Mr. Keillor,

I am seventeen going on eighteen and moving forward on college research and SAT planning and wondering what I am going to be doing for the rest of my life.

Yet in all of this I have become very apathetic. I don't have a goal or an idea of what I want to do with my life. It is bothersome to be told that you have to decide the entirety of your life in a few short months, but so, I don't really care. I have found that I do not very much care about what happens. At the moment, I don't even want to do my homework.

Do you have any thoughts on this, any observations or rectifications for my situation? How might I find a legitimate goal and the courage to chase it?

- Brendan Laughlin  
Fairfield, OH

--

I have to do my work, Brendan, and you have to do yours. The alternative is the long grim slide into torpor and depression, not a pleasant prospect. Take the SAT and prime yourself to do well on it, and look carefully at colleges. The next four years can be a beautiful time in your life, when you gather up your forces and plunge deeply into the sphere of ideas and accomplish intellectual growth that will shape your life.  It's quite okay not to know exactly what you want to do with your life. Most people don't live according to a plan. They improvise. I guess you feel deadlines pressing on you but they're not as heavy and irreversible as you may imagine. One thing leads to another: your high school experience points you toward something further. Meanwhile, why not keep a journal of observations this year, as an exercise for your own benefit, to sharpen your experience of your own life. I mean a journal that isn't about your inner life but rather an account of what you see and hear around you. More important than having a long-term plan is to live your life with intensity and conviction. Wish you well. 

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I am 38, a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history for three years at Kent State. I'm writing my dissertation on U.S. civil defense during the Cold War and how gendered language led those efforts to fail. I have written...about 35 pages.

It seems like every few months, I hear about another contemporary earning his or her doctorate, and even though I know I'm a good writer, I'm feeling increasingly inadequate and hopeless.

My question is this: how do you pacify the voices in your head that conspire to make you feel like whatever you write will not be good enough? That if your work is not perfect, even the first time, it means you are an abject failure? In other words, how do you make peace with the omnipresent potential for mediocrity?

Sincerely,
Melissa Steinmetz, a Perfectionist Ph.D. Candidate with Procrastination Problems  

--
    
Welcome to the club, Melissa. A lot of us get discouraged looking at the mess we've made on paper. And one can make an even worse mess on a screen, sprawling windy pretentious paragraphs that any sensible reader would automatically leap over. Writing on a computer is an exercise in mediocrity, if you ask me. Just keep telling yourself: the first draft has to come before the second and the third. All good writing is rewriting. If you're writing on a computer, print out hard copy and revise it with a pencil and then type the revisions into the digital version. Don't give up. There is an embittered editor up in your brain who expects your first draft to be classic literature. Tell him to sit on it and spin. Finish the dissertation before you're 40, kid. At 40, take a year off and work as a chanteuse in a roadhouse, leaning against the baby grand in your little black dress slit up to the thighs, a cigarette in your left hand, singing bittersweet ballads for lovelorn truckdrivers.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

My Bar Mitzvah is this weekend. I need to make a speech. Do you have any advice? Start with a joke?

Ari Rotenberg
Houston TX

p.s. If you're in Houston this weekend, you're welcome to come and bring a friend.

--

Dear Ari, We Christians don't have any tradition like this, the Goodbye To Childhood You're On Your Own Now ceremony, but it does strike me that you should've been thinking about this LONG BEFORE NOW, no? Am I wrong? But a joke is fine. Here are two.

You always want to begin a joke by saying, "So!" Pause two beats. Then the joke.

So. There was a big bar mitzvah outdoors in a backyard and all the bees went to enjoy the fresh flowers and fruit and they made sure to wear yarmulkes so people would know they were bees and not wasps.

So. God told his angels he was going away for the weekend and the angels said, "Are you going to visit Earth?" And God said no. "I went down there a couple thousand years ago and got a Jewish girl pregnant and they're still talking about it."

Congratulations and mazel tov and l'chaim, Ari.

Sir:

I spent last summer writing and painting with my lover in Normandy. Now she wants to go to the Alps to ski. I don't ski. Our relationship is at the point where I don't want to embarrass myself or disappoint her. How can I get out of this one? I have suggested a pilgrimage to Spain.

