Dear Mr. Keillor,
I can't recall having ever seen you on any television talk shows and I'm curious if I've just missed you or if you don't do talk shows. If you don't why not? I'm sick of watching their usual round of guests and so I rarely tune in any more. Is there any possibility of ever seeing you conversing with say, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show or maybe at length with Larry King?

Cathy G.
Westerville, OH

I used to do talk shows, Cathy, back when I was famous but I'm a recovering celebrity now and so it's not that interesting. Also, they don't ask me. That makes it easier to say no. The last one I did was the Craig Ferguson show in L.A. They tape it in the late afternoon and the audience is made up of unemployed twentysomething people who are herded like cattle into a studio and sit on bleachers for an hour as a deranged bald man runs around with a hand mic and makes them scream on cue. He's the warm-up guy. The same happens at the Letterman show. They bully the audience and abuse it and for some reason people enjoy this and get excited. The fact that they are treated with contempt makes them believe that the show must be really really good. So you get this hyper audience prepared to salivate at the sound of a bell, so that all the host need do is raise an eyebrow and the audience screams with delight. It isn't the branch of show business that I signed up for, Cathy.

Dear Mr Keillor,

My husband and I love to travel in our motor home, and while we travel from state to state we like to listen to your show. We recently visited Minnesota to see Lake Superior and saw many beautiful sights but the Twin Cities via I-35 was not one of them. Trying to get through the Cities was a much bigger adventure than we anticipated. The way the highway changes its name several times and turns into something else was confusing. The on ramps enter the highway from both sides and it was treacherous to maneuver through the narrow areas of the highway what with road crews and indecisive drivers. We did love our visit up the shore line of Lake Superior.

Jeri G.
Elizabeth, CO

I can't disagree, Jeri. The freeways went up against some fierce neighborhood opposition, which prevented the sort of 32-lane straight-shot expressways you'd find, say, in Texas. We like our neighborhoods so the freeway system had to squeeze in around them somewhat and also around the lakes and the big river. But I seldom use the freeways, one advantage of living life small. I take Marshall Avenue to work, which is nice and goes past Central High School and Concordia College and the Town and Country Club and then I turn onto Mississippi River Boulevard which runs along the river gorge and which is so pretty in the fall that a person has to get out of the car and walk. Someday I want to get a motor home, though, and do exactly as you're doing. First I have to talk my wife and daughter into coming along, though. I want to drive to the southwest, through Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado to the Grand Canyon and across the Mojave to Los Angeles and up the Pacific Coast Highway. The day I set out on that trip, I'll be the happiest man in America.

Mr. Keillor - this is the second time in recent years that you have scheduled your opening season street dance on Rosh Hashanah, Saturday 9/23. It appears that attention is not paid to this conflict. I bring this to your attention with the hope that you may be more sensitive in the future.

Nancy L.
Minneapolis, MN

Nancy, Rosh Hashanah ends at sundown Saturday and the street dance starts soon thereafter, so come join us if you like. Life is full of conflicts. The world doesn't stop for anybody's holy day, not in this country. Liquor stores are open on Sunday, people dance on the Sabbath. The radio show broadcasts on Good Saturday, on the most solemn weekend in the Christian calendar, and it's not my job to draw your attention to the Crucifixion. People who are deep in grief drive to the cemetery past people on their way to a wedding. It happens all the time. Have mercy.

Dear Garrison
They've abruptly shut down the Chatterbox. Did you know they were going to do this? Did you give permission or approval? Do you know why they did it?

John W.
Marblehead, MA

I asked the website manager to shut down the Chatterbox so as to give it a rest, John. It's become a rather tiny inbred chat room and not particularly interesting. I hadn't looked at it for years and then one day I did and I found the chitchat sort of dopey, nothing inviting to an outsider surfing by, nothing relevant to anything that takes place on the show or on public radio, just a tiny club of cronies ribbing each other. So we'll give it a rest and try to figure out how to run an interactive room in which people can speak freely but where private chatter is edited out. So shoot me. I thought it was dumb.

Hi Garrison,
I was in the audience the night you appeared in Hartford at the Bushnell and couldn't believe how fast the time flew by while you swept us up in a cloudstorm of words and made us laugh and
remember and ponder and laugh again. Afterward, my friends and I went to my car, which was parked next to Bushnell Park and saw people standing on the sidewalk and found that their two cars and mine had been broken into by people who smashed the windows and ripped out the CD players and part of the front dashboards in the process. "A very amateurish job," one of the men said. One car was from Massachusetts, another from Hartford and I live an hour and a
half away. We all agreed that we loved your show, and stood there talking about the magical experience we had shared and someone said, "Garrison wouldn't believe this," so I am taking the liberty of writing to you to tell you why we three gro ups of strangers were joined in conversation on the sidewalk in the night.

Jane V.
Thompson, CT

For what it's worth, which is exactly nothing, I feel bad about luring you into the city and distracting you with a show while thieves stole your stuff. I feel responsible. But it could be worse. A CD player can be replaced. A friend of mine had a briefcase stolen from his car down in Arizona and the briefcase contained manuscripts of poems and stories. A grievous loss. My wife had her purse stolen from our car parked near Hans Christian Andersen's birthplace in Odense, Denmark, a purse containing her passport (fairly easily replaced) and billfold (a pain to cancel those credit cards, but it can be done) and, worst of all, a pair of earrings left to her by her grandmother. She still feels bad about that. I once had a laptop computer stolen out of an apartment in New York, but it was fairly new and not much was stored in it. And I once had a car stolen, from a parking ramp in New York. A Ford Explorer, red. I'd driven it from St. Paul to New York when I moved there in 198 7. We didn't need a car but held onto it out of habit, rented a space in a ramp to keep it in, and when it was stolen, I felt a great relief. The insurance company paid us a big chunk of change and suddenly I felt flush. No parking fee, no insurance. The car was discovered weeks later in a turn-off on the FDR Drive. It had been stripped of all valuable or interesting parts and then set afire. R.I.P. S.U.V.

