A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

	GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between. Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome! Send your own post to the host.

Sincerely,
Michael A. Shapiro

Dear Mr. Shapiro: Ruby and Earl have been under the weather this past winter and the WLPBS has settled somewhat and appears to be in need of reinforcement. Mr.Schultz is still conspiring against it, in his capacity as chairman of the County Commission on Historic & Monumental Sites. He is officially charged with the protection of the WLPBS but of course protectors are in an excellent position to be predators, and many a fox has supervised a henhouse, and Mr. Schultz is saying that the WLPBS needs to be disassembled and fumigated and treated with herbicides, and that of course would destroy it. Meanwhile, the WLPBS's creator is feeling weak and woozy and is lying in bed, looking out the window that faces onto his Magnum Opus.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Do the folks up at L.W. know about the folks down at Ronco? I recently purchased a food dehydrator and was thinking if I was a sales rep I would really like to have Lake Wobegon as my territory for such a handy dandy little item. Why, you can dry literally tons of tomatoes and vegetables each year and it would sure eliminate having to dump bags of ripe produce on your neighbors porches in the middle of the night.

Just wondering.
Mary R.

Dear Mary R., I haven't heard about people up there dehydrating food, but those folks tend to be very secretive about trying new things. Mrs. Tollefson was on her high-kohlrabi diet for six months before she breathed a word to anyone. The Bunsens used a white-noise generator to try to solve his snoring problem and they told nobody for more than a year. So it's possible that some Wobegonians are drying their rhubarb and asparagus but I'd guess they're doing it around midnight in their basements by candlelight with newspapers taped over the windows.

Garrison:
Just a line to say that I miss the ads for the Fearmonger Shop and Bertha's Kitty Boutique. I suppose their advertising budgets have suffered along with the national economic decline, but surely in such a time it is more important than ever to fill the public's phobia needs. As for cats, they probably ride out recessions just the way they ride out everything else - but what about their owners?

Mother Joanna

Dear Joanna, The Fearmongers Shoppe has purchased 1 minute on an upcoming show to advertise their security check service, which sends a couple paranoid guys to look around your house for frayed cords and boxes of oily rags and pennies in your fuse box, that sort of thing. We're trying to get Bertha's back in the fold, but I believe I must've made some disparaging reference to cats and ruffled some fur at B.K.B.

Dear Garrison,
I always enjoy "The Lives of the English Majors". I wonder if you'd consider expanding this aspect of the program into Lives of the Language Majors"...Those of us who dedicated years of our lives to learning another language and delving into its literature, only to discover upon graduation that we are unable to find work outside the service fields, would love to hear romantic stories about ourselves, too.

Cyndy Barton

Dear Cyndy, We covered you guys in our commercials for Bud's Accent School, which teaches people a really good foreign accent in five one-hour lessons. A terrific French accent is worth $$$$ in the service field, depending on the restaurant. A lot of those suave continental fellows at Le Cote Basque and Le Bearnaise and Le Grenouille and Quelle Est La Place are really South Dakotans.

Mr. Keillor:
My son Eric is getting married in June, and I need to come up
with a song for him and me to dance to at the reception. This in itself is a bit stressful, since we come from a long line of non-dancers, but so be it.

Any song suggestions? Something easy for the rhythm-impaired to dance to would be a nice bonus, but mostly I am looking for something familiar and somewhat parental/sentimental.

Betty Maxey

Dear Betty, There's a beautiful Danish wedding waltz called Bryllupsvalsen, which sounds familiar the moment you hear it and is sweet and sentimental. I like "Love Walked In" and "Til There Was You". There's "Mom and Dad's Waltz" by Lefty Frizzell, a sweet old thing, and then there's "Love's Old Sweet Song," which would be terrific. And how about Bob Dylan's "Forever Young"?

Dear Garrison,
I love your PHC and have listened to it for a very long time. In all this time, however, I have not heard you mention perhaps Minnesota's most famous author, Sinclair Lewis. Also, it seems that Lewis was overtly shunned at the naming of the Fitzgerald Theater. Since you and Lewis find small town and rural midwestern life such rich sources of material, I am wondering why he seems to be persona non grata on PHC??

