Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Prudence Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, Beth Obermeyer, Peter Ostroushko. Thompson Brothers Ragtime Orchestra,
It's Coming ( Peter Ostroushko ) The waltz you saved for me ( Peter Ostroushko ) Bye bye Blackbird ( Prudence Johnson ) In My Room ( Kate MacKenzie ) Tennessee waltz ( Kate MacKenzie ) Moon River ( Kate MacKenzie ) Nothing to do but waltz ( Kate MacKenzie ) Auld lang syne ( Prudence Johnson , Garrison Keillor ) All Aboard ( Greg Brown , Kate MacKenzie ) Never shine sun ( Greg Brown , Kate MacKenzie ) Spanish Harlem ( Greg Brown , Kate MacKenzie ) Time has made a change in me ( Greg Brown , Kate MacKenzie ) Pennsylvania polka (Thompson Brothers Ragtime Orchestra ) Lichtensteiner polka (Thompson Brothers Ragtime Orchestra )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Hangover Medicinal Syrup Home Defense Hardware (Diet Squad) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Wide Awake Footwear Mood Shoes
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. Christmas was on Sunday, as you probably were aware. It's a hard one to miss, isn't it? Even in Lake Wobegon, among my people, who are pretty quiet people, with their tremendous restraint and self-discipline in the face of imminent pleasure. People who are quiet, there's no doubt about it, they're lovely people. But they do tend to sit and look at happiness, you know, and not betray, give away too much. People who sit and carefully unwrap their presents, peeling off the little pieces of cellophane tape so as not to mar the paper and folding it and saving it, putting it away along with last year's and the year before. People who by custom put out a truckload of food on Christmas Eve and then put it all out again on Christmas Day because they're all too polite to take seconds. And there are still refrigerators up there that are two-thirds full. Cookies overflowing on the cupboards. Care for some? No thanks. It's all right. People who put on records of joyous Christmas songs with brass choirs and big choruses and play them at very low volume. People who, if you didn't know them, you might think that their dog had just died.
But if you look closely at them and if you know what quiet people they are, you can tell. They're tapping their feet a little bit or one of them rocking back and forth in a chair. And we do hum a lot. So that way you know that we are having a good time. I used to think I was different, of course. I wanted to think I was different. More extravagant and outgoing. Kind of a free spirit there among the Lutherans, you know. But in the years since I left there, all the times, hundreds of times, that I have felt so happy. I almost, it's like Mr. Berge said once, he said, I was so happy I was having such a good time I could barely keep from laughing. All the times I felt so happy I could hardly keep it in. And somebody come up and say, what's the matter? Something wrong? Can I help? You want to talk about it? Then I realize I'm from Lake Wobegon.
One of them quiet people. That's why we have musicians on this show. So you will know it is meant as entertainment. Because growing up in Lake Wobegon does not prepare a person for a career in the show business. And so that's why I didn't go into it. See, they believe, they're a little superstitious. I think they believe that to get up in front of people and carry on, you know, to sing and dance, wave your arms and tell jokes or whatever you do, you're asking for it. You're sticking your neck out. You're tempting fate. That there be a sandbag way up there in the fly gallery, slowly unraveling. a counterweight with your name on it. A little superstitious about expressing happiness in general so that if one were to say, even in a room with the doors and windows closed in front of people whom you knew very well, if one were to say, I'm happy, you'd be sticking your neck out.
So that's why I didn't say it. You notice I said, if one word to say, I'm happy. Right then is when everything would start to come apart for good. Right then is when the roof would fall. And you'd become one of those people that other people read about in newspapers. And there it would be down in about the third or fourth paragraph. Witnesses told police that prior to the roof's collapse, the victim was heard to say, I'm happy. He was killed instantly. even though he was under the bed at the time. Asking for it. It reminds me of a boy I knew when I was growing up. He was about my age. His name was Larry. And he was saved nine times, I think. Every year and twice, some years, we'd go to revival meetings. And about two-thirds of the way through the preaching, we'd hear him sat a couple rows back with his parents. We'd hear dry, racking sobs.
And then at the end, at the altar call, he'd come forward and he'd be saved again. Which people were glad for him about the first two or three times. But after that, it was hard to know what to think. Wow. I think he just had a hard time believing that God loved him. He thought he had to keep asking on an annual basis. Which seems strange, I know, but there are people. It's like not believing in the force of gravity. And some people don't. They believe that they stay on the ground by virtue of the fact that they take very small steps.
They keep their backs bent, their knees flexed, and they stay close to trees and posts. so as to have something to grab onto in case they should start to float. I was growing up there when I was a lot more romantic than I am now. I used to imagine that those quiet people were all secret writers and that they didn't seem to be having much fun because they were busy observing and taking notes and remembering. And that someday we would look in their dresser drawer underneath their underwear and we would find thousands of poems just as Emily Dickinson's family did. Thousands of poems from quiet people written in tiny handwriting with very sharp pencils on little scraps of paper. Christmas wrapping paper. Folded over six, ten times to make little squares or rolled up into tiny tubes and tied with Christmas ribbon. And we'd think, well, there it is. They were writing poems all those years.
