Word: keillor
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This is parlor harmonizing, nothing more, but Keillor's pleasant, summer-weight baritone carries well. It bounces off a satellite into the electronic ears of more than 260 U.S. public radio stations--plus, antipodally enough, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation--and householders across the land shush one another the way people did decades ago when Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, or Fibber McGee and Molly came on the air. The theater audience settles back...
What follows, listeners know, will be two hours of Keillor and his friends, which is to say of honky-tonk piano, jazz, mournful old Protestant hymns and country music, much of it from some fairly strange countries. This flow of funk is interrupted by loopy commercials for the Deep Valley Bed, the kind with the old-time mattress that sags in the middle, making prolonged marital discord impossible; Bertha's Kitty Boutique, where doting and guilt-ridden cat owners can find, among other cossets, a special cat ice cream called Gatto Gelato to cool kitty's tongue on hot days...
...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...
...Keillor always starts out his radio monologue by apologizing: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He always ends on a diminuendo, with the formula "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the 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...
...with their antiquated, clattering six-foot combines. The Norwegian bachelors were not impressed by modern 20-footers. Sure, you got done faster, but that just meant waiting longer till it was time to go to bed. This is a good laugh line, as close to a knee slapper as Keillor lets himself get in the monologues. But like his uncle Lew, he tells stories, not jokes, and he goes on to say that "the clatter brings back memories of old days of glory in the field when I was a boy among giants. My uncle lifted...