A Prairie Home Companion: February 14, 2004

Opening
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Listen

Today is Valentine's Day. All of you women in the audience, this counts as a date. Don't say, Why don't we ever go anywhere? You did. Here.

I feel sorry for guys who don't have a date tonight. They have to sit home, by themselves, watching sports with $200 in their pockets. No one tells them that the shirt they put on doesn't go with those pants. They just sit there, thinking, uninterrupted.

A person doesn't want to stereotype Spartanburg, people are different everywhere you go, generalizations tend to be wrong, including that one, but it is a place where probably more dogs have been trained to fire shotguns than most other places (DOG GRUMBLING TO ITSELF, PUSHING THE BOLT, FIRING TWO SHOTS). A lot of smart dogs in Spartanburg. It is a high-deepfry, low-sushi town.

FN (SPARTANBURGITE): Sushi. Hmmm. Well, there used to be a place---- no, that's gone now. WalMart took that over. Well---- you could just go to a bait shop.

Lots of bait shops because Spartanburg is blessed with plenty of lakes. (BOAT MOTOR, TROLLING) Even on a cold rainy day like today, people were out at 6 a.m. fishing for brown trout. (CAST AND SPLASH) Onion rings are the favored bait, other than minnows and nightcrawlers. But onion rings can attract the big fish, gigantic ones, those ancient pterodactyls that lurk on the lake floor (MONSTER RISING FROM DEEP, CRIES OF TERROR, CRUNCHING OF BOAT) and you want to beware what you wish for. Some fish are too big.

Lots of Baptists here, so there's lots of good Baptist jokes here. Such as. You always invite two Baptists when you go fishing and that way they won't drink your beer.

Like many cities in the South, it is a city where an inch of snow or freezing rain is a crisis. (KLAXON HORN, SIRENS, VOICES ON WALKIE-TALKIES: It appears to be frozen. It's shiny. We are approaching it with caution from the rear.")