Mr. Keillor:
On a recent trip to Minneapolis my friends and I got real lost and confused. We just couldn't figure out how they name streets. How many 2nd Streets you wanna bet they have? Well, for starters, we drove through two intersections of 2nd and 2nd on the way to our hotel (4 blocks away was the intersection of North 2nd and 2nd Ave N; 4 more blocks away was North 2nd St and 2nd Ave S). But wait, there's more! About 4 blocks from the Polish restaurant where we ate, is the intersection of 2nd Ave SE and 2nd St SE because at a bend in the river the whole traffic grid gets canted off by 45 degrees. That's just the ones we found. And then there's St. Paul where the whole thing starts all over again!

Would you please use your power to invite someone to rename the streets?

Yours,
Michael Cowan
Torrance, CA

Michael, when you go around in circles, you're going to keep running into 2nd Avenues and 2nd Streets, but if you go in a straight line you'll find 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and so on. That's my advice to you. If you had headed north or south, you'd have followed a perfect consecutive numbering system, and then if you'd headed west, you'd have been in the alphabet of Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard, Humboldt, Irving, James, Knox, and so forth. (Occasionally on our show we have characters named Emerson Fremont or Irving James Knox.) We can't do better than this. If you venture into northeast Minneapolis, you will need to know your U.S. Presidents in order and if you do, you'll be just fine. St. Paul is another story. We don't have numbered streets in St. Paul, except for a few downtown, because we cherish our privacy. The St. Paul homeowner enjoys a high degree of anonymity, especially when it comes to visitors from Torrance. The fact that you got lost around East Hennepin in Minneapolis, however, is a comment on the state of education today. Did they not teach geography in the Torrance schools? Map-reading? Were you not in Boy Scouts? Perhaps you were in an accelerated program that skipped some of these basics and went straight on to study the cosmos, the theory of relativity, and so forth. In any case, we're quite comfortable with our street system here and feel it's a model for the rest of the nation and are not about to amend it in order to accommodate some visitors from California who — pardon me for being blunt — may have been partying a little hard at the time.

Post to the Host:
And one more thing. Wanting to do SOMETHING after 9/11, I made pieced quilts for each of the men at my fire station. Soon after I delivered the gifts, you began railing about the little old women at the Lutheran guild who made quilts for just everybody, including the poor people in the subtropics! So I know how you feel about quilts. If I had your address, I'd be tempted to send you the one remaining North Woods quilt left, so that you would have to face it every day until you made your peace with quilts. Okay, Mr. Keillor, I'm going to go rest.

Judy Sturgess
Independence, MO

Oh dear, Judy, I'm afraid I've gotten on your wrong side, but please reconsider the use of the word "railed". Railing is pretty harsh — I may have murmured, or gently mocked, or nattered, but I did not RAIL at those good Lutheran women. They love to quilt, that's all there is to it, and they crank out a good deal of product, more than there's a need for in Lake Wobegon, so they ship it away to people whether they need it or not. And their quilts are not — forgive me for saying it — all that a quilt can be. My grandma Dora Keillor made a quilt for each of her grandchildren for a wedding gift and I still have the one she made for me, which is very delicate and light and made from lovely faded cotton prints. The quilt of today is often composed of garish materials and can be so heavy as to impede a sleeper's breathing. I guess I am saying that, just as Grandma's baking made me intolerant of all other bread, so her quilt gave me an unreasonably high standard for quilts, and I'm sorry but there you are, that is the price of being a descendant of a good Methodist lady who took these things seriously. She was an excellent baker, a fine quiltmaker, and a former schoolteacher, so we daren't misspell a word when we wrote her a note to thank her for the quilt. She was born in 1880 in Charles City, Iowa, and died in Onamia, Minnesota, in 1962, with me, a college sophomore, sitting in the hallway outside her room and trying to write a poem about her. (I was an English major.) I'm sure your North Woods quilt is a fine piece of work, but I was acquainted with the Elizabeth Barrett Browning of quilts and I am at peace with that.

Dear Garrison,
I really enjoyed the New Years show. Your producer found wonderful clips, some of which I remembered, some not. The show reminded me of a character that we don't seem to hear from anymore... Larry in the basement. I miss Larry and his morose way of going through life. Is he still down there in the cellar? Will we hear from him again? Or has the door to the basement been padlocked?

