Butch Thompson Trio, Michael Cooney, Sharon Isbin, Tom Lieberman, Peter Ostroushko, Jean Redpath. Robin and Linda Williams,
Astudious ( Sharon Isbin ) Brazilian Classical Piece for Solo Guitar ( Sharon Isbin ) Never No More (Robin and Linda Williams ) Things Ain't Right (Robin and Linda Williams ) Wood and Married and All ( Jean Redpath ) Highland Laddie ( Jean Redpath ) I'm Shy Mary Ellen I'm Shy ( Michael Cooney ) Railroad Bill ( Michael Cooney ) Robert Burns Adaptation ( Jean Redpath ) Memories of the Alhambra Castle ( Sharon Isbin )
Ajua! Hot Sauce (After 16 years in public radio, you develop too much dignity.) Bob's Bank Powdermilk Biscuits (Story of the corner where the shy people go. Disaster can happen but very few people die of embarrassment. )
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Well, sir, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Trees are bare getting on towards winter up there, all the storm windows are on. People getting ready for it. Bud, the village maintenance man put the snow plow on the front of the truck here this last week and put the hydraulic fluid in it, and ran it up and down a few times make sure it was working, and drove it up and down Main Street a few times, try it out and make sure everything worked. All right. Unfortunately, he forgot to put the sand in the back of the truck that serves as a ballast, so it was a little front heavy, and it tipped going down Main Street. Corner of the blade caught the asphalt and put a furrow in it for about 30 feet.
I was just a few hours after he had gone up to the school to replace a tank on a toilet there in the boys laboratory in the school, and forgot to turn off the main valve down in the basement. He took the tank off and got it almost off, and he struck water. And in the excitement, he sort of forgot where the main valve was. It was an exciting moment up at school, kind of a contest too, between him and Mayor Clint Bunsen to see whether he was going to be fired or whether he was going to quit. But they've kept him on because he's been the maintenance man there in the village for about 30 years. He's done an awful lot of carpentry and plumbing and wiring, and he's done it all according to his own system, and has never kept a record of what he did.
So he's the only one who'd ever stand a chance of going in and fixing anything. It's a style of plumbing and wiring and carpentry that you don't learn in school, sometimes bud doesn't understand it himself. The last parade of this year was held last Saturday. It was the Halloween parade. Reported on the show last week that the Olsen girl was elected the Halloween queen, and she got to ride in the parade on the float, which is a big hay wagon with a castle on it, which is made out of straw bales and chicken wire and toilet paper, which is woven around in there, and it looks rather nice, depending on whether it's sunny or cloudy, all the kids marched in the parade, which is the main reason for it to let them be seen in good light, wearing their costumes that they all worked so hard on last year when the Halloween parade took Place, the float came down from the high school, and the tractor took the corner a little bit too hard, coming onto Main Street, and the Queen kind of slid off along those straw bales there at the corner. She sat there for a while.
So the attendance at the parade this year was quite a bit more than it was last year, especially there at the corner, but Bonnie made it around all right. There was a dance to follow up at the high school and down at the Alhambra Theater, there were two showings, both of them, packed full of people of the hand under the bed, starring Monica Montaigne and everybody turned out to see it. She is from Lake Wobegon.
Monica Montaigne. Her name there was Brenda inkvest. She is Pastor, pastor and Mrs. Ink, this oldest daughter, everyone came out to see it, sort of as a favor to the ink fist family, because if the truth be told, she does not really star in it. She has only but a very brief part in a scene in which the uncouple had stopped at a motel out in the deserted part of the countryside, and it's midnight, and Monica Montaigne, or Brenda inkevist, is the clerk, the desk clerk, and the couple come in and they ask for a room, and she says, we don't have Any. And they say, but we have to stop. And she says, Well, I could give you cabin 12, but we have not used that cabin for years because 13 years ago, on this very night, and the guy says, We'll take it. That's the extent of her scene. I. But at that point, Wally ran the movie back and showed it four or five more times. Everybody clapped. Every time said how wonderful it was. Boy, she's good. Look at her up there on that screen. That's Brenda. Brenda out there. Boy, is she good actress.
You never know what was Brenda unless you knew her. That's how good she acts. Of course, if you didn't know Brenda, you wouldn't care in the first place. But there she was, and she's a local girl made good become some kind of movie celebrity and everybody felt good for the incubists, pastor and Mrs. Who have been worried about her for so many years. She was the oldest child and given them a lot of a lot of worries, left Lake Wobegon soon as she got out of high school. That was about 15 years ago, and she went out to Sonoma, California, where she joined a commune that was making belts out of feathers.
While there, she changed her name to starflower, Moon bright, and she hooked up with some young man who had hair all over his face, and they put out an album of his songs, which were mostly humming. Actually, the album was called breathing songs. And then she was in some sort of theater group out there that did not put on plays, but which stood on stage and sort of confronted the audience with their hypocrisies.
And then she was in Nepal for a while, and then they didn't hear from her for a few years, and she showed up in an advertisement in a big slick magazine, an advertisement for $100 blue jeans, and she was a model, and she was wearing a pair. And her name was not starflower, Moon bright anymore. It was Monica Montaigne. She went out to the coast, and she had a brief part in a pop up popcorn commercial. And to look fast to see her, though, because she was wearing a popcorn costume. She was dressed up as a colonel of corn, and she popped rather fast. And here she was up on the screen. Several children have left Lake Wobegon and done well for themselves and become sort of celebrities. Every so often, you see their picture here and there, and you know it's true of almost all of them.
None of them were among the sweetest kids, nor the brightest, they were always kind of difficult, and people wish them well in Lake Wobegon, so long as they stay away and don't come back and make a nuisance of themselves. That's how they feel about celebrities up there. She was going to come back for this movie of the hand under the bed, and they went to a great deal of trouble for her. Wally got up on a step ladder, and he replaced the little tiny electric bulbs up in the ceiling of the Alhambra Theater that represents stars twinkling up in the ceiling. And he replaced the motor that makes the big cotton clouds go around on an oval track up there in the ceiling.
And he had the shop class make a banner welcome Monica and a key to this to the town which nobody had before. And then at the last minute, she canceled out, or rather, her agent did said that she couldn't come. Well, people were just as happy, I'll tell you, because they've always had a feeling about Monica or Brenda, that she had sort of constructed a world around herself in which she was terribly important, you see, and if she had come to town, they would have either had to be in her play, in her little drama in which She was the heroine, or else offend the ink vests, so they were glad she stayed away. And it wasn't much of a movie. I'll tell you, you could see people as that movie dragged on.
People were dying like flies up on the screen, one after the other, kind of waiting to see if Mon. Would show up again, she didn't. As the movie dragged on, you could see people look up at the ceiling, admiring those little lights up there that Wally had done such a terrific job on and the way those clouds moved around up, there wasn't much on the screen, but there was a lot of entertainment up in the ceiling.
That was last Saturday. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are Good looking, and all the Children are above average.
Garrison shares a hilarious story about when he was a disk jockey on a college campus FM radio station, Neither he nor any of his friends lived on campus and thus never heard the broadcast. As it turns out, there was a transmission issue and he had been talking to no one for months!
1981.11.06 Charlotte Observer / 1981.10.23 Minneapolis Star / 1981.11.07 Missoulian / Audio of the News available as a digital download.
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl