Word: companioner
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...everyone here in the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee is aware, this singular citizen--unprecedented and unlikely to be repeated--is the inventor, host, chief writer and principal song-and-dance man of an astonishing radio show called A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio each Saturday at 5 p.m. Midwestern time. Usually it originates from the World Theater in St. Paul, but during renovations there, the program is on the road, tonight in Milwaukee. It is now 4:57½, and Keillor is cranking up to do his first live broadcast in five weeks. He flaps about looking distracted...
...centerpiece of A Prairie Home Companion is a very long monologue, or out-of-body experience, in which Keillor, his low, breathy voice achieving sonorities like those of a train whistle in the distance at midnight, gives the news from a tiny, some say imaginary, Minnesota farm hamlet called Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." The same sturdy but hard-to-find settlement is the subject of Keillor's new book, Lake Wobegon Days (Viking; $17.95), a pack of beguiling lies that has been on the New York Times best-seller list...
...children are above average." In between, for 20 minutes or so, he discourses wonderingly, without notes, on a place where a dog lying asleep in the middle of Main Street will live out his days. In eleven years of talking about Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home Companion, he has not run out of material, nor does he seem likely to. He begins, on a recent show, to reflect in a misty way about married love, then cuts the mush short of flood stage with a rambling, funny story about how a middle-age Wobegonian and his wife were getting...
...knows, Anoka people do not see caricatures of themselves in Lake Wobegon's sound burghers, possibly, he thinks, because they do not listen to his show, which suggests that they are like Lake Wobegonians, who would be the last people in the world to listen to A Prairie Home Companion. So he says. The small town of Isle, Minn., on a lake called Mille Lacs, suggested some of the physical characteristics of Lake Wobegon, but he says that except for his aunt Eleanor Johnson, who is Aunt Flo in the book, he did not really know the people who lived...
...after he traveled to Nashville to write a piece for The New Yorker on the Grand Ole Opry, that he hit on the notion for the live evening show that shortly became A Prairie Home Companion. Years later the great country guitarist Chet Atkins heard from his agent, who said that "somebody in St. Paul wants you to work on a radio show for $300." Atkins was not thrilled, but then his daughter mentioned Keillor's show, and so did another musician. "I decided to tune in," he says. "That man's voice just mesmerizes people. I called my agent...