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Post to the Host: How

January 19, 2005 |

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.

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