Word: keillor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HAPPY TO BE HERE by Garrison Keillor...
...Garrison Keillor is the somewhat moonstruck and lately much celebrated rustic whimsyfier whose monologues from Lake Woebegon, Minn., embellish Public Radio's Saturday evening country-music broadcasts. The first response of an uninitiated listener is likely to be, "That fellow is being funny," and the second, uttered with reproach, "No, that fellow is being serious...
What gives Keillor's comic voice its amiable singularity in this excellent first collection of sketches and stories is a quality hard to describe without making him seem fatuous and the describer sound balmy. He is in love with the upper Midwest, with the region and the people that Sinclair Lewis derided. He is rooted, fond of hickishness, fascinated by the utter, daft strangeness of the ordinary. At 39, he lives in St. Paul, not far from where he grew up, and although he has taken note of East Coast sophistication to the extent of sending most of these...
...Keillor's jokes are rural; he raises an eyebrow ever so slightly at the Midwesternizing of the counterculture in his parody of a shopping-guide ad for "St. Paul's Episcopal Drop-In Hair Center (in the rectory basement)" where the Rev. Ray and the Rev. Don, trained barbers, "offer warm, supportive pre-and post-trim counseling . . . and if you just want to come in and talk about haircuts, well, that's cool too." Another ad, inserted by a people's used-furniture collective, condemns alienating queen-size beds, recommending instead "our Warm Valley Bed . .. narrow...
Such goings-on could not be contained in Minnesota, and in May 1980, Keillor's two-hour Prairie Home Companion, aired live from an auditorium with 1,000 seats, became an almost instantaneous hit on National Public Radio. Now heard in most parts of the country on Saturday night, it has acquired a devoted band of a million or so fans. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun is one. Says he, urging a dose of Home Companion for the power brokers: "Washington, I suspect, could use a good bit of Lake Wobegon." Like Brigadoon or Camelot-Lake Wobegon has become...