Paul

--

I am in pain in your behalf, Paul. I hate to say this, but there is no alternative. The pilgrimage isn't happening. You are going to go skiing in the Alps. You will do this with great bravado and you are going to break your leg. I hope you break it in a good place, a simple break that doesn't require an orthopedic surgeon and a four-hour operation and the insertion of steel rods that mean you'll set off metal detectors for the next forty years and have to be patted down at airports. She will feel enormous guilt at what she made you do and she'll admire your fortitude and the way you lay patiently on the slope, your leg bent at that horrible angle, and the way you endured the emergency-room doctor setting the bone (kkkkkkkkkkrackkkkk) and how you've done everything your physical therapist asked. Your p.t. will be a willowy blonde named Amber who holds you in her arms as you do the crunches and leg lifts and your lover is a little jealous. She marries you in the spring. In the summer you learn that you will be a father. Life hurtles forward and hazards fly past us and down we go, just like on a ski slope. I wish you well.

To the host:

Today, I heard a commentator say that young graduates entering the work force will have to compete against people their parents' and grandparents' ages. I am one of those older folk needing to re-invent myself & I hate the thought of posing a threat to young people. What is a good way to proceed to keep out of their paths, while creating steps of my own?

Kathryn Cogswell
Ashland, OR

--

We older folk who aren't ready to retire are indeed competing against the young. I, for example, am standing squarely in the path of some 22-year-old who wants to be the host of a Saturday evening variety show. I have no qualms about that whatsoever. The old lion comes to the carcass of the wildebeest and feeds and bats away the young cubs and yearlings until, one day, they shove him away and he crawls off into a canebrake and perishes. It's the way of the world. Comedy is a young person's game and nobody is very funny past the age of 40. I am hanging onto the ledge by my fingertips and one day some punk with hard soles is going to stomp on my aged fingers and I will drop to the rocks far below. But I refuse to jump.

Dear GK,

I'm pretty good at what I do. I've had some pretty good professional recognition. But after a few career setbacks, I have completely lost my confidence.

I continue to work as hard as I can; but I have a terrible time convincing anyone -- myself most of all -- of the value of that work.

You face the blank page, you face a live audience, you face a lot of situations that require a confidence that I can't seem to find anymore. Where do you find yours?

Don

--

It's all an act, Don. You conceal your insecurity from other people and eventually you learn to conceal it from yourself, but of course it never goes away. And it's never what I'd call "confidence". I've met some very confident people and found them insufferable. Arrogant. Insensitive. Bullies. I can imagine how painful it must be to suffer setbacks, though it's hard to advise you without knowing what those setbacks are. You might consider giving yourself a challenge that lies outside your professional life ----- riding a bike across the state of Iowa, learning Spanish, writing a family history, knitting a scarf ----- just as an exercise to prove to yourself that you have a reservoir of potential. You might consider looking for a support group ---- surely there is one relevant to your needs. Some dilemmas lie outside the realm of therapy but can be ameliorated by kindred souls. But what you describe as a loss of confidence may also be a life change that one accepts and learns to work around. I have pretty much lost my confidence at golf and tennis and don't expect to recover them. I do not have confidence in my ability to write a long novel anymore and that's just a fact, and I don't expect to regain it, and why should I agonize over it? I have confidence that I can write a full-length play, though I've never done it and may not succeed: ignorance can be a friend. Maybe you know too much. Try naivete.

Garrison:

You've expounded on the value of public universities, how democratic they are and how they facilitate the bootstrap spirit of our nation. I live in the busy Northeast Corridor, and I'm now considering applying to one of the great American public universities.

But how do I justify this to all the Ivy League punks in this world? There seems to be a grain of truth that Ivy graduates run the country, and fill the most powerful roles in our society. I can hear their sneers, years in advance.

Sincerely,
Concerned Applicant

--

I'm a romantic idealist when it comes to education and I think college is supposed to be an enormous life-altering experience, not simply vocational training. It was enormous for me. At the private schools I've visited in the past few months, St. Olaf and Macalester and Drake, it was striking (to me) how cheerful and eager and enthusiastic the students were, and maybe that's an advantage of Ivy and other private schools, that they weed out the indifferent. On the other hand, when I've been at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, I only felt very lucky to have gone to the University of Minnesota. It was a huge land-grant university when I landed there in the fall of 1960, but I was terribly lucky to enroll in three terrific classes at the get-go, Latin Reading with Maggie Forbes, Composition: The Essay with Richard Cody, and American Politics with Asher Christiansen, three teachers still vivid to me all these years later. And I, who had vague literary ambitions, fell in right away with others who had big literary ambitions. And I went to work at the student radio station. So, within a few months, my life got set on its course, which is a sort of miracle. I came from a small town and the U of M was a bustling metropolis with large contingents of African, Indian, and Asian students and ambitious cultural programs. In my freshmen year, I became good friends with Barry Halper and Larry Leventhal and got to see Andres Segovia and the Royal Danish Ballet and the Cleveland Orchestra with George Szell and see a couple Shakespeare plays and see Robert Frost read, one amazement after another. I was at the U because I had no money and my high-school record was unimpressive and what I got from the U was a chance at a large life. And that's why I believe in public higher education.

But of course things have changed in fifty years. Tuition has risen ---- obscenely, I think ----- and commercial pop culture is more pervasive, which tends to dumb down the environment, and political correctness has eroded the classic curriculum, and the economy has made students more fearful and cautious than I remember being. But there's still an education out there for you, young man, and you don't need to justify your choice to anyone. Take your shot and make the most of your opportunities, whether you go to Harvard or Hermantown J.C. And have a big time.

Dear GK,

I met a woman named Betsy, Swedish-American ancestry, from around Chisago, MN, who told me that, as a 17 year old, while working at a nursing home, she was "forced" to fix the lutefisk (the other staff were off that day). She had never fixed lutefisk before but tried her best. The nursing home residents voiced their displeasure, saying she had ruined the lutefisk. My question to you is whether it is possible to ruin lutefisk?

Mark Brynolfsson
Palatine, IL

--

Lutefisk is a delicacy that is cherished by a dwindling population of old Swedes and Norwegians around Christmastime, dried cod soaked in lye that must be carefully washed (many times) and then properly cooked, eaten (by Swedes) with a white sauce and (by Norwegians) with melted butter. It is peasant food, a staple among the immigrants, that is eaten by fewer and fewer people in Norway but still is cherished by old Scandinavians for whom it has sentimental associations with the blessed holiday. People joke about it because it does, in its raw state, reek of lye, and it will stain silver, and the odor will linger in your kitchen, but if it is prepared properly, it does not need to be pungent, as I described it long ago in Lake Wobegon Days:

"Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I'd be told, "Just have a little." Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot."

The answer to your question, Mark, is Yes. But lutefisk does not need to be an issue. The big lutefisk dinners in Minnesota always serve Swedish meatballs as an alternative entree and nobody is going to put a gun to your head and force you to eat the "repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish". It is an acquired taste, like sweetbreads, or Baroque music on period instruments, or Morris dancing, or Melville's Moby Dick, and here in America you find small pockets of enthusiasts surrounded by large populations of the indifferent and dismissive. It's a great country.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Our book club just met to discuss your book "A Christmas Blizzard." Much to my surprise, I had read a completely different version of the book then my fellow members. We were very curious as to why there were such extreme differences in the hardcover and paperback versions.