Leonard

Dear Leonard, I read Main Street and Babbitt and Arrowsmith way back in high school and liked them all and think I'd probably like them again if I picked them up today and find him almost as funny as I did back then. Lewis's stock has fallen on the literary exchange, especially compared to Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a very popular unit in high school English classes and young people seem to identify with the perpetual adolescent that lurks in so much of FSF's writing. But PHC is not a program about literature. We don't talk about Lewis (or Fitzgerald, really) nor Hemingway nor Faulkner nor Cather nor Wharton nor any of Lewis's other contemporaries. We are a program of light fizzy entertainment and cheap thrills. You may not know this, but I do the show in a baggy lavender suit with red suspenders and floppy shoes and a red bulb in my lapel that flashes when I tell a joke. I am no Alfred Kazin to stand around lecturing on Sinclair Lewis.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Are there any family therapists in Lake Wobegon?

Dr. Pam Pare

Dear Dr. Pam, There are. They are called aunts. As your aunts die off, then you become a therapist to your nieces and nephews. And if you've made some serious mistakes in life and known your share of heartache, all the better for you.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I have recently begun home schooling my two children.
Home schooling seems to be catching on all across the
country. Are there any home schoolers in Lake
Wobegon?

Amy Kropp

Dear Amy, Good for you. You're a dedicated and resourceful mother. I'm not aware of any home schooling going on in Lake Wobegon but I'm not up to speed on all the latest developments there. Often when I talk about the town, I drift back to the Fifties, my childhood, and sometimes do it in the present tense ---- this may happen to you when you get to be my age. Perhaps there is a family living out in the woods that makes pots for a living and raises all their own food and sews their own clothes and home-schools their kids. If there is, I certainly wish them well. Maybe they're living the way they do because they distrust the media's view of the world and are trying to save their children from buying into that view. In which case, I, as a media guy, really ought to leave them alone. I believe passionately in the right of every American to not tune in.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I recently tried to write a story based on one of the most momentous events of my adolescence. I tell the story more or less as it happened. [But] I really hate what I've written so far. If you write about real events, is it better to tell them as they happened (and risk sounding bitter) or change them to make things come out better, give it a moral, etc. (and risk being saccharine)?

Patrick

Dear Patrick, This is a common problem for writers, even aged ones like me, and of course we wind up improving on our stories and making ourselves look better. That's the main thing. You don't need to give the story a happy ending so long as you, the narrator, come off looking bright and capable and friendly. Nobody wants to read a story by a dodo. Another tip: why not put a dog into the story? If there's already a dog, add another dog as a partner for the real-life dog. People will often continue reading a story they don't like if there's a likable dog in it.

Mr. Keillor,
I've been wondering if you picture the Lake Wobegon Lutherans as ELCA Lutherans. If so what do you think of the new communion between the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, and thus what would the good reserved Scandinavian folks there in Minnesota think of their more liberal Anglican brethren?

Aidan

Dear Aidan, The ELCA Lutherans of Lake Wobegon were dead set against the new communion, although some of them (I name no names) have, while visiting their fallen-away children in distant cities, attended Episcopal churches (with the children) and partaken of communion. But they don't want there to be an official link that might, over the years, grow tighter and, before you know it, you'll find Pastor Ingqvist processing in a dress and a rhinestone-encrusted cape preceded by two guys twirling incense pots on chains like they were yo-yos and go through a lot of bowing and turning and genuflecting. And suddenly the Bible-based sermon of 25 minutes turns into a 6-minute homily about the beauty of flowers. And the Sunday School takes up the infrastructure needs of the inner cities. And soon you realize that your young people are a little shaky on their Bible stories and parables and can't find Jeremiah or Deuteronomy or even Ephesians without looking up the page number in the index. No, the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon don't care to go in that direction. Anglicanism is for when you take a vacation to England. It's like nightclubbing that way. It's for special occasions. You don't want to make a practice of it.