DECEMBER 1, 2019 – Yesterday evening while my poor wife coughed at home, I ventured to Pantages Theater in Minneapolis for Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Christmas. It was a brilliant show: Rich Dworsky at the piano, with the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band; Tim Russell and Sue Scott as “the voices”; Fred Newman at sound effects; and Heather Massie as vocalist. All were in rare form.
With mike in one hand and his audience in the palm of the other, Garrison owned the stage as he had for over four decades before his retirement in July, 2016. I marveled at his voice, his humor, his energy, his brilliance. If he is the Mark Twain of our time, Garrison is so much more.
The tall teller of tales started off with a Norwegian carol, then made us laugh over his worst Christmas ever (a greasy goose skidding across the kitchen floor), his best Christmas ever (just he and Jenny, with Maia four days away), and his second best Christmas ever (his father’s recovery from a fall off the barn roof).
The sellout crowd (in the event, diminished somewhat by the inclement weather) was then treated to over two and a half hours of music, including Garrison and Heather in a medley of Christmas carols with hilariously altered lyrics, the Shoe Band’s brilliance, and, of course, multiple skits, including a Guy Noir routine in which Tim Russell nailed impressions of Trump and Giuliani.
Best of all was Garrison’s monologue about Christmas in Lake Wobegon—yet another classic to add to his vast collection.
With the crowd, I laughed, hooted, and hollered. During the show, I put aside the angst and agony that has visited me every single day since November 29, 2017. That’s the day when Garrison’s long-time partner, Minnesota Public Radio, announced it was “severing all ties with him”—a misconstruction, since he’d retired long before that.
As a member of the team that tried to help him navigate through the smoke generated by MPR’s abrupt reaction, I was at ground zero in the months that followed. For all of us involved, especially the handful who could connect all the relevant dots, the train wreck was a lesson in how easy it is to derail a locomotive unjustly.
Yet, in one of the supreme ironies of our age, a handcar labeled “Make American Great Again” under splotches of hurled rotten tomatoes rolls blithely by the scene of the wreck. Inexplicably, whereas a $5 gold piece placed on a rail put the mighty locomotive into the ditch, the handcar manages to push aside all barriers the resistance can erect.
This coming week a group of us will meet to begin the job of securing a permanent repository for the work of a titan—and of all the people who helped produce it, week after week for over 40 years. MPR won’t be present. Its reward—estimated in excess of $300 million plus its very existence—was transferred to a train marked “Amnesia,” whistling down another track.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
