A Prairie Home Companion: January 14, 2006

University script
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Listen

(PIANO)

Garrison Keillor: It's always a big day when a guy gets to come back to his Alma Mater. I was lucky enough to go here during the Sixties — a colorful time in our history—

Tim Russell: (DEEP INHALE) Oh man. Oh that is good. Wow.

GK: It was a time of ferment and experimentation among the young.

Sue Scott (HIPSTER POET IN TRANCE): Electric neon Orlon wingtip wingback mindwarp of Boddhisatva Walt Whitman highway nothingness.

GK: It was a time when student radicals rose up against the institution.

TR (ON BULLHORN): We're taking over the radio station! (MOB RESPONSE: To the radio station)

GK: And that's how public radio got started — spewing our left-wing biases and attacking the foundations of civilization.

It was a time when people like me, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, were under attack by intellectuals.

(SCUFFLING, MUDBALLS FLYING, SPLATS AND SPLORTS)

TR: Hegemonic patriarchal marginalizer!!!

SS: Person of non-color!!!

Tom Keith: Neo-colonialist!

SS: Genital imperialistic neo-classicist!

GK: Many white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men were intimidated and pretended to be minority persons, including me. I took up the saxophone. (STAN GETZ NOTES) And that led me into a life of crime and drug addiction and ultimately redemption. My memoir of my college years has recently come under attack for inaccuracy — a bunch of literalists have questioned some statements I made, such as where I say that I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die — and I just want to say that the book is true in a deeper sense than those pitiful pedants will ever be able to understand. Bob Dylan and I went to college together here, we robbed banks, we rode freight trains, we earned our tuition with a deck of cards, we were pilots together on a steamboat that plied the waters of the Big River (STEAM WHISTLE), we lived wild and free, we played our songs, and it all happened here at the University of Minnesota. This is for you, Bob.