Jim Patterson
La Pointe, WI

Jim, we've looked in the basement, back in the corner, near the washtubs, and haven't seen Larry back there, but we haven't given up hope. He and his cats may have gone south for the winter. Or there may be catacombs that we don't know about. We can smell him, but we can't see him.

Post to the Host:
OK...this is a longshot...

I can't remember when, and I can't remember the guy's name, so if you can remember, it would be great. I'm trying to remember who it was that read his own rendition of certain Hebrew laws taken from the Old Testament. It was so funny, and I just can't remember who he was or which show to look up on this website to find that reading! It was so perfect! If you can remember who he was, it would be great!

Bonnie Zeron
Bayonne, NJ

Bonnie, I remember it well. It was Ian Frazier and the piece was "Lamentations of a Father" and it was on our show five or six years ago and it was hilarious, a classic. Look it up in one of his collections. Frazier wrote a great book of humor, Dating Your Mom, and also a great work of Americana, Great Plains, and he's worth your while.

Post to the Host:
How come when you take your humble little radio show on tour, it always seems to be definitely unhumble places like New York City, or Seattle, or Chicago ... okay, you did go to Duluth, but it IS in Minnesota ... but never any smaller towns (ours, for example). Come here, you'd make the front page of the paper and everything. Heck, you'd fill up the high school auditorium no sweat. You could even charge, say $5 a ticket ...

Doug Shirk
Wenatchee, WA.

Doug, a Wenatchee crowd is probably a pretty tough crowd and if we brought our humble show there, Wenatcheeites would say, "We'll show these cake-eaters. They think they can come here and do any old thing and we'll be grateful for it. Well, ha! Double ha!" And we go out on stage, glittering with flop sweat, and do a Pretty Good show — not a Peabody winner, but good enough for all intents and purposes — but not good enough for Wenatchee. They watch it and they're thinking, "Where's the chimps? The dogs who do back flips? The magician who pulls the ace of spades from behind your ear? Where's the guy who does Richard Simmons impressions?" Ordinarily, we carry a claque of fourteen young men and women dressed all in black, wearing stylish shades, and they laugh uproariously and clap until their hands are red and this convinces the rest of the audience that we must be hot stuff, but the claque doesn't get traction in Wenatchee. The applause is tepid, the mayor proclaims it Prairie Home Afternoon instead of Prairie Home Day and gives us a key to only one small neighborhood of the city (and not the best one), and the next morning's Wenatchee World Telegram says, "Prairie Show Turns Out Flat," and our goose is cooked. You may consider New York to be unhumble, but actually it has a powerful humbling effect on us. Wenatchee would have a powerful humiliating effect. The stakes are simply too high. Sorry. Try Neal Diamond.

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 ere 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 I 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.

Post to the Host:
Hi! I heard a rumor, that has faded to the point of perhaps even urban legend that only I know...

anyway...that y'all were in the process of making a movie of the show. Not a recording of an actual show, but more along the lines of the old Muppet show...where you see the back story of the characters...of Guy Noir, Dusty and Lefty...and so on.

Hope you have a wonderful new year and keep up the fantastic work.

J.

Dear J., These rumors are wonderful and I wish I'd hear more of them. I even heard that Michelle Pfeiffer was going to be in that movie which is the sort of rumor that makes a man vow to lose thirty pounds and do something different with his hair. A movie about a radio show: what a terrific idea. The only question in my mind is: who's going to play me? I'm for George Clooney but the rumor is that Al Pacino is up for the role, a terrible idea. Al Pacino is a great actor, don't get me wrong, but he does more facial expressions in two minutes than I do in a whole week. Ditto Dennis Quaid. And Jeremy Irons. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Acting midwestern is no walk in the park. I saw Johnny Depp in the biopic of J.M. Barrie and thought he was flat and wooden enough to be me. I'm also thinking Gerard Depardieu.

Post to the Host:
This is just to let you know that I make a mean pumpkin pie! And I use the recipe from the label on the Libby's can WITH the canned pumpkin from the can. Back in my younger days I baked the fresh pumpkin, sieved it, added the eggs and spices and evaporated milk, and it wasn't as good as the Libby's pies. I have made thousands of pies, and my pumpkin pie is terrific. Without nutmeg.

