Dear Garrison,
The spouse and I love your show and for the past two years we've seen you in person at Tanglewood and loved every moment. I've been watching the schedule to see when tickets would be available for Tanglewood but so far it's not listed.

In a recent Post to the Host you mentioned that you were doing less traveling this year — does this mean you're not coming to Tanglewood? (Rats.)

By the way, the new program, "Literary Friendships," sounds terrific. I wish it were
being broadcast for those of us who don't live nearby.

Jane Reel
Watervliet, NY

Jane, we'd find it hard to give up going to Tanglewood and the show will play there on Saturday, July 2, unless Albert Webster, our tour manager, is delusional, in which case we have major problems here. All of us love Tanglewood as a glorious venue — the rolling terrain of the Berkshires, the pretty towns, the crack staff of the Boston Symphony that runs the place, and especially we adore the audience that comes and sits under the Shed or out on the grass and hangs around afterward to press the flesh. It's an audience that is quick and warm and capable of making sharp turns, so you can give them Pat Donohue singing the blues and in the next minute, after a word about ketchup, Emmanuel Ax playing Debussy, and they soak it all up. As they soak up the sun. Or (a few years ago) a summer downpour. I'm especially fond of Tanglewood because my wife loves it so much, having been a violin student there in her teenage years and having the chance to play in a student orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So we go out and stay at the Red Lion in Stockbridge and it's always the last show of the season before the summer break and sometimes we're joined by Boston relatives and late on Saturday night we sit on the porch of the Red Lion and feel the lovely summer stretch out ahead of us.

"Literary Friendships," our series of duo-artist readings mit conversation starts January 18 at the Fitzgerald with Robert Bly and Donald Hall who have been friends for more than fifty years, since their student days at Harvard. A friendship that took form in thousands of letters written back and forth. Each of them seems to have shown the other everything, every work in progress, and told the other exactly what he thought, and this is an amazement. Plus which both of them are wonderful poets. We'll be producing this series for broadcast and hope it turns up next year on your local public radio station.

Dear Garrison,
I've often wondered why you pronounce "Guy" in Guy Noir to rhyme with "fly" instead of (as in French) with "flee". I suppose it must be because he's American, but then why isn't Noir pronounced to rhyme with "choir"? It just seems inconsistent. After all this time, however, I've become used to the way you say the name and would find the correct way jarring.

I'm looking forward to seeing your show in Duluth Jan. 8. Merry Christmas and see you next year!

Marilyn Kaeli
Hibbing MN

Marilyn, I could make the case that the French word "noir" is in common usage in English, pronounced as it is in French, so as a last name it can be pronounced that way. But of course the simple truth is that Guy Noir pronounces his name the way he pronounces it, and in America people have the right to do this. You could pronounce your name like "caeli" or "kiley" or "keeley" and the rest of us would have to accept it. We can argue further about this in Duluth.

Hello Mr. Keillor,
I've had a crush on Rich Dworsky for awhile now, for singing the marvelous ketchup song and the Jewish holiday songs, as well as being the bandleader, right? (In my naivete I used to think that was you playing the piano for the opening theme.) But then I heard Pat Donohue sing "That'll Be Alright" on November 6 and that "ah-hah" of his near the end of the song sent shivers down my spine. You know them both so tell me, who should I develop my innocent crush on? And when will you invite Billy Collins back in, so we Bronxites can brag?

Rina Sanej
The Bronx

Rina, Rich is the unmarried guy in the Shoe Band so if the thought of availability stimulates your fantasy, then you'd want to choose him. And being a pianist, he's naturally more of a romantic figure (think Chopin, Liszt, Gershwin, Peter Duchin, Professor Longhair — forget Glenn Gould). And he's a terrific salsa dancer. Pat is married to Susan, the father of Daisy, and though he gets very sportive and limber during his guitar numbers, and has some great moves, I doubt that he's a great ballroom dancer. (He used to be in the brick business, after all.) Rich loves New York, by the way, and has Broadway ambitions. As for Billy Collins, we'll get right on the case — any other Bronxite you want us to invite? The show is back in the city in April, so think hard.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
My husband and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel; our youngest daughter will graduate high school and leave for college in a few short years. We are intrigued by the idea of leaving the East Cost and heading back to the Midwest, specifically Minnesota. Only one problem; I hate snow. I believe my aversion to snow arose on the day of my birth, the end of December in the middle of a snowstorm.

However, on my husband's frequent visits to the Twin Cities area, he has noticed the fact that many downtown areas are connected by elevated walkways. My question: Would it be possible to live an active life in Minnesota and never have to actually touch or feel snow?