Dear Garrison,
I find it very confusing to come into the Mineapolis-Saint Paul Airport and hear that starchy British Voice announcing the arrival of the shuttle tram.

Can't we please persuade the Airport Authority to let Sue Scott make those
announcements in her perfect Minnesota accent?

Twiss B.
Saint Paulite-in-Exile

We have a British lady's voice on the tram so as to prove that we are cosmopolitan folks here and not a bunch of hayseeds. A Minnesota voice ("Okay, then, let's all get on the tram now and hold on cause the thing's about to get going then.") would cause us shame and embarrassment.

Dear Garrison, (Yes, I feel I know you that well.)
I want to commend you on your outstanding rendition of The Raven. Poe would have been proud.

It was perfectly accompanied with the haunting music I seldom hear and am eager to know the name of that selection. It too was wonderfully played. I was impressed with the bass notes; deep, rich, mellow and far more touching than I've noted in comparable piano renditions.

I learned more insight into that poem during your presentation than in all the times I've heard and read it--and that was a bunch.

Kindly reveal unto me the name of that music--and please kiss the piano player for me.

Your appreciative listener,
Zoe

Hello Zoe. Rich Dworsky (the pianist) here. Thanks so much for your kind compliments about the underscore (and for the kiss!). I agree, Garrison's recitation was fantastic. Poe would've been proud. The musical underscore was all improvised on the spot by me. I read the poem several times prior to the performance, and marked up a copy with notes like "rustling curtains", "fear and doubt", "awe and marvel", and "no more Lenore". The only piece I composed beforehand was the recurring theme played by the band. I titled it "Scary Dworsky". It was a unique challenge to write a theme that would sound classical and dramatic, that could be interpreted by our Shoe Band. That day we had mandolin, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. Not your usual theatrical pit orchestra, but I thought the boys did a splendid job. Thanks again for writing, and Happy Halloween in advance...
-Richard Dworsky

Post to the Host:
How about acknowledging sources on PHC? The "Anne Boleyn" song which your guest just performed on the show is one of the musical-hall monologues of the inimitable Stanley Holloway, taken word for word and note for note, except that it just isn't the same in anything but Holloway's thick north-country English. Stanley Holloway was making radio audiences split their sides long before anyone changed your first diaper, and it would have been honest, and respectful, to acknowledge his authorship, not to say his comic genius.

James W.
Seattle, WA

Our show is not an academic quarterly and so our guests sometimes don't give a full list of acknowledgements, but if you Google "With her head tucked underneath her arm," the refrain of the song, you'll find the very first entry that comes up is Stanley Holloway, and then you can Google him and find out hundreds of interesting things that the radio can't offer. Such as the fact that the song was written by R.P. Weston and Bert Lee. I doubt that Mr. Holloway credited Mr. Weston and Mr. Lee when he performed the number on the stage. Was that dishonest and disrespectful of him not to?

What did you do this summer during your hiatus, Garrison, besides cruise to Alaska? Write a book? Travel anywhere interesting? Fill me in.

Mary W.
Tumwater, WA

I finished the first draft of a screenplay, Mary, and got a novel underway, and that meant that I got to stay home all of August, which was a pleasure. Except I travelled to Rochester, Minnesota, for a little medical procedure. They ran a catheter up my femoral vein and into my heart and plugged a little hole in the atrium wall which they think might help prevent strokes, which an MRI showed I had had two of sometime in the past. And the afternoon they did the catheterization, I sat in bed in St. Mary's Hospital and wrote nonstop for about six hours, a fine day of work. What else do you want to know? I turned 64. I got to drive a Toyota Camry Hybrid for a couple weeks. I went to Fisher's Supper Club in Avon for the walleye special. I decided to open a bookstore. I went to the State Fair. I drove through the heaviest downpour I'd seen in years. I discovered a frozen custard stand in St. Paul that had been unknown to me. I read a terrific novel, "Goodnight, Nebraska". I visited my cousins in Anoka whom I hadn't seen in a few years and found this comforting. I am related to kind people.

Dear Garrison
I am getting married in October and will be giving away little bottles of ketchup as a wedding favor. My fiancee and I love ketchup and thought it would be something different for our guests. I was trying to recall the messages from the Ketchup Advisory Board to use as sayings on the ketchup bottles and was wondering if there was one that went with a wedding/new love theme.

Patricia S.
Bel Air, MD

Ketchup contains natural mellowing agents that let people know they are having a good time, even if they themselves are not sure.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Why is it that people react so weird when I laugh at my own humor? Some have even mentioned that I laugh at my own jokes and make negative remarks. What does this say about me and them?

Sincerely,
Doug M.
Bovey MN

Don't beat yourself up, Doug. Some jokes are so good you can't help but laugh at them. The same exact thing happens to me all the time. For example----

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Eskimo.

Eskimo who?

I tell that joke and I am breaking up by that point and unable to finish it. In fact, I've never finished it. Now that I think of it, I don't remember what the punchline is. It must be hilarious, whatever it is, because it destroys me every time.