Michelle Tvaryanas                   
Centerville, OH

--

Penguin, my publisher, was curious too, Michelle. Ordinarily authors don't rewrite a book for the paperback edition. But I thought the story could be improved by shifting James Sparrow, the protagonist, from the high promontory of the super-wealthy to the ranks of the renter class. So I went ahead and did it. I leave it to you to judge the results, but it was great fun to get another whack at the manuscript. No book is ever really finished --- it's simply yanked out of the author's hands and set in type ---- and that's why authors don't sit around savoring their own work.  They know they'd come upon big lumpy passages that fill them with chagrin. But I don't think I'll lobby Penguin for the chance to re-do Lake Wobegon Days or Lake Wobegon 1956. But I'm really really tempted to go at Love Me. I'd cut out about half of it and expand the core. A writer comes to a point in life where he suspects that he has said what he has to say and now his job is to say it better. On the radio show I've been borrowing more and more from early work, which is easy, thanks to the computer. There in my hard drive is a vast trove of scripts and lyrics and monologues going back thirty years, and if I pull up, say, a Noir episode from 1993, the thing cuts like butter.  Out goes 9/10ths of it and from what remains I sprout a new story. A frugal man takes pleasure in this sort of recycling. On the show last night, I did a revised version of a 10-year-old "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" with some new lines ----

Better be careful, be discreet
Don't try to sell a Senate seat
Santa Claus is coming to town.
Don't think a sense of style
Conceals your escapades.
Don't vote to impeach Bill Clinton while
Shacking up with Congressional aides.

It got a nice response from the crowd in Town Hall.

To the host:

Do you have plans to write a memoir? I hope so!  
    
Doug Mitchell
Austin, TX

--

Minnesotans don't produce great memoirs, Doug. Hubert Humphrey's had some good stuff in it, mostly about his boyhood and his dad, a pharmacist in South Dakota who loved opera, but then the boy became ambitious and successful and success knocked the life out of the memoir. It went dead, boinggggg. Dylan's CHRONICLES was interesting but seemed oddly impersonal. Fitzgerald wrote some memoiristic essays, collected in THE CRACK-UP, that are impressive but fragmentary. New Yorkers do a better job of it. Cheever's JOURNALS is one of the great pieces of American prose writing ever. Just finished reading Harry Belafonte's memoir MY SONG, Doug, which is a terrific book, I think, very honest and probing, lots of memorable scenes, a classic story of a poor boy who becomes fabulously successful and then must deal with his demons, and one comes away from it with admiration for the writer's hard work assembling all the pieces and mostly avoiding self-aggrandizement. Mr. Belafonte moved in much grander circles than I, Hollywood, Las Vegas, European tours, in and out of various White Houses, and any memoir I wrote would not travel too far from Anoka, Minnesota, and the Sanctified Brethren and the streets of St. Paul. I can't write a memoir unless I feel I can do justice to all three and to the people who've passed through my life. I wish I could do them justice. Edward Hoagland wrote a great book, SEX AND THE RIVER STYX, in which, I think, he did some justice to his own life. If I thought I could write a book as good as his, I'd start work on it tomorrow. 

Dear GK:

I recently lost my job at a corporation and for the last 8 months have tried to re-invent myself. At the age of 44, I've gone back to my passion for writing. I was hoping to get noticed with my blog, but with so many blogs these days its like screaming to get noticed at the Super Bowl; feels like being just another fly on the wall. How do I get noticed? How do I get someone interested in what I have to say, write and do? It seems like you have a better chance at getting struck by lightning than getting noticed.

Sincerely,
The Broke Boat Broker Blogger.

Adopt reverse strategy and fly under the radar while saying and doing extraordinary things. Be anonymous, self-effacing, invisible. Use a pseudonym. Refuse requests for interviews. Don't endorse products. Fight every attempt to bring you into the limelight. Unplug the phone. Withdraw from the world and the world may beat a path to your door and ---- here's the pay-off ---- you can then pretend to regard attention as a great burden and a nuisance, a privilege granted to but few.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I attended your talk at the National Book Festival in Washington Sunday, at which you said "The only good reason to write a poem is to impress a woman."  While I totally agree that this may be a good reason for a man to write a poem, can you tell me the "good reason" for the beautiful poetry written by the fairer sex?  Perhaps the reason I cannot muster a halfway decent attempt at poetry is because this reason evades me.

