Post to the Host

Host Garrison Keillor answers your questions about life, love, writing, authors, and of course, A Prairie Home Companion.

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Post to the Host: I've

March 7, 2005 |

Post to the Host:
I've just begun listening to your show after a friend played his wife's "News from Lake Wobegon" tape during my visit to their house. It's a delight to find a show like yours on the air today, although I fear most people in my age group (I'm 25) just miss the whole point. Listening to APHC makes me feel counter-cultural, in an odd and ironic sort of way; I tell them about it and they back away slowly, probably to cleanse themselves with a dose of "American Idol."

But anyway. Is there any chance you'll come do a show or speaking engagement in or near North Carolina in the next year or two?

Hugh Fisher
Rockwell, N.C.

Hugh, the show is in Norfolk, VA on April 30 and Knoxville, TN on June 23, and that's as close as we come to North Carolina this year. As for 25-year-olds, we have quite a few in our listening audience, many of whom grew up in public-radio homes and listened to the show, some willingly, others not so, but I keep running into them whenever I go talk at colleges. Some bright shiny-faced person says, "Hi, I grew up listening to you." This can be jarring, since I, in my innermost recesses, feel that I am more 25-like now than when I was 25 when I was actually more 50ish, but it's okay to be jarred, and then I ask them about what they're up to and that's always interesting. Inevitably, they're more mature, poised, articulate, FUNNIER, than people that age used to be, and I envy them that, but sometimes they seem to envy me my having lived in the bad old days of the Sixties and come right out and say so — they got a whiff of the era from listening to the Beatles and Dylan and reading Hunter Thompson and the Beats and Ken Kesey, and maybe are slightly nostalgic about it, what you might call pre-life nostalgia, and that's sweet. I like meeting them. I enjoy being an uncle, though I neglected my own nieces and nephews dreadfully (because I worked all the time and did shows on Saturday so I even missed their weddings), so when there are people at the stage door after a show, I tend to deal swiftly and curtly with the geezers so as to have time to hang out with the kids. (That's you.) This is a cruel tendency on my part, to shove old ladies aside in order to mingle with youth and beauty, but there it is.

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