Am I wrong to say that Garrison Keillor is the best American storyteller since Mark Twain? A better orator to come out of the 20th Century than JFK, Ronald Reagan, or even beloved Bill Clinton? The spirit of Will Rogers delivered in the long winded narrative style of Shakespeare?
It was the kind of radio variety show that died out 50 years ago, only nobody sent these people the memo.
A Prairie Home Companion is more beloved than The Grand Ol Oprey. Part comedy, part music, part drama, even radio noir, Saturday nights have a
salt of the earth quality you won't find anywhere else on the dial, or the big or small screen.
In a city that knows how to keep its secrets, one man turns his back on the latest blog movement of I-Disclose. Instead of having to guess which are pay per post advertisements and which are just search engine food, we're treated with fake ads for companies and products that haven't existed since the 1930s. Powder milk biscuits - if your family's tried 'em, you know it satisfied 'em, and beebop a roo bop, it's rhubarb pie. With a fiddle and mandolin, and then the cowboys, the people time left behind talking about a bygone era when the Mississippi was a great frontier. The music has a devotional quality, pointing backward to when life was short and hard, when settlers of the prairie went to meet their families in Paradise.
It saddens me to realize that GK is approaching 70, that soon his brand of Americana will fade into the history books and be gone forever. And it opens my eyes to hear the stories from the past, to realize that globalization is nothing new and the story of the melting pot is really the story of the world
Quote:
In Moorhead, Minn., you'll find a fine replica of an 11th century Norwegian stave church, which looks a little odd there with few trees and no mountains. And that's how the Norwegian emigrants felt who wound up on the prairie. The sky was too big and they had to learn to walk on level ground. But life was hard in Norway. The Black Plague had killed off half the country in the 14th century and made it defenseless, and so Norway fell under the woolen fist of Danish oppression until Denmark chose the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars and was forced by Britain to give Norway to Sweden, and between the Danes and the Swedes they managed to give Norway a national inferiority complex that lasted even beyond national independence in 1905. In these little villages along the fjords, people wearied of vertical agriculture and began emigrating to the Midwest back when it was a primitive frontier.
A Norwegian hates to admit a mistake, however, so the emigrants wrote glowing letters back to Norway, which lured even more Norwegians to the Midwest.
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And that's the news from Lake Wobegon
where all the women are strong,
the men are good looking,
and the children are above average.
never the less I enjoyed reading your piece 
