Leaving Lake Wobegon Garrison

By John Skow

He had left home long before, choking on prudence and rectitude, clawing at his collar for air. Exile was the bittersweet point of those fond and misty monologues about Lake Wobegon, the tiny, imaginary Minnesota town "that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve." The wry truth was that Garrison Keillor, celebrated shy person, uncorkable parlor baritone, world's tallest radio humorist, could abide the rural Midwest only in memory. Much of his audience had made the same journey, or nearly, and we loved to be persuaded, as we listened on public radio each Saturday to the extraordinary two-hour variety show called A Prairie Home Companion, that we had the same rueful recollections, maybe even the same peculiar second cousins.

Now 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 a drop of perspiration, from the sweet, lined face of Guitarist Chet Atkins, and after running a lordly half hour beyond the close of his time slot.

He was right to quit, of course. It was time; some of us had begun to miss broadcasts now and then, though always with a good reason and a note from our mothers ("Jack was in a holding pattern above Logan Airport; please excuse his absence"). Still, it felt funny to know that Keillor was quitting cold, that he was going to live in an apartment in Copenhagen with his Danish wife Ulla. It was as if a tall, shock-haired boy we had all thought especially promising were heading off to the big city with a private smile on his face, leaving us rubes behind.

Keillor, who is 44, looked owlish a couple of hours before the last performance. In his dressing room he slapped shaving cream on his jaw and said without bitterness, but also 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 in the fall, and national broadcasts will start in January. But that was Adams' problem; Keillor had no advice to give. He was drawn to the Eastern part of the U.S., he said. In the meantime Denmark, where he was "just another bozo on the bus," would be his home.

He wanted to write magazine articles, he said, fact pieces, probably for The New Yorker, which has published his work over the past two decades. Fact pieces about what? "Well," said Keillor, "I could get away with one Innocent Abroad piece, but only one." Really? Not a series of Letters from Denmark extending into the next century?

Apparently not. At least in part, Keillor seems to regard Copenhagen as an excellent observatory from which to view the U.S., and in particular one elusive hamlet in the north-central region. A new collection of Lake Wobegon writings, called Leaving Home, will be published in the fall. Until then, the faithful in the U.S. will have to make do with APHC reruns on public radio and videotapes of the show made since March by the Disney Channel. Beyond that, will there be new dispatches from the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Cafe? "I need to let some air into Lake Wobegon," said Keillor. "That's one of the reasons for leaving the show." But, he says,"I owe a movie script to Sydney Pollack." The story will be set in Lake Wobegon, some decades in the past. Keillor knows the shape of the story he will do for Pollack, who directed Tootsie and Out of Africa: "There will be a wedding, and a funeral; that's clear to me."

Keillor is one of the sharpest and funniest extempore wits in show business, but in conversation he has a disconcerting knack of sounding like a Minnesota-born Henry Kissinger discussing the dangers of excessive arms control. Asked whether he might play a part in the Wobegon film, he went into his Kissinger mode and said, "That has not been discussed." O.K., did he expect to do any sort of performing? Here he brightened, for he likes the risk of live performance. "You have to perform now and then, to keep stage fright under control." He waves away the idea of a talk show as "death by interview." What does interest him is the kind of television variety show Sid Caesar, Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle used to do. He is not really comfortable with TV; there is an army of people to deal with, and someone like himself, who communicates in silences, isn't good at that. Still . . .

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.

Then the red ON THE AIR sign winks on, and Pianist Rich Dworsky whacks out a couple of yards of barrelhouse. Keillor swings into his theme song, the old Hank Snow tune Hello Love: "Well, look who's comin' through that door/ I think we've met somewhere before . . ."

A couple of hours later, give or take about six encores, it's all over. Scottish Singer Jean Redpath has sung in her lovely, clear voice, the Hawaiians have aloha'd, Guitarists Atkins and Leo Kottke have laid down some elegant tunes, Buster has woofed one last time before going on unemployment, the Norwegian bachelor farmers have made their final appearance at the Chatterbox Cafe, and Keillor has carried on shamelessly. "I'm going away, for to stay a little while," he has sung, "but I'm coming back, if I go ten thousand miles." Does he mean it? The ON THE AIR sign turns dark, and Keillor bows himself offstage. Goodbye, love.