I don't know, maybe they were. I've never looked in their dresser drawers. Never felt I had a right to. Never really wanted to. I'd rather believe there were thousands of poems in them. Some of them were not all quiet. And some of them I came to think of as actors who were happy expressing grief and sadness. You know, like some actors like to play Hamlet. It doesn't mean that you are Hamlet. It doesn't mean that you are that person. It just means that you like to cry out the way Hamlet gets to cry out and wave the sword around, you know, and suffer big, big feeling like our parents back when we were kids.
Parents nowadays aren't like that anymore. Parents today, the ones I know, work within a narrower range of feeling. They're more rational, you see. They're better read. They read all the books on being a parent. So they're more calm and cool and articulate. Kind of more like Polonius. But back then, being a mom or dad was a big, tragic role. And you've got to give big speeches. Like, I can't even do it. I wish that I could. But like the speech that goes, how can you do this to me? After all that I've done for you, I have worked. I've worked my fingers to the bone. And how do you treat me? You treat me like dirt under your feet. That's right, you know that. But someday you will have children of your own. And when you do... I hope they treat you just like you treated me. And then you'll be sorry. But it'll be too late.
Great speech. It's a wonderful speech. I have a poem. It's almost a little folk poem. Half the people in this audience know that by heart. Different variations on it, but they've all heard that before. Except it isn't necessarily true, you know. My kid treats me wonderfully. Which goes to show you, life is unfair. Sometimes it turns out better than you deserve, you see. Oh, I think of him. I think of those people in Lake Wobegon every New Year's Eve, as I imagine you think of people that you knew long ago on the last day of the year. I think about them about 10.30 when I go out to bed. lie in the dark and I bring them all back, which you can do in the dark. You start out by reconstructing a room for all of them to be in and I usually choose my Aunt Flo's living room. And I get all the furniture all set. I got the sofa on the long wall, kind of wine-colored sofa with the Adam McCassars in the arms and the back, and the one odd Adam McCassar in the odd place pinned there to cover up a stain. where actually somebody had spilled wine, but it made a different color on the wine-colored sofa. And you got the two easy chairs, neither of which match the sofa or each other, and the rocking chair, which is placed to hide a rip in the rug. And down at the end of the room, hanging over the organ, you have Grandma and Grandpa's wedding picture. And over the sofa, you have a picture of a moonlit winter night with a wolf standing on a snowbank howling at the moon, which was meant to teach us something, I think, but I don't know what. and you construct this room in your mind and you sit in it in your imagination and you sit perfectly still until it's so quiet that you can hear water dripping from the faucet in the kitchen until you can almost hear The motes of dust falling down through the two shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows. And then you bring them all in. And they all sit there.
Bring in some extra chairs from the kitchen. Seat the guests. They all sit there. Very quietly. As if they were waiting for someone to talk. Probably me. Because I brought them there. They want me to give some kind of speech. Tell them what this is all about. But I can't. Because I'm a kid again. I don't want to stand up and talk. Because I don't know what to say. So I sit and look down at my shoes. Which are gigantic shoes. 5 feet 6. I'm 5 feet 6 inches tall and already I'm wearing size 11 and a half. Big clown shoes. And I'm afraid that I'm going to grow that way for the next few years until I've got shoes like skis. Immense feet. I'll have to sleep on my back. with two big posts sticking up in front of me so that the covers will only come up to my knees.
But then as you look down at your shoes, you see little specks that are like two or three separate snowflakes slowly falling in the room. And they are those little specks on your eyeballs. Those mysterious little specks that are, I don't know, like bubbles or something. They're there on the fluid on the outside of your eyeball. And you try to make them stop. Which is hard to do because it's natural to look at those specks and when you look at them, you follow them down as they fall. Which of course is what makes them fall. It takes effort and concentration to make them stop. And in order to do it, you have to look slightly above them. And then they will hang there, suspended, as if they were little Christmas bulbs hanging from your gaze, which I know is not a big thing. And maybe you don't get as big a kick out of it as I do. But whenever I'm able to concentrate, to make those little specks stop and hang almost like in mid-air, suspended before my eyes, I always feel happy. And then as you concentrate on them, you can start to feel your heartbeat in your eyeballs. And then, for just a moment, after you look away from the specs and out into the room, the light in the room seems to be alive, seen through beating eyeballs. And the people in the room seem indescribably beautiful and very lovely. so beautiful that you could not look at them all the time like that, but only once in a while.
Which I used to think was an illusion, but which I now think is how things really do look. Well, I hope I have not gotten a lot of kids at home to sit there cross-eyed straining to see those little specks on your eyes don't do it too hard kiddos don't do it too often remember that if you strain your eyes real hard looking at something your eyes can get stuck If a kid looks at something too hard, your eyeballs will get stuck like that, and then you'll go around and just be able to see tiny specks, which isn't the point of this.
Sometimes people have to take a kid by the ankles. Sometimes when they look too hard at things, and they have to shake them upside down a little bit, loosen their eyeballs, and get the blood running to their heads. You try it sometimes. Now, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, I'm pretty sure. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Emily Makin's loon calls. Beth Obermeyer's tap dances. Department of Folk Songs: Sleepy head, I don't want to play, The rest of the world go by, Black sox, My bonny, My pa will buy me, Auld Lang Syne.
1983.12.31 Berkshire Eagle / 1983.12.30 Star Tribune/ rebroadcast on December 31, 1988.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto