Word: wobegon
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...folk song. The stammering voice of Melville's Billy Budd protesting his innocence. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's rousing rendition of Beethoven's Fifth. And the husky, down-home inflections of Garrison Keillor inviting one and all to drop in on the imaginary hamlet of Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and that decades cannot improve...
...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...
...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 Wobegon...
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...
...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 a symbolic landmark, existing only on the map of the imagination. "Not everything that is real is on paper," says Keillor. "And if everything that is on paper were real, this would be a sorry world to live...