Word: small-town
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...socks and galluses, and black sneakers with white stripes. When he is feeling rueful and self-mocking, which is fairly often because he is a shy man, he calls himself "America's tallest radio humorist." This, the listener is meant to understand, is the kind of hick distinction that small-town Midwesterners cherish, and Keillor is splendidly and defiantly a small-town Minnesot'n. (The a missing here, Easterners and Westerners, is not pronounced, and neither, of course, is the apostrophe...
This time the family whose strangely assorted Linen hangs out to dry is an odd lot of small-town Virginians. Their matriarch, now dying peacefully, may have helped herself to widowhood with an ax some years ago and then dropped her defunct husband down a well. That possibility thrusts itself on her daughter Sybill, a middle-aged spinster who sees a hypnotist to have her subconscious unclogged. Her mother inconveniently expires before Sybill can begin an inquiry. To her siblings, that is just as well. They, and the cousins and in-laws who gather for the funeral, regard talk...
ENGAGED. Garrison Keillor, 43, beguiling, bittersweet chronicler of U.S. small-town life on radio (A Prairie Home Companion) and in books (Happy to Be Here, Lake Wobegon Days) and Ulla Skaerved, a former exchange student at Keillor's Minnesota high school, who met him again when she returned in August for a 25th class reunion. The marriage, scheduled for Dec. 29 in Copenhagen, will be the second for both. Keillor had dedicated Lake Wobegon Days to Margaret Moos, his radio producer, with whom he shared a house in St. Paul; she has taken a leave from the show...
...longtime subscribers, however, have complained that the new look amounts to free promotion for USA Today. So far, about 130 of those clients have switched to Parade, boosting the nation's biggest Sunday supplement to 268 papers (circ. 30 million). Gannett officials claim that most of the defectors were small-town publications that will be replaced by fewer but larger city newspapers. "We will end up with pretty much the same circulation but with a better mix of markets," says Ray Gaulke, president of USA Weekend...
...programs of modern times has transformed this onetime Portuguese enclave from a backwater of crumbling villas, sleeping dogs and avuncular priests into a shiny pleasure zone that is the envy of southern China. From across the Pearl River estuary, Hong Kong's worldly denizens once snickered pityingly at their small-town, Macanese cousins. Now the latter are having the last laugh, unveiling bombastic showpiece after showpiece-from dazzling casinos and resorts to a new sports arena and (in the works) a lavish theme park complete with erupting volcano. They're also relishing a booming local economy, fueled by Macau...