Stevie Beck, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Norman and Nancy Blake, Peter Ostroushko, Jean Redpath. Sylvia Woods,
One Bottle of Pop ( Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko , Jean Redpath ) Aerobic Blues ( Greg Brown , Butch Thompson Trio ) Because I Could Not Stop For Death ( Greg Brown ) Michael Finnegan ( Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko , Butch Thompson Trio ) Fido ( Greg Brown ) Ole Ole Ole ( Greg Brown , Garrison Keillor , Peter Ostroushko , Jean Redpath ) Cigarettes, Whiskey, and Wild Women ( Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko , Butch Thompson Trio ) We're the best ( Garrison Keillor ) Do you wanna talk? ( Garrison Keillor ) Handful of keys (Butch Thompson Trio ) Texola waltz (Norman and Nancy Blake ) Spanish fandango (Norman and Nancy Blake ) New domestic deal ( Jean Redpath ) Bananas ( Jean Redpath ) Love is Pleasing ( Jean Redpath ) Rank Strangers ( Jean Redpath ) Sylvia's tune ( Sylvia Woods ) Chicken Reel ( Stevie Beck ) Cluck Old Hen ( Stevie Beck )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Chatterbox Cafe Federal Uniform Guitar Tuning Act Floral Brand Chlorinated Dental Floss Greg Brown Aerobic Blues Hombre Laundry Detergent Home Defense Hardware Minnesota Fruit Council Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, little town That Time Forgot. Gardens are coming up, the little green onions poking their heads up, and all those little garden plots and all the backyards all through town, the Garden Club awarded the yard of the month award to the mag and dances this last week. Father Emo had always felt that the garden club had been prejudiced against Catholics in awarding this prize and had taken off points for backyard shrines, but the mag and dances won it, even though they have two of them, the BVM and also their St Francis of Assisi, bird bath and bird feeder with St Francis counter weighted to keep off squirrels.
It's quite a backyard. You ought to see it some time. There's hardly room in it for the mag and dance children to play, they all have to go to the neighbors. Their oldest boy is is graduating. He is in the senior class at Lake Wobegon high and along with all of the other seniors, was released from school on Friday. Graduation is a week away. It's next Saturday, and there did not seem to be any point in keeping those children any longer. Their minds were elsewhere. They were champing at the bit, waiting to be let go, and it was discouraging for the teachers to look at them to realize how much they had to learn and how little time remained. And to try and drill them, to look at a class, to lecture to a class, to ask a question based on something the teacher had said 10 minutes before, and have a child look up at you and say, What would you mind repeating the question, and then the child screwing up his face as if, of course, he did know the answer, but he didn't quite know how to phrase it. He couldn't find just exactly the right words.
Mr. Halverson's History class on Thursday, none of the kids had a thing to say about the Gadsden Purchase, Smoot Holly act, Sacco and Vanzetti. To those seniors, Sacco and Vanzetti might have been an old Italian vaudeville team. They just had no comment to make about any of it. Didn't seem to recognize it. Miss Falconer's English class. None of them had a thing to say about Shakespeare's Sonnet, when in disgrace, with fortune in men's eyes, I all alone beweep My Outcast state, even though Miss Falconer suggested that some of them might soon know a lot about disgrace, she had gotten done reading The term papers, including the one the deaner boy sent in a term paper on the renaissance that began. The Renaissance, like so many other periods of history, both past and present, included so many different ideas, moods, attitudes, attitudes, theories, that it is difficult for me to say exactly what sort of period of history it was, but in the short space allotted to me, I will attempt to give a few impressions of the Renaissance as a period of history. And then he went on to give a few impressions of things he had finished reading in the Collier's Illustrated Encyclopedia. Oh, children, children, children, children, what can we do?
What can we do but love you? It's important to do well in school, you're going to need this someday. School helps to develop intelligence, and nine tenths of intelligence is just paying attention, just being alert, keeping your head up, just an attitude of wakefulness, that's intelligence, and you'll need that someday. Life is short. We can't sleep through it.
So how did the seniors show their intelligence and their alertness, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. That's what they did Friday night. Last night out at the gravel pit. They were all out there, got a keg that somebody's brother had found, and cigarettes they had snuck off their parents, and they all stood around there, around their parents. Cars in the gravel pit late at night talking about life. The Diener boy was pulling up the gravel road into the pit when he lit up a cigarette, I think, the first of his life, and he sort of heisted himself up in the seat to see in the rear view mirror how it looked when he exhaled through his nose. He was doing it the wrong way. He coughed. He hit the brake pedal, except it wasn't the brake pedal, it was the gas pedal. Car went down the slope, wound up in the crick his father's car. He got out of it, waded into the Crick, and noticed all of a sudden that the crick was kind of black and greasy transmission, transmission.
Oh, that wasn't that's not bright, that's not intelligent. Well, he left it there. He left it sitting there, and went off to join his friends down the road. I don't know. He figured maybe it would get better if he let it sit there. Maybe this creek was kind of a Lourdes, you know, for transmissions. He went off down, stood around in the gravel pit with all the others, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, being cool, talking about life, playing the radio at top volume, some rock and roll station in St Cloud, putting on some kind of Jimi Hendrix Memorial well up over the hill, up over the hill and across the pasture. The Christian sisters Sarah and Tina lay in their beds, and they listened to the yelling, and they listened to the rock and roll until they had heard all that they were going to hear. And Tina got out of bed, and she loaded up the 12 gage and she headed off down there came marching over the hill in her nightgown and her winter coat and a raccoon cap with the gun at the ready.
And it was right about at the moment when Curtis inkvest was leaning back against the car, taking a long drag and saying, I think we'll have nuclear war in two or three years. I'd say two or three years. I don't think any of us have long to live saying this for the benefit of the tolerude girl who had always looked up to him, but not enough.
And it was at that moment when Tina let fly with both barrels. Oh, there was some intelligence. Then, I'll tell you, there was a real attitude of alertness. Then they woke up, but fast. And I do not say this to advocate the use of firearms or to take a position on gun control. I only just describe something that happened. After all, she came marching over that hill. She didn't come crawling on her belly, you know, with little branches of sumac around her flak helmet for camouflage, she came marching straight up there, as big as life Tina did, and she got a pretty good reverberation in the gravel pit. I'll tell you. She walked up as close to them, I am to you. And if they had not been quite so absorbed in themselves, they would have seen her. She took a she took a straight bead on the Milky Way, and she fired both barrels, and they took off as fast as they could go, including the boy with the car in the creek. It turned out not to be the transmission, at least it wasn't the reverse gear.
Oh, you children. You children, what will ever become of you? I had no idea, but I do know that back in town, the deaners were sitting on their front porch, Harold and Marla, their boy, their youngest boy, leaving, now graduating the last of seven children sitting out on their front porch in the twilight of a Friday night On a May evening, just looking at each other all these years, all those kids poking them, prodding them, reminding them to be careful and to brush their teeth and to be clean and to be nice, all those years with all those kids.
Les and those two sat and looked at each other, starting to remember what it was that led them to get married and have kids in the first place. He is a handsome man. She is a good looking woman. I think they'll remember and to that boy, I would just say, grow up, go away. Have your problems, but don't trouble those two. They've got some work to do now of their own. I think they'll do it. 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.
Twins are in 1st place. LWHS graduates in two weeks. Radio tax or non-MN residents. Teaching men to sort laundry. Couples at War: Take your family quarrels to the party. Start of walleye fishing season.