Sara

Poets tend to claim very high motives for themselves, Sara, as you know if you ever read interviews with poets. It's a religious passion that moves them, a mysterious restless urge that comes upon them and won't go away, an electrical current in their souls, a powerful twitch ----- really, it's God blowing in their ears. They claim powerful mysterious motivation to cheer themselves up, knowing that nobody much cares about their poetry. Maybe, if they're in the Top 40 Living Poets, a teacher will make her students read their work, but otherwise nada. Maybe an independent bookstore will stock their books, but not many people wander over to the poetry section, and most who do don't stay long. It's discouraging. What I meant by what I said is simply: I don't want to write a poem that will go unread, and one reader is enough, so I'll write to that one, and if I can impress her ---- she who knows me much too well already ---- then this is not a bad poem at all. And there's no point to writing a bad poem. There are enough of those already.

To: the Host

I write for a music oriented website. Being a philosophy major has helped me to write with an entertaining and surrealist wit; however, I feel that my speaking voice can come off too dry and unaffected, or worse, sound insincere. I'll need to improve for podcasting, or else I fear I'll lose the audience I've gained through my writing.

Do you have any advice?

I'm a fan of yours, and of the craft itself.

I wish you well,
Gunther McEwan
Victoria, B.C.

When one is young and smart, as you are, one naturally affects a voice of authority so as to hold your own against other young and smart individuals. When I started out in radio, knowing nothing whatsoever, green as could be, I imitated the voice of Edward R. Murrow, the boy broadcaster from North Carolina who taught himself to talk like Sam Spade when he reported from London on the Battle of Britain. I did a pretty good job of it, too. But the voice of false authority teeters on the edge of arrogance, and that puts people off. And the best thing you can do to develop a natural voice is to sing. Sing to yourself, sing with other people, sing along with the radio ----- try singing the blues ----- those simple repetitive forms, making up your own words, bending the notes. It'll help weather your voice and give you more range and warmth. And it's awfully enjoyable, more so than preaching and philosophizing. Everybody ought to sing the blues. It makes you a better person.

     My name is Gunther, and I'm from Victoria.
     I said, my name is Gunther, and I'm from Victoria.
     I do a podcast, and I'll sing this song for ya.

Dear Garrison:

Heard some of your comments yesterday afternoon on the radio about last Sunday, being Pentecost. Surely Pastor Liz did not say what you said she did regarding Pentecost??! Pentecost is not the event in which Jesus, risen from the grave, breathed on his followers! Pentecost (a Jewish feast day) during the year after Jesus was crucified, was the day in which the Holy Spirit, visible only as flames of fire over the heads of Jesus' followers,and felt as a "mighty wind", descended to earth to stay, as the power animating and endowing the church. It was actually the birth of the Christian church. Pentecost was not about the teaching of forgiveness, but about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church.

Better get back to Pastor Liz about this.
Best Wishes,
Canon Cheryl J. Bower

My dear Canon, the Gospel text for Sunday June 12 was John 20 where Jesus gives his disciples the power to forgive sins, and though Pastor Liz touched on Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Spirit, she found it more pertinent, what with the flood of righteous comment on Congressman Weiner, to emphasize the Gospel text, and if she commingled the two in a confusing way, then she begs to be forgiven.

Suddenly one night last week there was a tidal wave of emails urging us to cancel the June 4 broadcast in Flagstaff in line with a boycott of Arizona ---- I hadn't been aware of any boycott, but evidently there is one ----  by people opposed to the new state law authorizing state troopers to stop the cars of people who appear to be Mexican and asking to see their papers.
 
The suddenness of the onslaught of mail (from people who were "shocked" or "horrified" or "outraged" by the idea of "A Prairie Home Companion" going to Flagstaff) suggested an organized campaign and many of the letters seemed to have been copied from a form. None of them tried to argue that our cancellation would actually affect real people in some positive way; mostly they were just plain angry righteous letters.
 
I questioned our decision to do a show in Flagstaff months ago, the day after Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the parking lot in Tucson and I spoke to our friends in public radio in Flagstaff and, while they completely understood my concern, they argued that Flagstaff is a hotbed of moderation, a college town, a very different place. Cancellation of the show would hurt the Flagstaff station financially. It would be a slap in the face. And I think that now is no time for public radio to retreat in the face of extremism. And the Flagstaff station is a loyal friend. So we're going to go.
 
