A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Season Reflections
Saturday, June 28, 2003

	Garrison Keillor

The show was at Tanglewood in the Berserkshires for the grand finale and it was pretty grand. A perfect summer day (70s, high clouds) drew about 10,000 people to the grounds, 4000 under the shed and the rest arrayed on the lawn. There were plenty of children, some on their way to camp. A lanky Rhode Island girl of 10 who took a day off from sailing. A lady who called herself Spiderwoman. Students from Amherst and a kid in a black sleeveless t-shirt who said, "I'm one of your right-wing fans." Unitarians. Many English majors, and some English teachers. A man with an anchor and "U.S.N." tattooed on his forearm. Old marrieds and old folkies and some folks from Texas. Stunning young women in beachwear who each said they'd been listening to the show since they were little girls. Sixtysomethings of all shapes and sizes. Several young men named Noah. A big Long Island contingent including people from Queens and Brooklyn. Many many Bostonians. Leo Kottke fans.

Leo was on the show, playing and singing like an old master, looking like a 20-year-old who is happy to be making his coffeehouse debut. (Leo has been looking twentyish for about thirty-nine years.) A slender young Chinese pianist, Hsing-ay Hsu, did a round of show-stoppers of Liszt, Dvorak, and Debussy and stunned the crowd with her bravado and her good humor. The Shoe Band was joined by the Nilsson Sisters String Quartet. Guy Noir solved an acoustical problem at Tanglewood. Leo got into the hobo life with George W. Bush and Fred Newman gargled "The Flight of the Bumblebee." There was an oration on the subject of potato salad. A pretty typical PHC broadcast. The crowd hung around afterward and clapped and I and Pat Donohue came back out and did "Bye Bye Love" and then there was a slow soulful semi-acapella rendition of "Amazing Grace" which really was amazing, sung by several thousand people under the roof. (All of the dreadful bagpipe renditions have not diminished its beauty and people have not wearied of singing it.)

After the show, I stood out on the grass and talked to the friends and neighbors for a couple hours, and the cast and crew gathered for a little dessert & libation party in a cabin in the woods that once was Daniel Chester French's studio. (He was the sculptor who did the seated Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial.) Everyone agreed that Tanglewood is just about the greatest venue around. A terrific stagehand crew, good front-of-the-house management, and a fabulous facility. The audience is happy coming there, and that's everywhere evident. And the restless spirit of Leonard Bernstein drifts through the place, the inspirational genius of Tanglewood for fifty years, always urging you to be braver and aim higher.

The party chugged along until about 1:30 a.m., which is late for this bunch ---- the day began at 7 a.m. for most of them --- and (if you really want to know) was quieter than in the olden days. There was a day when musicians jammed at the post-show parties and Mr. Johnny Walker and Mr. Jack Daniels disappeared pretty quickly and a bibulous hubbub arose and a lot of flirting went on. Now it's a wine crowd, with plenty of people sticking to club soda, and there is quiet conversation (mostly not about the show) and if there's flirting, it's too subtle to notice. A few of the younger staff stand out on the deck and smoke and have a martini or two, but the tone is considerably subdued. Which is good. No? People who do shows should do them on stage and be pooped afterwards. You plop down into a chair with a plate of cherries and an iced tea and reminisce about that moment after "Bye Bye Love" when a woman in the audience fell off the chair she was standing on, hit her head, was knocked unconscious, and you had to say, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' (There was.) as you tried to remember the words to "Amazing Grace" and remembered the first verse, the 10,000 Years verse, the Fear verse, and could not for the life of you remember "Through many dangers, toils, and cares we have already come."

The morning after the Last Show, you sit on the veranda of the Red Lion Inn in Lenox, sipping your coffee among all the serious Sunday Times readers, and you sit and reflect, which can be dangerous in the radio business. Radio is flickering, evanescent, momentary, like bread-baking or politics or sandcastle construction, and you shouldn't think too hard about What Is This All Worth Anyway. But being a liberal, you do, and having been raised Sanctified Brethren, you do. And the only answer available to you is, It's Not Good Enough, Bubs. You accuse yourself of mediocrity and you plead guilty. You are more severe than any critic has dared be. Did Bernstein do this the morning after a Mahler 4th that everybody else thought was pretty good? Yes, he did. Sure, he did. He had Jewish guilt, you have Protestant guilt made from the same black cloth. He made extravagant mistakes and had urgent unfinished business right up to the day he died. So will you. You will never get the problem figured out. Perfection eludes you, sometimes by a wide margin. You raise sail and the boat blows over and you go in the drink. Some things that you work hard on, nobody notices. Being a performer can mess up your life in all the clichéd ways --- and then at some point you realize God has made your life into a mystery and more and more often you find yourself saying, "God, you got me into this with (I trust) some end in mind, and now, if you please, accomplish what You will." You are sluicing around in a line of work that seems so ego-powered and yet the effect of it is humbling. You have used the medium of radio to take you back to your childhood (when you listened to the radio) and to bump around in the barn with the ghosts and the horses and pay homage to a life you escaped and impersonate some of those old preachers and uncles who sat on the grass in 1948 and dandled you on their knees. It's the meaning of your life, buster. Everybody gets one good idea and this was yours. Be grateful you didn't collapse under the weight.

Have a good summer, enjoy the Saturday nights with old shows, and we'll hope to see you September 27 with a brand-new one.