The proof is in the tasting. Until you have tried it, please keep an open mind. By the way, I had lots and lots of fresh sweet corn last fall. The weather here was perfect and the corn season lasted almost to Labor Day. Some farmers nearby were selling a variety called Incredible, one of the new super-sweet varieties, and it was truly incredible. My Mennonite farm neighbor told me that those new varieties actually increase their sugar content after picking, unlike the older ones, whose sugar begins to change to starch as soon as they're picked.

Carole Cubbler
Shippensburg, PA

Carole, I knew somebody was going to take issue with my diatribe against pumpkin pie back around Thanksgiving, and here you are. I believe your every word and will try to keep an open mind on pumpkin pie, but the pie I long for is the mincemeat that my Aunt Eleanor made one year for a family Thanksgiving that was miles beyond any I'd ever tasted. She didn't divulge her secret but I gathered that there was meat in it and that it was labor-intensive. Of course, after a major feast, one hardly needed anything as rich as mincemeat, but it was remarkable. As for the Incredible sweet corn, I'm sure you're right and it is, though I hate to think that plant genetics has rendered obsolete the old ceremony of picking sweet corn and husking it as one walked quickly toward the house and popping it directly into the pot of boiling water so as to maintain maximum sweetness. The wonders of science can be discouraging to those of us brought up to be industrious in a world of scarcity.

Dear Mr. GK —
Your show is my Saturday Solace here in Santa Fe. I especially enjoy the Ketchup Advisory Board segment ... and I'm just so absurdly touched by the Ketchup Advisory Board song ... by the striving and yearning in that singer's voice ... I simply HAVE to know who sings it.

Basile Vallas

Basile, that yearning voice belongs to our music director and piano-player Richard Dworsky. Since you are so touched by it, I'll try to write a longer ketchup song one of these days.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
It is an awfully small world. I was reading Post to the Host a few moments ago and came upon a letter to you from Rabbi Janet Ozur Bass, who happens to be the wife of the cantor at our temple. This underscored to me the power of the Internet. Do you think the world is shrinking because of the Internet? Are you a Luddite about the Internet or do you welcome it? Will human relationships change because of the ubiquity of e-mail?

Mania Baghdadi
Potomac, MD

Mania, it used to be a smaller world back when I was living in Lake Wobegon and I thought I had a good grasp of how things worked. A small world of helpful friendly people and if you ever needed anything you only had to ask, and if you did the work and played by the rules, you'd be okay. We grew up in a quiet little pond, protected from treachery, and that was a long time ago. My view of the world was changed by Vietnam and by the realization that reputable and intelligent men were quite willing to permit the slaughter of innocents in distant lands rather than speak the truth and endanger their own careers. This happens again and again. The knowledge of evil makes the world seem vast and incomprehensible, and so, ever since November, I've given up reading newspapers or surfing the Net, preferring to live for awhile in a small world circumscribed by St. Paul, the radio show, poetry, my own family and friends, my writing, and a little music now and then. The country is momentarily in the hands of vandals and there isn't anything I can do about it. E-mail does enormous good in combating loneliness and gloom, and so one is grateful for it, but at the moment, we're stuck in a period of drift and squalor and the Internet isn't going to change that.

Hello Garrison,
My wife has told me wonderful stories about the time she lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul and it has inspired me to visit in January (I am truly a winter person) — I like to see the framework and backbones of the land, people and community when it is bare in the winter. I think winter is a better time to get to know a place.

What do you like to do in the winter in Minneapolis/St. Paul?

Peter Cook
Elkins Park, PA

Peter, welcome to Minnesota and I hope we have plenty of snow on the ground when you come, but it sounds like you're an intrepid traveler, ready for anything. I recommend that you plan to take a hike around the Minneapolis chain of lakes — Cedar, Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, and Harriet — late one afternoon and into twilight. You might have to endure some lowflying Northwest airliners, so bring earplugs, but it's a lovely sight. There are some big manses along the lakes and then you can take little detours onto side streets for the real stucco-bungalow and frame-shotgun neighborhoods. There are several hot-air balloon companies that offer flights along the St. Croix river from Stillwater or Hudson. I think that ice fishing is a big adventure and would recommend you contact a resort on Lake Mille Lacs that offers a package deal — gear, fish house, license, and a bottle of brandy. If the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is doing a baroque concert at the UCC church on Summit Avenue, that's always lovely — you sit and hear gorgeous Bach or Vivaldi or Telemann and walk out into the cold and hike along Summit, our street of decaying mansions and forlorn hopes and elegant pretense, and look at the river below and maybe stop at the University Club for a drink or hike to the Cathedral or swing over to Selby Avenue and sit in Nina's Coffeeshop on Western or eat at La Grolla or Zander's, both splendid. That Summit/Cathedral/Crocus Hill neighborhood of St. Paul is so gorgeous on a winter evening. Some Cass Gilbert houses and Queen Anne and Victorian and very cheery and slightly ratty around the edges. If you're looking for small towns, you can drive south on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi through Prescott and Stockholm down to Pepin and then cross over to Wabasha, Minnesota, which is really lovely. Some good restaurants there and a fine old Main Street. You'll have a good time here in January, I can tell. You have the right spirit and the right aesthetic sense and now you just need a little luck. And having married a Minnesota girl, how much luckier can a man be?

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I'm determined to be on the Prairie Home cruise. If I can't get a suitable roomy, can I have one assigned? I'm 80, widowed, very healthy and active, nice looking, liberal minded, etc., so preferably I'd like a younger man, possibly 65 or so. What do you think?

dee hill
tulsa

Dee, it appears that the cruise is all sold-out for this fall and we don't find any single 65-year-old men listed on the manifest. Everyone seems to be coupled up already. But we could scour the ports as we call at them, in search of an able seaman of mature years who is looking to relocate in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I am so happy Mrs. Sundberg got that really nice letter from that medical resident. It takes a little extra to write a letter, as you know perfectly well, while the rest of us only think about writing and we all know how nice it is to get a letter mixed in with the Excel bill and the mortgage statement and the solicitations from organizations you donated once to three, four years ago when everyone that year said, instead of a gift why don't you just donate some money. I notice this year people are asking for books, which must be pleasant news for a writer, don't you think? Which brings me to my question, Mr. Keillor, if you don't mind my being so forward, I think you should collect up all those views from Mrs. Sundberg's window and publish them all in one book. The Internet is a fine thing, but there's nothing like holding a real book, with its weight, and the tick of the paper as you release the next page from your thumb, or if you turn the page from the corner, how it can sound like walking in the snow sometimes, and how satisfying it is to close the book and look up, out the window, and think about what you're reading, all mixed in with thoughts about groceries, the lives of sparrows, and the letters you mean to write one day.

Sincerely,
Su Smallen

Mrs. Sundberg loved your letter, Su. Here's what she said in response…

Dear Su,
Well thank you kindly for your words. I have to say I agree with you wholeheartedly about books. Don't get me wrong — the Internet is wonderful and I'd wander around bumping into windows and cabinets without it, but the ability to hold a book in one's hand and read it and fall asleep doing so is one of the seven great things about being human. When I was growing up there was an oak tree along the side of our house with a big ol' thick limb that ran perpendicular to the tree much like a giant thumb and on summer days I'd get out the red wagon and use it to climb up onto that limb where I'd sit and read all afternoon. I read Charles Dickens and Harper Lee and James Herriot and even Walt Whitman up in that tree. I read about open-heart surgery and Anne Boleyn and the Peshtigo Fire and the Lindbergh kidnapping and while reading about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World it came to me that there must be the Seven Wonders of Being Human. I made a list and don't recall much but that "reading books" made the list. Mr. Sundberg often calls my lists "grocery poetry" because I get a bit carried away now and then and fill the paper with words I find lovely and necessary. Though I've never bought a pomegranate, I put the word on my list now and then because I like the sound of "pomegranate." Same with "filet of sole" and "saffron" and "marzipan." Never bought any, but I like the idea so put them on the list. And I like the thought of writing a book. But I'm not an expert in anything, really, so it would take some thought. I know a lot about baking and ice fishing and the best places to find wild blueberries. I know about paying bills on time and how to build a campfire. Mostly ordinary things. I don't know anything at all about quantum physics or making cheese but I'm interested. Maybe I just need to read some more and one day it'll hit me and I'll do it and I'll have you to thank in part for giving me a little nudge like my mother did whenever it was my turn to speak and I hesitated for whatever reason.

I hope someone gave you a good book recently, Su, and that one of these cold cold nights you fall asleep reading with snow blowing against the window and more than one quilt piled on you and not much to do in the morning but make some coffee and pick up right where you left off.

Mrs. Sundberg