A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media

Post to the Host
GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between.

Send your own post to the host.
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!

October 2003

Dear Mr. Keillor,
As the proud parent of a young girl, I know the day is coming when she and I will have to have the "talk." You know, the one where I explain to a child the difference between Democrats and Republicans, without scaring her. They should have warned us about this at our Lamaze class.

—Dazed 'n' Confused

Dear Dazed,
You will do just fine, so don’t worry about it. Parents aren’t responsible for teaching politics. They are, however, responsible for teaching about manners, which may be more important in the end. I treasure my encounters with gracious Republicans and humorous Democrats and your little girl may grow up to be either one and make you proud.

Dear Sir:
I listen to your radio show through my computer, using headphones, during my lunch break at work, the boss probably thinks I'm working, because as I listen I correspond with a dear friend on line. No matter. I can't seem to get your show on my radio, unless I'm driving on a particular stretch of Rt. 17 though I did catch it once returning from Buffalo. I had been driving for four hours and was pretty bored, but your radio show really livened up the last hour or so. The radio programing these days just gets worse all the time. So now instead of only a boring PB&J for lunch I add your program and I get a smile and a laugh and some good music with my PB &J. Of course it takes a couple of days to listen to a whole show, but what the hell, I have to eat lunch every day all week long. Hang in there fella, my best to you and your whole Radio bunch there.

— Cliff

Cliff,
You must live in a mountainous region, and when you pass through the dales, or vales, or dells, or hollers, or whatever you call them, the signal is lost. (No problem here in Minnesota, by the way, we can get Little Rock and Salt Lake and Pittsburgh.) I certainly admire a man who can listen to a radio show, write a letter, and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the same time, while appearing to be working. But there's nothing like the pleasure of tuning in a real radio show on a long car trip. Makes me want to take more car trips.

Mr. Keillor,
My goals in life are to be a good writer and a paid writer. What do I need to do? I'm not looking for abstracts or broad rules to live by. I write every day, and I do my best to live life to the fullest and make up for youthful inexperience with intense scrutiny. I have a growing body of work. What do I need to do to get people to buy it?

— Chelsea

Dear Chelsea,
Literacy in America is not a booming phenomenon, thanks to
television which has reduced the alertness of many of our fellow citizens to that of slugs in March. So to get people to buy it, you have to make it sing or jump off the page or tell them a secret so fascinating they will drop everything to listen. It ain’t enough to be interesting, kid. You have to pack some voltage.

Garrison,
I live in Texas and have discovered a very interesting phenomenon: the Lawrence Welk Show is aired on the local PBS station at the same time as Prairie Home Companion is and if you watch the Welk show while listening to PHC, sometimes the actions on TV will synchronize with your show. It's amazing! Is this synchronization some great cosmic coincidence?

—Alida Andrews

Dear Alida,
I'll bet that if you listened to the show while watching a flock of chickens, there would be moments when the birds seemed to be lip-synching. There are coincidences more amazing than this.

Dear Mr Keillor,
I am a ninth grader at an all girls school. This gives me limited access to the opposite gender. And I must say, they confuse me. Any advice for me? What do I do to get guys to pay attention to me? Should I be upfront? If I act too jokey and pally around them, will they never consider asking me out because I'm too much like a friend? And most importantly, when do guys become like normal human beings?

—Chattanooga

Dear Chat,
You get guys to pay attention to you by not paying attention to them. Indifference works, every time, and usually it attracts the guys you'd want to be attracted, guys with some intelligence and curiosity. It's fine to be jokey and goofy but do it on your own terms, not theirs. Don't be upfront at all, girl. Be mysterious and aloof. Practice the Drop Dead Look. Guys are fascinated by this. Bozos are put off by it, but intelligent guys find it amusing. Guys can be stupid in groups (so can girls be) and when you catch them alone, they're usually pretty normal. Thank you for your interest in my gender, and good luck, girl.

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Imagine my surprise to hear at church yesterday that a woman in Lake Wobegon had the very same experience as I with a bear sitting on our deck in a settee, gingerly eating sunflower seeds out of the birdfeeder. I wonder if she has any advice as to encouraging him to move on. Somehow not even the loud noise of my husband testing out our generator scared the bear off. What do you suggest as a prudent course of action?