Angela Ibrahim
Silver Spring MD

Angela, you certainly could find a high-rise condo connected to enclosed walkways that would let you roam downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul and not touch snow, but such a life would be too weird for words. One can't even consider it. And I'm sure that you've seen plenty of snow in Silver Spring and you didn't need to be enclosed in a bubble. Snow is actually rather cheery, even romantic, and if you came up for a visit in January, you'd no doubt feel the urge to go for a walk and let the snowflakes land on your cheeks and smell the chill in the air. You'd come to associate snow with fireplaces, hearty soup, red wine, reading books in bed under a quilt, and mysterious moonlit nights. You don't want to experience these things from behind glass.

Hi Mr. Keillor,
My family and I adore listening to your show every week. I grew up listening with my dad — he passed away many years ago — and it is gratifying to do the same with my three children now.

I am married to the most wonderful man in the world and my husband and I are about to celebrate our twelfth wedding anniversary. We have a special place for you in our hearts — you were in the restaurant, at the next table, on the night we got engaged!

So I was hoping that in honor of our anniversary (on December 27th), you might give us some words and wisdom on love.

Thank you so much,
Rabbi Janet Ozur Bass

Rabbi Bass,
I'm dazed to think that I was in the vicinity of such a grand occasion and unaware of it. I imagine this was in New York, maybe at La Reserve on 51st Street, or Alison's On Dominick, or the Rainbow Room, three lovely places that have all passed into restaurant history, but here you are, and here I am, still ticking along. I'm much older than you, but probably no wiser. A rabbi, unless you are a hermit rabbi or a cloistered rabbi, is bound to see more of life than most authors. People defer to rabbis, of course, and tiptoe around them, but you do get to see individuals in terrible straits, under awful duress, in great despair, and that is when you witness the great truth about people, their sheer tenacity. As a young man I hoped to be one of the gifted, but gifts are cheap, and what really counts is tenacity, which everyone has in them but it doesn't come out unless provoked by circumstance. My great ambition has always been to be a novelist, which I've failed at. I had the opportunity — back around the time you and I were neighbors in that restaurant, I had all the time in the world to write the novel I wanted to write, but it wasn't in me. It simply wasn't there. I couldn't find the tenacity. For me, radio was the day job, a stopgap measure, a way to tide myself over until I got to do the big thing I wanted to do, but if it gave pleasure to you and your dad, then I start to see it in a different light. Last Saturday night, I went to a memorial concert at an old firehouse in Minneapolis, to honor an old friend from the early days of "A Prairie Home Companion" who died last summer. Died young. (My age). Milton Schindler, a nice Jewish boy from north Minneapolis who discovered the blues in high school and picked up the harmonica and became an outstanding blues harpist and shouter and got the nickname "Soupy". There were many musicians from the old days of "Prairie Home" and it was good to see them and feel their tenacity, hammering out the classic blues and R&B and jug band numbers that Soupy did so well. He was a sweet man who was possessed on stage and he threw himself into his music and held nothing back. (Pat Donohue has that same fire, and so does Rich Dworsky.) It was a soulful show. None of the folks on stage had ever found wealth and fame in the music biz, and yet they are great artists of tenacity. The art is larger than the artist. It keeps on keeping on. I listened to Bob & Ray as a kid and got a particular odd sense of joy from them and some of it lives on in this show and someday when I'm 101 I'll hear something on the radio and think, "Hey, he stole that from me." and be pleased.

Post to the Host:
Hello. Several times you have mentioned pumpkin pie as mediocre and merely "an excuss for using nutmeg." The pies I grew up on are from a recipe right off the back of the Libby's can and contain no nutmeg. The store-bought pies always taste funny to me, they must have nutmeg in them. Is this a reference to the legend about sailors abusing nutmeg aboard ship to alter reality, or some other nutmeg myth? I do rate the Libby pumpkin pie and whipped cream up there with fresh sweet corn.

Thanks,
T.C. Robertson
Coupeville, WA

T.C., you can't be serious. You simply can't. Anyone who puts canned pumpkin on a par with fresh sweet corn has never eaten fresh sweet corn. Either that, or you have a serious nutmeg problem. You need help.

Garrison:
Thanks tons for the snippet of Oley Speaks's "Road to Mandalay." It IS a contagious melody! I first saw it in a stack of sheet music at a neighbor's house when I was a kid. Once in awhile a student sings it in the weekly recitals here in the music department at the University of Toledo. But of course, neither they nor Thomas Hampson's recording of it use all the politically incorrect verses of Kipling's original poem — I'd love to hear the one about the Burma's girl's "whackin' white cheroot" and so forth.

