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A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

English Majors script
Saturday, October 30, 2004
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GK: ...after this message from the English majors of America.

(AUTUMNAL MUSIC, FEET CRUNCHING ON DEAD LEAVES)

SS: I love the fall. The smells, the leaves, the rain, it brings back this beautiful flashback in sharp detail of school and afternoons at the library and the sweetness of teenage melancholy and the surrealism of football.

TR: What's surreal about football?

SS: Oh, you know. People getting all excited about nothing that really matters, cheerleaders in those stupid uniforms screaming, boys running terribly into each other, the pain, the sense of nothingness.

TR: Nothingness?

SS: You know—the emptiness at the heart of it, all of that effort and expense devoted to a sport that has utterly no effect on anything, it's a sort of insanity, a kind of officially-sanctioned form of child abuse.

TR: You know, I don't think you and I maybe ought to get married, Christina.

SS: I think you're right, Todd.

GK: So many women go down the road with men who turn out to be dull, uncomprehending, lacking in a sense of irony, impervious to intuitive reasoning, captive to stereotypes, unaware of subtexts—

SS: Subtexts!Did I hear you say "subtexts"?

GK: Yes—

SS: I love the way you said that—say it again.

GK: Subtexts.

SS: Say "iconic."

GK: Iconic.

SS: Say "empowerment."

GK: I'll do more than say it. I'll make it happen.

SS: You're an English major, aren't you.

GK: Yes, of course.

SS: I knew it. I could tell by the look in your eye. Why have I wasted my time with men who I was physically attracted to when I could have found a man who would understand me?

GK: I don't know.

TR: A message from the Professional Organization of English Majors.

The Newsletter from Lake Wobegon

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LIBERTY

Liberty:A Novel of Lake Wobegon A national holiday in Lake Wobegon is always gaudy and joyful. But what is going on between Clint Bunsen and Miss Liberty?
Everyone is here—Pastor Ingqvist, the Sons of Knute, Sister Arvonne of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and her ocarina band, the Norwegian bachelor farmers, Dorothy and the Chatterbox Café, Wally in the Sidetrack Tap—as crowds converge on the little town to celebrate American independence, even as the chairman of the event broods on the great question of the day: Shall we struggle on valiantly here or shall we burst the bonds and find beautiful life in the golden west?



YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?

English Majors CD Set Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of men and women who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.) Selections include "The Six-Minute Hamlet," a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting "Professional Organization of English Majors" drama, and guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr., and Calvin Trillin.


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