A Reflection of 25 Years: Garrison Keillor on the Spirituality of Radio

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS people reach that milestone pretty regularly - but in the Darwinian world of radio broadcasting it's an eon, and the long life of "A Prairie Home Companion" is a real accomplishment, just like the World's Largest Ball of Twine. You keep on winding your twine, and it gets bigger and bigger, and pretty soon your home town erects a sign, "Home of Wilfred Sneed and His Twine Ball - 100 yds straight ahead on left," and I suppose you should feel some pride, but you should know that it was not for brilliance or sheer imagination that you accumulated this monstrosity. It was lack of imagination masquerading as perseverance. Most people would've tired of winding twine back when the ball was ten feet in diameter and taken up license-plate-collecting or joined a polka club or gone off on a bus tour of Civil War battlefields. But I am a horse, which you need to be in radio, I guess. You stay in harness and remain focused on the end of the row you are plowing - focus, in my case, on Saturday, and as your colleagues drop out of radio one by one and go into arts administration or public relations, and the creepy little guy who used to mix the show starts up an Internet company and takes it public for a couple hundred million, you plod up and down the rows whinnying, and suddenly one day, they present you with a plaque. It is a chunk of Lucite with the number 25 etched into it.

I have almost no memory of those twenty-five years because I'm on a weekly schedule. I can tell you about Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning, but I don't recall annual stuff, like 1982. On Friday, I write scripts, Friday night I rewrite them, Saturday we go on the air and stumble through the drill, I do my dance and sing my song, and do the News from Lake Wobegon, which is mostly about muskrats and pouring concrete and annuities and my boyhood pal Skippy and his hilarious mispronunciations, and meanwhile a white mist of powdered sugar falls around me from the doughnut of the stagehand on the catwalk above who is retying the sandbag hanging over my head, and now I have forgotten the end of the Skippy story so I wind it up, and there is a big commotion in the wings and a clatter of hooves as the Guy's Shoe Band rushes onstage and strikes up a tune and the stage manager brings me a note ("Go to Credits") and now I cannot remember the names of the guests I should thank, I can only remember the end of the Skippy story (he kept the chicken, whom he named Fred, in the garage, and gradually it became just like a member of the family), so the show peters out on a long drum solo and tepid applause, and I go back to the dressing room and weep bitter tears. Sunday morning I forget the whole thing. In this way, a man avoids melancholy and regret and stays forever young.