Word: keillor
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...Keillor was leaving not just home, but us. He had made the announcement on the Valentine's Day show, a few months ago, that APHC would shut down after 13 years on the air. He said he would quit, and on June 13, in the World Theater in downtown St. Paul, he did, after wandering without notes or road map through one more gentle monologue about Lake Wobegon, where the week, as usual, had been quiet, though rainy; after singing every goodbye song he could think of, after taking out a pocket handkerchief and wiping a tear, or perhaps only...
...quit, of course. It was time; some of us had begun to miss broadcasts now and then, though always with a good reason and a note from our mothers ("Jack was in a holding pattern above Logan Airport; please excuse his absence"). Still, it felt funny to know that Keillor was quitting cold, that he was going to live in an apartment in Copenhagen with his Danish wife Ulla. It was as if a tall, shock-haired boy we had all thought especially promising were heading off to the big city with a private smile on his face, leaving...
...Keillor, who is 44, looked owlish a couple of hours before the last performance. In his dressing room he slapped shaving cream on his jaw and said without bitterness, but also without any trace of regret, that he and Ulla were selling their house in St. Paul and did not expect to live in the Midwest again. This was a realization, he said, "that came to me with stunning finality." There was no unfinished business here; renovation of the World Theater had been completed. A brave man named Noah Adams, lately of the public-radio news show All Things Considered...
...wanted to write magazine articles, he said, fact pieces, probably for The New Yorker, which has published his work over the past two decades. Fact pieces about what? "Well," said Keillor, "I could get away with one Innocent Abroad piece, but only one." Really? Not a series of Letters from Denmark extending into the next century...
Apparently not. At least in part, Keillor seems to regard Copenhagen as an excellent observatory from which to view the U.S., and in particular one elusive hamlet in the north-central region. A new collection of Lake Wobegon writings, called Leaving Home, will be published in the fall. Until then, the faithful in the U.S. will have to make do with APHC reruns on public radio and videotapes of the show made since March by the Disney Channel. Beyond that, will there be new dispatches from the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Cafe? "I need to let some air into...