Audience, Garrison Keillor.
How Great Thou Art ( Garrison Keillor , Audience ) America ( Garrison Keillor , Audience ) I Saw Her Standing There ( Garrison Keillor , Audience )
[undocumented]
Having a splendid time on my February swing of solo stand-up across the South, looking forward to some Midwest in March, Northeast in April and May, and the big Tanglewood PHC in June. It’s an ideal workday for an octogen, 90 minutes around 7 or 8 p.m. and the rest of the time I try to keep in touch with friends and relations and do my laundry and tinker with my novel.
Other stand-ups are scrapping to get on late-night TV, have a Netflix special, write a bestseller, play big theaters, and I am very content in the small-time. I had a terrific time with 600 people in Wilmington, NC, the other night. The old man walked around the stage, sang, recited, poked around in memory, and got them to sing some songs they’d forgotten that they know, which actually thrilled them. Six hundred people thought they were coming to see comedy and they got some of that and then, to their amazement, they were standing and singing “America” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “How Great Thou Art,” and they were stunned by how beautiful they sounded. It’s stunning. People spend so much time alone, plugged into electronics, and here they are with an intense sensation of humanity. They don’t applaud for themselves, they simply are very moved.
This is the beauty of old age. Your ambition has faded away. You’re not going to set off fireworks. The world has gone off in other directions. AI is coming on fast and soon you’ll record yourself saying all the vowels and consonants, prepositions, conjunctions, and the computer will program Moby-Dick read in your voice — add a few other vowels and you’ll have Proust in French spoken by you, voilà! — but right now it’s still possible for an old man and a few hundred strangers to create an intimate evening together that’s not like anything else.
Meanwhile I worry about the kids. I stay in motels where everything, the plastic silverware, the plastic cups, are wrapped in plastic and we seem to be racing heedlessly toward the degradation of the planet when our descendants will curse us for our narcissism. I’m lucky, I got to see the last strains of the 19th century when I stayed at Uncle Jim’s farm and Grandma made my breakfast on a woodstove and I went haying with Uncle Jim and held the reins of the two horses, I got to see the outhouse, the kerosene lamp, my uncle milking cows by hand, I saw history, also the poverty that my father managed to escape. I grew up in the Sanctified Brethren with their two-hour-long Bible Study meetings, Brethren who’ve now gone the way of the Aztecs, delving into Ecclesiastes.
I love my laptop computer, can’t imagine doing without it, but I also cherish the memory of the Underwood manual that I wrote stories on that got published in the Anoka Herald in the mid-Fifties, set in hot lead on a Linotype and printed on a flatbed press inked with rollers.
Having seen so much history gives a person a deep love of his country and people. So I want to keep on working, doing my outmoded show, speaking in my odd American voice.