A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media

HAPPY NEW YEAR, FRIENDS: A NOTE FROM GARRISON KEILLOR

And here it is, 2009, about to drop from the sky. Unbelievable in a way, but there it is, 365 days gone since the last time we sang "Auld Lang Syne" and each of us got exactly the same number, nobody got a bonus. Hard times for many people. Friends whose 401k got socked hard by the crash and who don't talk about it but their retirement plans have now changed. Friends whose jobs seem shaky. A good radio show, "Weekend America," is biting the dust, dang it. And of course there is a lot of mortality going around.

We have a new president coming in and I'm delighted about that and also pleased that he's a man of great discipline and decorum and isn't full of himself or vindictive and righteous and he invited that evangelical guy to give the invocation at the inauguration. Bravo, Barack. Enormous progressive changes have been wrought by mannerly people in ordinary clothing. Anyway, I'll be there at the ceremony January 20, sitting in the bleachers (thanks, Senator Klobuchar!), hoping for a good speech, hoping the inaugural poet proves worthy.

Our old radio show plows forward, after a two-week break, with a winter run at the Fitzgerald and tour stops in Louisville, Duluth, Appleton, Nashville, Durham, Watertown, the April run in New York, and the spring route to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, and Tanglewood.

My New Year's resolution is: Do it better. The enemy, as always, is passivity, inattention, self-indulgence, cynicism — the list goes on and on — when you get to my age, you know your faults all too well — and the reward is to give you some shining radio moments. Those moments are more intense for the fact that it is a live show and even if you listen to it as a podcast or hear the Sunday rerun, it still is live, sort of. It's produced by an extraordinary team of individuals — backstage, there is the wizardly Tom Scheuzger, the orderly Ella Schovanec mistress of scriptage, our writer Laura Buchholz who does Mom and Duane and Jim and Barb and Rhubarb and many other things, our music producer Kathryn Slusher who can find anything in three minutes or less, our stage manager Albert Webster who makes sure that nothing bad happens in the theater at any time, our house sound guy Tony Axtell who is a musician and knows how things should sound, our tour wrangler Caroline Hontz and our truckdriver Russ Ringsak, our various ranchhands Janis Kaiser and Ken Evans and Tom Campbell and Jim and Alan and Hey You, and our technical director/producer Sam Hudson who makes the broadcast happen and has a say about everything that goes into it. And then there are the people onstage, but you know them already. And the mysterious people back in the office in St. Paul. And the even more mysterious people at American Public Media. And the people at the stations who put the show on the air.

And so onward we go and you too, God willing. Courage. May we all find some beauty and humor and kindness in the new year, and maybe even some inspiration. We will try to do our best and hope to be forgiven for the rest. Take care.