—Heidi Stevenson

Heidi,
There is no expertise here concerning bears. I never encountered one. (Cowardice has served me well all my life.) People who have encountered bears seem to suggest that they hope not to encounter another. Apparently, running is a bad idea—they're fast—and climbing isn't the answer, and fighting may not be a good choice either. You do what you must do. You let the bear get what it came for and then try to make it scarce for next time. Glad to hear you're safe.

Dear Garrison Keillor,
My aunt Teresa was such a great person, an historian at the Chicago Historical Society for years, and she died last December. She used to send me tapes of your show so I could listen to them as I injected fruit fly embryos in a cold dark room. (It was my post-doctoral work). I really wish you could have known her, and she you; how sad that never happened.

—Alice Schmid

Alice,
I know the feeling. Giants are passing from our midst. Tall trees are falling. The people who knew us as children, departing, one after the other, leaving us without a past. I wish I'd met your aunt, wish you'd met some of mine. Last week George Plimpton died, at 76, a man of letters and editor and journalist and incomparable storyteller, a prince of bounding enthusiasm and bonhomie in a field of dour achievers. I wish your aunt had met him. He had stories about Hemingway that a Chicagoan would've enjoyed hearing. Now that whole repertoire, that whole swath of history, is gone. This is why we long to put words down on paper that will live after us. F. Scott Fitzgerald died young, at 44, and the people who knew him never said, "If only you could have met him"—the gentleman had his good days and not so good, but the best of Scott was in his work.

Mr. Keillor,
I just left high school and am off to college and wondering about my future. I haven't travelled too far from home yet, but I'm thinking about it. I'd really like to go live in England after college. Maybe Australia. Somewhere that wouldn't take too much effort, linguistically. Is it disloyal to feel like you belong somewhere else? When you come back, is it the same?

—Restless

Dear Restless,
No, and no. But for a really big experience, you could try getting outside of English. How's your Spanish? Go to a college that gives you credit for a year abroad and get your Spanish up to speed and haul off to Barcelona for nine months. Find people who don't speak English and live with them. You'll find an almost mystical sort of friendship that crosses language barriers and you'll also get to learn how to deal with excruciating loneliness and this will do you a world of good. You'll learn about self-reliance and how to be good company to yourself. This will free you from ever needing television, and that will give you about 20% more of your own life to live. With this 20% bonus, you can write books or raise kids or become a tycoon or do anything else you want to in this life. No kidding.

Garrison,
My husband and I are in our early 30s and are trying to decide when to start a family. We have only been married for a year and would like to wait a while. It seems as if, biologically speaking, it would be better if we got to the task at hand. We are having a blast right now. Having a baby is such a leap of faith and I can't even imagine what a baby will do to our marriage. Any advice?

—Michelle and Will

Dear Folks,
It's a happy predicament, to be in love and wondering when to start a family. Things could be worse. And though you hear the clock ticking, you shouldn't let yourselves be rushed or pressured by family into begetting offspring. Having kids is like leaving Laguna Beach and moving to Minnesota: You have to be prepared for some big changes that, in fact, you can't really prepare yourself for.

My honest feeling is that the impulse to parenthood has to come from the woman, and then the man has to look into his heart and see what he wants. It's a big thing to bring a child into the world and to be her sun and sky and horizon for those crucial years and be ever after entwined. For one thing, it brings to an end the delightful period of self-invention called adolescence, which for some people lasts a lifetime. There's sleep deprivation, of course, which makes you slightly psychotic. Your sex life disappears for awhile. Conversation changes: You don't talk about movies in the same serious way you used to—you discuss the intelligence and personality and weight gain and small motor skills and bowel movements of Little Bebop. You lose interest in restaurants. You lose track of fashion and what's hot now and what hip people are talking about. You're no longer one of them.

I myself was never happier than when the burden of hipness was lifted from me, but I can't speak for you. I advocate freedom for you, delicious freedom, and you should go and enjoy it together and make good memories—go do everything, see China and hike the Himalayas and bike across Costa Rica and scuba-dive the Great Barrier Reef and see if you hear a still small voice saying, "When are you going to have me?" I don't know any parents who regret parenthood, not really, but plenty of them regret not having enjoyed their early married years more.