Speaks was from Canal Winchester, OH, SE of Columbus, but lived around NYC most of his life. A colleague who did doctoral work in music at the same time I did at Ohio State wrote her voice performance document on him after sitting at the Speaks archives (a couple filing cabinets, I think) there in his home village,
presided over by some fussy older ladies who volunteer there.

Ed Duling
Bowling Green, Ohio

Ed, it just isn't possible to explain the power of Mr. Speaks's music to anyone who hasn't lifted his or her voice in "The Road To Mandalay" — the verse is artful but the chorus actually sings itself, it comes roaring out of you against your will. I wish you could have seen the faces of the VocalEssence Choir as they sang it — they were transported! Most of them had never heard of it (nor "Juanita") and they, being a serious choir, are of course well-practiced at singing the unsingable — the whole miserable glop of modern choral composition — and here was a song that made everyone feel like an opera star. I once wrote northern Minnesota lyrics to it and sang it as "On The Road To Grand Marais" and that was okay. There are verses in the Kipling original that, if I sang them on the air, would cost me my job and force me to work for a living and maybe teach (yikes), so I stay away from those. Freedom of expression is fine by me but I don't intend to give up this cushy sinecure so that you can hear about white cheroots.

Mr Keillor,
I've been a mostly dedicated listener (and reader) of yours for years now — before and after reading James Joyce — because I'm always a fan of keeping a dying art form from death. My question, however, concerns the distribution of PHC, which has changed over the last six months, from Public Radio International to American Public Media. I'm curious because I've been hearing rumors about public radio companies and recent leadership shake-ups due to the expansion of FCC permissions regarding consolidation of media companies. Does the change in PHC's distributor have anything to do with these events? Was the change your decision, or was it due to changes in PRI policies? Is there something about PRI I should know?

Jeff Eldrige
Mansfield, WA.

Jeff, the workings of Management are a big mystery to me, so this will be a short answer. National Public Radio is the national consortium of public radio stations that produces "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" and a great deal more. Back in 1978, when NPR declined to carry PHC nationally (we'd begun on Minnesota Public Radio in 1974), MPR formed a distribution company called American Public Radio to distribute PHC live by satellite uplink. APR added other programs to its list, and changed its name to PRI, and this last year, MPR split away from PRI to create APM. APM is tied to MPR and PRI wasn't. The change was not my decision, and so far it doesn't seem to affect PHC much one way or the other. Neither PRI nor APM require me to sit in a conference room and listen to people drone on about branding or interconnection fulfillment or devolution of decision-making. I hate meetings and as long as I don't have to attend any, it's all the same to me. They can call it ATM or PMS or ADD and it's okay by me.

Dear GK,
One thing I've always been curious about: Do the characters in Lake Wobegon age? Will
Clarence Bunsen always be 55, etc.?

Kevin Key
St. Cloud

Good question, Kevin. Most of them don't age, or don't age much, since not many of the old timers have died in the past thirty years. The death rate is extremely low. The resurrection rate is higher — I believe that Byron Tollefson, whose funeral was dealt with about eight or ten years ago — his lesbian daughter from Arizona, Diane, came and sang "Red River Valley" at the service and also, I believe, "Happy Trails To You," and embarrassed her family — Byron has been seen in the background in a couple recent monologues. Some children have aged — Barbara Ann Bunsen went from her early teenage years to being a wife and mother, but now she seems to be holding between thirty and thirty-five. But then so do many women in real life. Chronological age is tricky. And a writer is reluctant to kill off anybody who seems to have more to say. Even old Mr. Berge, the town drunk, keeps hanging on, wanting to say something sensible someday.

GK,
I mentor a 15-year old boy who suffers from severe depression and obesity, and has tried to commit suicide on more than one occassion. He lost his father about eight years ago, and lives alone with his mother in a very dangerous neighborhood in Phoenix. His mother is afraid he is going to turn out like his older brother (who was recently shot in a botched drug deal).

Amazingly, for a tough kid (at least on the exterior), his passion in life is poetry. Unfortunately, I can barely tell the difference between Shel Silverstein and Robert Frost (pathetically, my favorite book of poetry is "There's a Wocket in my Pocket" by Dr. Seuss).

The poems my mentee writes are dark, full of despair, loneliness and hopelessness — but they are so moving... so powerful.

What can I do to help direct him? I don't have the slightest idea where to start or who to turn to... how can I help foster this talent? Is there a "must read" list? Do you know any poets he could become an old-fashioned "pen pal" with him to help encourage and critique his work?

