A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

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Saturday, December 31, 2005
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Garrison Keillor: Tonight's party has a medieval theme — men wearing velvet pantaloons and hats with ostrich feathers, women in silk dresses with pushup bodices, and people drinking warm gin and schooners of beer and eating big hunks of meat with their hands — no vegetarian course tonight — we're eating wild boar and elk haunches and the gizzards of buzzards — and we have swordfighting and people being thrown into the moat and we may have a beheading — yes, a beheading —the executioner is sharpening his sword right now — and of course there is typhoid and the plague and smallpox and the people smell terrible. Those are the ones we're beheading. There is the guillotine being raised now. And a Dissenter is being led to the guillotine and he is being placed in it. But here come a whole bunch of Dissenters on horseback to rescue him and now we have a big swordfight and people with smallpox are spitting on their swords to transmit the disease to someone they stab and it's a big fight and now I see that someone has been injured and he is going to have to have his leg amputated. He seems to be in a great deal of pain. And the doctor comes, with a handsaw. And the man is begging to be killed instead. So they put his leg into the guillotine and now it's off and they wrap a filthy cloth around the bleeding stump and he's given a crutch and a tin cup and he is going around the audience begging. And now I see that many of you have ugly red splotches on your faces. In fact, I'd say all of you. And so we are going to be closing the big iron doors of the theater and bricking up the exits and we'll all be staying here for awhile. So we may as well dance……