The law in question strikes me as reminiscent of the old East Germany, but at the moment it is making its way through the courts and isn't affecting anybody.
 
I did plenty of boycotts back in the day ----- boycotted green grapes, non-union-made clothing, refused to buy a Volkswagen because it was after all a car sponsored by Hitler ----- and I don't mind people urging me to boycott whatever they think needs boycotting, but the bullying tone of the mail we got last week is something I resent deep in my Midwestern soul.
 
Instead of boycotting Flagstaff, I am going to protest California's inhumane overcrowding of prisons ----- 140,000 inmates in prisons designed to hold 80,000 ----- by boycotting California wines. (I don't drink, but it's the gesture that counts.) I am going to punish Wisconsin for its denial of collective bargaining for teachers by boycotting Harley Davidson. No hog for me. I am going to teach the Japanese a lesson about nuclear power plant safety by avoiding sushi. And show the French how I feel about sexual assault of hotel employees by refusing escargots. Call me a wild-eyed idealist but those are my positions and I am sticking to them. You can make your own decisions. But if I run into a guy on a Harley eating an escargot sushi while drinking a Napa Chardonnay, I am going to give him what for.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Yesterday, Saturday 5/21/11, I happened to ride the subway from the West Side of Manhattan, the C train, downtown, at about 2pm. You and your wife stepped into my car at one stop, and I was thrilled to recognize you. A little later, before 59th St., by chance you actually sat down beside me. I thought to say Hello, but then thought better of it. You seemed so calm and thoughtful.

I sensed that few if any passengers recognized you. Did you get that sense -- of being somewhat anonymous in the Big City?

Tom Lewinson

That was us, Tom, rushing to make the curtain at the Stephen Sondheim Theater on West 43rd to see the 2 p.m. "Anything Goes" matinee and we did make it. Two seats in the back row of the orchestra and the show is terrific, Sutton Foster and Colin Donnell are great and Joel Grey, and two big tapdance routines, and at the end the audience stands up and whoops and yells. As for the subway, it's how we get around, of course, and I just never think about anonymity. Not an issue for a radio guy. Ever so often in New York, some young beautiful woman with a stern street face suddenly smiles at me on the street, violating the rule for young beautiful women, and that is shocking, and then I think, "Ah, there are benefits in this line of work."

We loved doing the show at the Fox in Detroit and, by the by, meeting our friends at Ford, which underwrites our show, and we did not mention the Edsel, the car that became a joke because the "horse-collar" grille in front looked like a man yawning. The Edsel came out with great fanfare in 1957, launched with a TV special called The Edsel Show, starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope and Rosemary Clooney. The company was projecting sales of 200,000 and they sold 64,000 (and discontinued the line in 1959), and what hurt the car were the jokes about the horse-collar grille that comedians said looked like an "Oldsmobile sucking a lemon." That was one of the cleaner jokes. Although it was a fine car and rather handsome, the Edsel went down to defeat and automotive design became cautious and cars started to look more and more alike and little boys no longer sat by highways competing to see who could identify the cars: all the cars looked alike. Except the Mustang and the T-bird. Oh how I loved my Mustang convertible. But that's another story.

When listeners write in to say they're offended by something we did on a show, I don't tell them not to feel that way. If you're offended, you're offended. Quite a few were offended by the tornado that appeared in the Guy Noir episode in St. Louis on April 30. Guy was working security at a Cards game and a tornado came up as a streaker was dashing across the field and Guy chased him as the tornado lifted the naked man up and Guy jumped and grabbed him by the ankles and they both flew up in the air and then gently descended in the outfield. People thought this was insensitive, given that the death toll from tornadoes in the South that week was more than 300. They may be right. I'd ask them to consider that we were not telling a joke about tornado victims but simply putting a tornado into a story, which was meant to show the intense devotion of Cards fans ---- they didn't evacuate, they stayed in their seats as the tornado came through, and the game quickly resumed. A tall tale, and if you look up American folk humor, you'll find dozens of tall tales about tornadoes. I grew up hearing stories about the whimsical ways of tornadoes, hopping and skipping around, and I've told half a dozen or so tornado stories over the years, usually about them hitting the righteous and avoiding the wicked. My parents talked for years about the tornado in Anoka around 1938. But we didn't lose anybody and there's a difference. We do stories about madmen, feral dogs, people running around shooting guns, anvils falling on people, cars running off cliffs, and in these stories, as in cartoons, nobody ever dies. The car falls off the cliff and hits the gasoline tanks which explode and somehow the driver is shot into the air and caught by a whale who vomits him onto the beach. If you ever had a loved one who ran his car off a cliff, you might be offended by that. I would be sympathetic.