He is such a sweet kid, and I think poetry could be his ticket out of despair. Any direction you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,
Jon Lewis
Chandler, AZ

Jon, you're right about wanting to blow on this spark and get the flame burning. I'd suggest he look at the poems of Charles Bukowski and the very early work of Victor Hernandez Cruz — two poets who might interest this kid, simply because the poets are living on the rough side of town and find beauty there — but I think he might also be intrigued by poetic form, the villanelle and sestina and the sonnet, which can give great pleasure, like working out a math problem. For a young poet who is passionate about the art, publication is a natural step, and you'll want to urge him to put his poems out there where other people can enjoy them. The thought of giving enjoyment to strangers is a healthy notion for a young man. Publication might mean something as simple as taking his best poem to Kinko's and running off a hundred copies in a handsome layout and putting them in a public place for people to read. Or posting them. Eventually your poet might want to attend a poetry event (not a Slam, but something uncompetitive, where poets of all ages take turns reading to the audience), at first to listen, then to participate. The boy's depression has to be treated seriously, by professionals, and I don't hold out poetry as the answer to that, but surely it can only help him if poetry can be an entry point to a larger world in which people gather on the basis of love of language, rather than physical attractiveness, or hipness, or athletic prowess. And how about piano? Can we get his hands on a piano? Can he sing? Does he maybe have a comedian jiggling around inside him?

Post to the Host:
I'm a medical resident, which means I spend eighty hours a week or so in a hospital dealing with a lot of human tragedy and sometimes, people at their worst. After spending hours admitting patients from the emergency room, I find that, unlike some of my colleagues, I can't just run up to the callroom and lay my head down on the pillow for a few winks before the next call. I have to "decompress" — and I do this by going up to our small residents' office, which is on the 8th floor of the hospital, spending a few moments staring out the window at all the twinkling lights of the entire sprawl that is Los Angeles, and then, I sit down at the computer and type, "www.prairiehome.org". The first thing I do is scroll down to "The View from Mrs. Sundberg's Window". If I've had to give bad news, I often have a queasy, heavy feeling in my stomach, and reading about Mrs. Sundberg listening to your show somehow makes me feel better. She sounds like such a wonderful person. Is she a professional writer? Or at least a former English major? Please express my gratitude towards her for giving me hope about people, and making me a more thoughtful doctor.

Agnes Chen
Los Angeles

Agnes, your kind letter was forwarded to Mrs. Sundberg, whose response is below…

Dear Agnes,
I received your e-mail the other day while in the middle of a double batch of stollen, a Christmas bread I make in rather manic waves around this time of year to give to people I care for. As I read your words that dang oven buzzer went off so I was running back and forth between the kitchen and my desk and managed to trip on a string of lights dangling off the lowest branch of the tree. I nearly knocked the whole shebang over, but didn't and had only a few ornaments to hang and some water to wipe up. I was able at last to read your letter in one sitting and I will say there were tears. It's a blessed moment to find a good listener in the crowd, and even better when a conversation springs up. Your work sounds like a real mix of sadness and beauty, and I imagine you could define "tired" better than most of us on the planet. You know, I've never been to Los Angeles but I'm putting it on my list. When I look out my window I see a bunch of pine trees and snow and an occasional squirrel. And then there's the floodlight from the neighbor's backyard which is a real problem for Mr. Sundberg but that's another story. Anyway, I think a sprinkle of city lights would do me some good. I don't know that I could tell you what I do to decompress but I'm thinking that just being in my kitchen with flour on my hands does the trick. That and tucking in the kids and writing letters. I love to write and have since I got bored riding in the way back of our brown station wagon on a trip through Wisconsin when I was about eight. I wrote a letter to my grandmother on an A&W root beer stand napkin and mailed it to her from a corner mailbox in Hayward. Well, anyway. I could go on and on but there's laundry to fold and the kids have field trips to the opera and the Science Museum tomorrow so there are bag lunches to get ready. Agnes, if you lived nearby you'd be my doctor. Because you know the importance of "decompression," and because you use words like "twinkling" and "gratitude" while working eighty hour weeks.

Mrs. Sundberg

Hi Garrison,
I have seen your show twice in NYC. I went to try to get tickets, and saw you were not coming to NYC this Christmas??? Are you ok, is it because your daughter is in school? Why did you skip NYC this year?

