organize the essential details into some sort of index or bible and she was aghast at the inconsistencies and gaps. I think I should hire a city manager to keep track of the place for me, and then I could go off and pursue my real ambition which is to sing in nightclubs.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
My wife and I took our mothers to the show at the Wang Center in Boston. We all had a great time, especially my mother who said "it was the kind of thing you just didn't want to end." She first went to the Wang when it was a movie theater in the 30's and the Dorsey band floated up from beneath the floor to play before the movie.

I have a little poem for you; it rhymes (if you are from Boston):

Sis-boom bah, I bought a brand new car,
I've been busy saving fot it, cause I loved it when I saw it
So finish up your soda, and I'll rev up the motor,
We'll cruise the scenic vista from Boston out to Worcester
And there we'll find my sister,
We'll go out and have a pizza
after everybody meets her.

Jim P.

Jim,
I didn't get into the parts of Boston where the real accent lives ---- just a downtown hotel and Cambridge where they all talk through their noses ----- so I'm glad to hear that it still exists.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I have been a fan of your show ever since I discovered it in 1998, and listen every week from my living room chair with my pipe and slippers. I know you are a Democrat. I am a Republican, but our ideological differences never prevented me from enjoying your show, since the political humor was infrequent and usually good natured. Until this season. Over the past few months, the show's political humor has built to a crescendo and taken on a vicious edge. Finally, during last week's show from Hot Springs, I had enough and turned the radio off during Guy Noir (erstwhile my favorite segment, being a devotee of Ramond Chandler). I felt no desire to listen this week, and left my radio off for the first time in years (excepting re-runs I had already heard). If you want to turn the show into a two hour Republican-bashing anti-Bush hatefest, why it's your show and you are free to do that. And it's fine with me... I won't be listening.
—Scott A. Miller, M.D.

Dr. Miller,
I can't imagine you being offended at Guy Noir travelling to Hot Springs and sitting around in a steam bath with Bill Clinton and getting chased up into a tree by a couple of yellow dogs. The very same Hot Springs show drew a tide of bitter mail from Democrats complaining about my making fun of Mr. Clinton and (horrors) singing "Dixie". I must be doing something right. As for a "two-hour Republican-bashing anti-Bush hatefest," I don't know how you could possibly hear that. If I were you, I'd check the pipe tobacco.