Fearmonger's Shoppe
Saturday, June 3, 2000
Listen

(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell, RD: Rich Dworsky)

....brought to you by the Fearmonger's Shoppe. You're at the doctor's and he writes you out a prescription (SCRIBBLING. TR: Take two of these every four hours for the next three days...) and you take it to the druggist (SS: Hmmmm. Looks like 50 milligrams arsenic....odd.....Oh well.) and you go home and in eight hours, you're lying in a huge refrigerator and your family is planning the memorial service. Poor penmanship among doctors is estimated to cause as many as 198,000 deaths a year. Imagine. Your doctor prescribes Viagra and the druggist gives you fifty capsules full of Niagara laundry starch. How can you protect yourself against this mistake? By carrying a safety kit from the Fearmonger's Shoppe, which includes a box full of large, easy-to-read gummed letters. (TK: Here, doc. You mind using these?) The Fearmonger's safety kit includes flares, safety rope, alarms, protective headgear, lead pants, parachutes, and fits in any full-size pickup. The Fearmonger's Shoppe for all your phobia needs.

Ketchup Advisory Board

GK: ... brought to you by the Ketchup Advisory Board. TR: Once there was a town where everyone was very deeply into the arts. Moms and dads came home from work and went to the theater or to hear the symphony and on weekends children begged to be taken to museums. Murals appeared on the sides of buildings, everyone was in a book club and busy writing poetry or fiction. Shops were filled with the sound of Haydn and Mozart. And thanks to that, the I.Q.s of children rose higher and higher, and they all went to prestigious colleges and earned doctorates in math and physics and got lucrative jobs in high-tech companies and when they were thirty they cashed in their stock options and retired and started writing their memoirs, and soon there was nobody left who had time to attend the theater, everyone was too busy exploring their own sensibility, and so the theater went dark, and the orchestra, and the museums, and in a few years, though the parents were all writers and terribly sensitive, their children were all into Nintendos and Pokemons and body-piercing and really gross humor, and their I.Q.s dropped and one day it rained hard and the parents looked out the windows of their studios and saw the children standing outside, soaked to the skin, water running down their little pointy heads, and the parents thought, "Maybe we're not getting enough ketchup." So they started putting ketchup on their food and they realized that their memoirs were really crummy and not worth writing and soon they started a theater and everyone went to plays and concerts of Mozart and everything was the way it used to be except that they were all a little bit smarter. All the best that a ketchup can be.

RD (sings):

These are the good years,
in the golden sun
A new day is dawning,
a new life has begun
Life is flowing like ketchup on a bun.

GK: Ketchup: for the good times.

RD: Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup.

(c) 2000 by Garrison Keillor