Other listeners felt that the bridal song for Prince William and Duchess Catherine was in poor taste. They felt the line "It's not bad, it could be worse. It's better than coming to church in a hearse" was a reference to the funeral of Princess Diana at Westminster Abbey. It was not intended to be. Prince William's mother died fourteen years ago and her funeral is not in the forefront of my mind. And it is better to be alive than dead. I do believe that.

To APHC:

We were living in northern Minnesota back in 1977, '78, '79, '80 and loved Mary DuShane. Especially when you would say, "Oh, Mary, give us some of that sweet biscuit fiddle."

What ever happened to her?

-- Robert McKinney
Sugar Grove, VA

An answer from our production assistant, Ella S.:

You're thinking of an early permutation of the Powdermilk Biscuit Band, which featured Fiddlin' Mary DuShane, guitarist Adam Granger, Bob Douglas on mandolin, and Dick Rees on bass. Mary, Adam, and Bob were together on A Prairie Home Companion's Reunion Show in 2008, when the "biscuit fiddle" and the rest sounded just as sweet as ever.

For the last few decades, Mary has been playing everything from country rock to contra dance. She is part of a jug band called The Geezers -- we had them on the show back in 2005.

Mary DuShane's favorite thing right now is Cajun dance music, which she picked up from Louisiana. She currently plays with two Cajun bands, the Cajun Hot Soles and the DJ Cajun Trio. And she also enjoys teaching fiddle lessons at the Homestead Pickin' Parlor in Richfield, Minnesota. Or you can hear her on Old Sweet Songs: A Prairie Home Companion 1974-1976.

I just finished listening to your song about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. I don't know what to call it other than offensive trash.

If this what you find entertaining and funny, you've clearly gone senile.

Maybe you've always been that way. I wouldn't know since I don't listen to your broadcast. After this taste of what you find entertaining, I'm glad you'll be off the air soon.

They should pull your show today if they had any sense. You make Rush Limbaugh look sensitive.

Susan Bullard
Arlington, VA

Not much is known about the relationship about Jefferson and his housemaid, Sally Hemings. There's been conjecture, starting back in their time, and for many years Hemings descendants claimed to be blood relatives of Jefferson, a claim that was given  some credibility by DNA tests. Jefferson himself wrote nothing about the relationship, and Miss Hemings, who was freed after his death, did not divulge anything either, so far as is known. The case for his paternity is further strengthened by the fact that he freed the five Hemings children who were thought to be his offspring. At any rate, the story is something of a blank, and I decided to make it a love story. In the lyrics, she sings:

 I begged him to teach me to read and to write
         But we only met in the dead of the night
          I left his bed when the sky turned blue
           What happened between us only we knew.

He feels that, though she is his by slavery and though it is wrong to lie with her, nonetheless she cares for him. Many listeners objected to the duet chorus:

 It was love though no one could understand
         It was love between a woman and man
          In the dark, forbidden, condemned as wrong,
           But love will sing its song.

And the song ends on a strained note:

TOM: I rode my horse around the plantation
SALLY: I bowed my head as he passed
TOM: I could see in her eyes a dark accusation
SALLY: When he died, I was freed at last.

A great many listeners agreed with you, Susan, that love was absolutely not possible between a slave and a master. There's much to be said for that. After thinking about Jefferson and about his wife Martha, who made him promise on her deathbed that he would not marry again, I took a different point of view.

"Tom and Sally"

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"Tom and Sally" (lyrics)