Word: theater
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fossil Energy to 591 people but was stymied because Congress had decreed the office could not be shrunk below 754. "The efforts by Congress to micromanage the Executive business are most unfortunate," says Porter, who now teaches a course on the presidency at Harvard. It makes for good theater in the electronic age but, in Porter's view, the natural power of the presidency is being squandered and the future of the U.S. held hostage by endless argument...
...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...
...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, sat in an office at Minnesota Public Radio most days, brooding about how to start his own musical variety show in the APHC time slot. Local tryouts will begin...
Ninety minutes to show time: backstage at the World Theater, the 6-ft. 4-in. Keillor is now chest-deep in an army of young Hawaiians, the 49 members of the Kamehameha School glee club. Singer Kate MacKenzie, a.k.a. Sheila, the Christian Jungle Girl, rushes up to check a cue. Sound men and stagehands circulate. Buster the Show Dog signs autographs, in the person of Actor Tom Keith, who also does the voices of Father Finian and Timmy, the Sad Rich Boy, motor and siren noises and dandy skyrocket effects...
Half an hour before the beginning of the show named after Prairie Home, a cemetery in Moorhead, Minn., the theater doors open, and fans who have been waiting all afternoon in 99-degree heat file in, wearing T shirts advertising Powdermilk Biscuits and Bertha's Kitty Boutique. At the 15-minute mark Keillor wanders onstage, looking solemn, and tells everyone he does not believe in unsentimental farewells. He wants howling and lamentation, he says; he wants people to throw themselves on the floor and wrap their arms around his ankles. Yessir...