Avalon Foundation president Al Bond took the stage Sunday evening to greet a full house gathered to hear the latest “News From Lake Wobegon” as reported by storyteller extraordinaire Garrison Keillor, former host and creative eminence of public radio’s “Prairie Home Companion.”
But first he thanked the audience for wearing masks and for helping kick-off the Avalon’s centennial year and the hopeful end of a dark period of abstinence from live in-person entertainment due to pandemic precautions. Opened in 1922 as a movie palace billed as “The Showplace of the Eastern Shore,” the Avalon is the kind of theater, Bond said, that he imagined as a perfect setting for the live radio variety show broadcast every Saturday night for decades.
Following a warm greeting as he moseyed onto the stage, Keillor picked up on the theme by extolling the acoustics of venerable small-town theaters before he’d heard a note sung in this one. He then recruited the audience as his guest-star choir for the evening, launching into a patriotic medley of “America (My Country Tis of Thee”) and “God Bless America.” (Our voices were mask-muffled, but you could tell that most everyone knew the lyrics – not so for some of the hymnal singalongs to come.)
It was just the start of Keillor’s two-and-a-quarter hour reminiscence – sometimes reverent, sometimes risque bordering on ribald, but always entertaining with his cleverly devious wordplay and the poetic license of a reformed clergyman celebrating his freedom from scriptural doctrine and societal conventions.
For a man of 79 going on 80 in August, Keillor showed remarkable stamina, performing without intermission, though he allowed one for his audience as we stood for a Christian singalong so those who desired a bar or bathroom break – “or to call a babysitter” – could exit more freely. Acknowledging the relative seniority of his audience, he quickly amended his “babysitter” remark to hint that even some of our grandchildren no longer require a sitter.
If there was one recurring theme to his rambling but astute observations, it was the freedom that advanced age confers on those well enough to enjoy it. Chief among professionals he was grateful for, he said, was his cardiologist and “the teenager who assisted him on an iPad.” The “teen,” he acknowledged, claimed to be 33. But Keillor would have none of it.
His other theme was the easily targeted absurdity of our times, taking a shot at the Washington Football Team formerly known as “Potato Skins.” (That’s one I anticipated years ago, having written that the Redskins could have averted the name change by simply switching their mascot to a ’tater.) He also observed that Easton was lucky to bear a name that not only indicates geographic location but avoids the controversy of a moniker, say, of a Confederate soldier or a statue of one. (I wasn’t alone in thinking he missed a ripe joke about the Talbot Boys.)
But Keillor was at his hilarious best in describing feelings of inferiority while growing up in a stultifying Minnesota Lutheran culture that “regarded peas in tuna casserole as too show-offy.” He recalls wearing hand-me-down clothes from older siblings, including a sister. The mental picture he painted of standing before a urinal trough in the boys’ lavatory at school, wearing his sister’s used side-zipper pants, was impossible to erase from your mind’s eye – at least until he topped that one with another side-splitter, so to speak.
The actual “News From Lake Wobegon” was limited, since he lives in New York now, to a seemingly endless stream of visits back home for funerals, many for people he disliked. Each story – I counted six, unless the one about Siamese twins, which he admitted is a verboten term these days, makes it seven – outscored the previous one in comic implausibility. The finale brought to mind a patriotic message, which brought the evening full circle to a stand-up singalong. I won’t spoil the ending by revealing the song, except to say everyone knew its lyrics.
Following a sustained standing ovation, Keillor returned for one curtain call before the house lights went up. When was the last time you saw that on radio?
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