Word: keillors
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...town that time forgot and that decades cannot improve," Lake Wobegon was founded only seven years ago by Garrison Keillor, a Minnesota writer and disc jockey. When he was a boy, Keillor, 39, loved the Grand Ole Opry. Now he frets that the Opry has become too much like a big industry and he believes that, despite TV, there is still an audience for a radio variety show, which is what the Opry and dozens of other shows of the '30s and '40s used to be. The producers of Minnesota Public Radio agreed. A Prairie Home Companion...
...first, things moved rather slowly, as might be expected in a place where winters are so tough that graves have to be dug with dynamite. When Keillor and his guest musicians-a guitar duo, a jazz piano player and a male singer-first walked out onto the stage in St. Paul's Ja net Wallace Concert Hall, there was an audience of 15 and exactly 385 empty seats. But the program's brand of whimsy gradually attracted listeners...
...befits a variety show, A Prairie Home Companion has a little bit of everything, or everything that interests Keillor. There is a lot of music: bluegrass, folk, opera, jazz, blues, and visitors like Bill Staines, a yodeler, or Dr. Tom Weaver, who taps out the William Tell overture on his teeth. There are also letters from listeners and mock commercials. (The main "sponsor," Powdermilk Biscuits, promises to give shy people "the power to get up and do what needs to be done.") But the backbone of the program is Keillor's gravelly narration of the goings-on in Lake...
Over the years, the shy, slow-speaking Keillor, who has written all the scripts, has peopled Lake Wobegon with enough walk-on eccentrics to fill an English garden party. Father Emil, the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, for instance, who has not paid much attention to Vatican II, figuring there is only one Vatican and that is enough for him. And Jack, who runs Jack's Head Stop Center, which teaches intellectuals things like bowling. There is also the fellow who runs the Fearmonger Shop, which caters to paranoids of all persuasions. The shop offers...
...Germaine Greer-if only with a ten-foot pole." In the first column, Lawyer Peter Friedman tells how his circle benefits from the presence of insect parts in food: "Instead of complaining, we're collecting the fragments and painstakingly assembling them into whole insects." New Yorker Writer Garrison Keillor parodies speed-reading courses and concludes: "You are now able to read at the amazing rate of 8,000 words per minute, which means that you should have finished reading this already." Which would be a blessed gift for those who have to read a lot of Associated Press prose...