Ken in Ridgefield, CT

We're in St. Paul for December this year, Ken, because it's easier for our staff. PHC is put out by a rather small clump of people and we try not to pound on them too hard, especially the production crew which does all the heavy lifting. (And, theoretically, I was going to use the fall to overhaul the show a little, so what did I do? I went and got up to my dewlaps in campaign stuff — so much for well-laid plans.) But I miss New York in December. My wife and I are heading out there for a few days next week to take our long Christmas walk down Madison and up Fifth and see the Christmas tree at the Met and take in a play. The show comes to Town Hall in April for four Saturdays and we'll take a poll whether to come in April or December. My daughter is, of course, in school through most of December and would hate to miss school — and I hate being away from her. Maybe we could enroll her at P.S. 95 as a one-month exchange student. She feels quite at home in New York, being a child who loves to eat in restaurants and who can sit quietly through a two-hour show — she recently attended Madame Butterfly and seemed quite absorbed throughout, and when she was five, she had a big time at "Thoroughly Modern Millie". (She did sleep through some of the first act, but napping through the slow parts is a New York skill.) And of course the Radio City Christmas Spectacular was enormous for her. She had the good fortune to see the Rockettes at a performance in which one Rockette accidentally kicked off her shoe. Priceless.

Hi GK
Love your show. It is simply the very best in radio and despite the fact that the BBC make it quite difficult to find it here in Scotland, we hear it each week through satellite TV. Brilliantly funny, witty and keenly observed. And it brings us in touch with musicians unheard of in our country. Maybe one day we'll make it across to a show in the States.

Lorna Dey,
Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Lorna, you're a sweetheart. I've not been to Aberdeen but did get up to Huntly once to rummage around in a graveyard and take snapshots of stones for my Aunt Mary, whose people were buried there, and I have old pals north of Pitlochry, living on a mountaintop there, and a pal in Leven, on the coast, in the Kingdom of Fife. And of course my grandpa came from Glasgow almost a century ago. I want to take some family back to the old country to celebrate his crossing, if only we can find some old steamship to board and stand at the rail as she steams away to the west. We still don't understand why he came over. He had a good job there, working for the railroad, same as he did in the U.S., so it wasn't for money, and it wasn't for love — he brought a wife and five wee bairns — and it wasn't to escape the sheriff, so what? Scots people are tight-lipped about personal matters, it seems. He went back for a visit in 1925 and kept a detailed diary of his return voyage, what time he rose, what he ate for breakfast, who he saw, and so forth, until he arrived in Glasgow and his relatives were there and then he wrote no further. Isn't that amazing? We're left to assume that he came to America to get away from his stepmother and perhaps to escape a faint lingering air of scandal surrounding the circumstances of his marriage. But the things we most want to know about him, he kept from us.

Dear Garrison,
Did you ever have to give a witty response (to the many unromantic, pessimistic Minnesotans out there) when questioned about your remarriage, and if so, what was the response?

Cheri

Cheri,
People in Minnesota tend not to ask strangers about their personal lives unless there's an issue — e.g. if you dumped garbage on somebody's lawn, they might ask you where you were brought up. And I didn't make a big announcement of my remarriage. But I disagree about Minnesotans being unromantic or pessimistic. (I know you qualified it with "many".) We are hopeful and adventurous people, by and large, and intrepid travelers, and the ability to travel and be at home in strange circumstances makes us good candidates for marriage. The rules for marriage are the same as those for lifeboat passengers: stay in your place, no sudden moves, and keep all disastrous thoughts to yourself. And if one lifeboat sinks, then you find another one.

Hello Mr. GK!

I first heard your show on I-10 near the Louisiana border headed to New Orleans from Houston when I was sixteen. My mother and father are Pentecostal missionaries, and we were raising funds to go to Botswana. It was a wonderfully strange time for me. As a Houston hometown boy I didn't really want to go overseas and leave all my friends behind but I didn't have a choice. So I was enduring the hardship, so to speak, of traveling with the family and being away from all that I was familiar with. I was fiddling around with the car radio dial and landed upon an NPR station and you were having the annual Joke Show. The family loved it and we laughed until we almost cried. Several times we almost lost the show due to traveling but we were always able to find another broadcasting station as soon as the one we were listening to faded. It was a heavenly moment. Since then I have been a fairly faithful listener in between stints to countries abroad. I have changed much since that sixteen-year-old boy; traveling out has done wonders for my mind and soul. I am back in Houston though for how long I am not sure. My only question is will you ever get this far south? Hope to see you down here someday!

Zach Long

Zach,
I see by the calendar that I'm to be in Port Arthur early next year, but that's solo, without the show, just me, talking. We've done a few shows in Texas, years ago, and I suppose we will again, but this year we're delighted to be spending more time in St. Paul. I love St. Paul for a lot of reasons not worth trying to explain and at the moment find it a comforting place to be. And I have a child who is just starting to understand jokes, so there's a responsibility to stay home and tell them. Glad that travel did your mind and soul good.