Word: wobegone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When is he going to write a book about it?" The question has been asked for years in taprooms, diners and shopping malls all over the country. The reason: weekly doses of wry musings about mythical Lake Wobegon, Minn., on the public-radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion are not enough for many of the program's 2 million fans. They have been yearning for something more substantial...
...from an ideal of Norman Rockwell hominess, Lake Wobegon reverberates with terror and finalities. Lonely Norwegians with whisky bottles lie down on their family graves in Our Prairie Home Cemetery to talk to the dead about the old country. Keillor's folk confront mainstream America with beer and trembling. They are still wagging their heads and clucking their tongues over Father Emil's summer replacement. Golfing Father Frank proclaims of his martini at a backyard party, "Dry. Mmmmm. What did you do? Just think about vermouth, for Christ's sake...
Dour, deliberate and repressed residents, both Lutheran and Roman Catholic, suffer dangerous guilt complexes. Just as the middle Olson boy reaches out to examine the medallion between the breasts of a sultry waitress from Mom and Dad's Cafe, Lake Wobegon's four-story grain elevator explodes, showering the town with chunks of timber...
...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...
...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...