St. Paul script
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Listen

Garrison Keillor: St. Paul, the city of the arts. Minneapolis has more art museums, but St. Paul has something better. It offers you the suffering you need to become an artist. Going back to 1880, when Paul Gauguin left Paris and came to St. Paul to become a painter.

Sue Scott: You? Paint? Hello???? You can't even draw. Look. Your trees are all wrong. It's a big mess. Orange grass? What gives?

Tim Russell (FRENCH): It's impressionism!

SS: Yeah, well, I'm not impressed.

TR (FRENCH): I'm an artist! Someday the world will know that.

SS: Oh right. Dream on.

(MUSIC BRIDGE)

GK: So Paul Gauguin left St. Paul and went to Tahiti where he could paint naked people which is why people go into the arts — he found all the nakedness he could handle. But St. Paul provided him with the suffering he needed to be in the arts. — Same with the composer Paul Hindemith (TR GERMAN MUTTERING) — (PIANO CHORDS, TENTATIVE, AS IF COMPOSING) —

SS: You call that music? My ten-year-old can play better than that. You can't even carry a tune. Why don't you try carrying the mail?

GK: And then there was Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism. (TR FRENCH) When he lived in Paris, he was a chef— (TR HAPPY FRENCH) — he made crepes — he made toast — (

TR: FRENCH TOAST) — and then he came to St. Paul — the bread was lousy (TR FRENCH COMPLAINT) — it was like cake — it made terrible toast — and that's when he became an existentialist (TR GUTTURAL FRENCH: We are all alone in the universe. Existence is without purpose. But it's all we have. So we must find a reason to live.) For that, he got a Nobel Prize. He learned it in St. Paul. Come to St. Paul and we'll hurt you so much you'll make beautiful things from it. Just like F. Paul Fitzgerald. (

TR: Our boats borne ceaselessly back into the past, looking for the green light on posts at the intersection that mean, Go— Go, on — onward, gypsy lover—) St. Paul....we don't look at artists, we help make them. (TK CRY OF PAIN)