Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Willie Humphrey, Garrison Keillor, Claudia Schmidt.
Cool cool of the evening ( Claudia Schmidt ) Never saw ( Claudia Schmidt ) Love love love ( Claudia Schmidt ) Who ate Napoleons ( Claudia Schmidt ) The glory of love ( Claudia Schmidt ) Love will guide us ( Claudia Schmidt ) Late in the evening ( Greg Brown ) True friend ( Greg Brown ) Collegiate (Butch Thompson Trio ) Four leaf clover (Butch Thompson Trio ) Trees ( Garrison Keillor ) World theater ( Garrison Keillor )
American Toledo Slimline Slate Boards Bertha's Kitty Boutique Fearmonger's Shop Golden Eggs from Happy Hens Jack's Scraps for Dogs Minnesota Fruit Council Olsen, Harold Powdermilk Biscuits Sons of Knute
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. My hometown, love was in its glory a week ago tonight, the junior senior prom was last Saturday, and it went off so well too. Just a perfect success. Everybody came home alive, and nobody came home too early, you know, so that you'd worry about them. And the ones who came home and woke up a little bit under the weather the next morning said they had learned a lesson they would remember for the rest of their lives. So you can't do any better than that. It was a lesson that had something to do with burgundy wine, gin and pineapple juice.
Somebody was trying to make sangria, and they were off a little bit, but they all learned a lesson from it. Oh, I just suddenly got a little wave of nausea there passed through my entire body whenever 17 year old persons make their first venture into the world of elegance and glamor and grace and style, you know, you're bound to learn a lot that stands you in good stead. The rest of your life, you learn, for one thing, not to touch your clothes with your hands. You You want to let your hands hang loosely at your side so the sweat can drip right off them.
So you touch yourself that les a great big dark stain on you. And when you eat in elegant clothes, you want to remember to lean way forward when you take a bite, because glamorous clothes create a vacuum that sucks food in towards them, and it creates dark stains in some places you would not believe on your body. And of course, then to go around trying to cover up stains. You know, to sit all night with your legs crossed or walk around with your arm around the back of your neck, kind of ruins your posture. You lose a lot of grace and style right there. And you never can really cover up the stains, the dark stains on elegant clothes, because they're so huge. One drop of coffee, one drop of coffee on elegant clothes just hits the surface and it spreads to make a huge black splotch across the entire front of you. It's kind of a ripple effect. It's like dropping a stone in a pond, and it stays there for weeks. So you learn all of that when you make your first venture, which you should do when you're 17, because when you get to be my age, you're too old for it to say you can't support elegance and glamor any longer. People have come to think of you as a comedian by then, so they expect you to wear baggy pants and big floppy shoes. You see, if you wore elegant clothes, they just laugh at you.
So I can't wear that stuff, like white tuxedos. I can't wear that anymore. I could wear it around the house, but, I mean, I couldn't wear it. I couldn't wear it out in public, as Wayne gustland Or did for the junior senior prom that young man drove all the way into St Cloud to pick up his white tuxedo and white trousers, all white, brought him home in a plastic bag, hung him up there on the woodwork above the arch between the dining room and the living room, so the whole family could walk around and admire it. And the red COVID Right there is that.
How you pronounce it cumberbund, or is it cumberbund? It's one of the two. See, I don't know which one, but he knows, I'm sure. So beautiful, a brilliant polyester white, dazzling white. Oh, they all looked at it, and then he went in, take a bath, soaked himself for about a half hour, put on brand new underwear wrapped in plastic and brand new socks in a little plastic bag and put on a powder blue shirt with ruffles at the sleeves and pleats down the front and the red cummerbund and the white jacket and the white trousers. And he come out and they just about fell over. It was so amazing to see him there. He'd gone into that bedroom a boy, and he came out something else. He came out he looked like the star of the show. When he stepped out there in the shiny black shoes and all dressed in white and the red around his waist and the powder blue and the pleats, he looked like the star of the show. He was about to dance, sing, tell jokes, tell the folks to buy the Cologne and get the deodorant for free. They just walked around him, Don and Hazel and the kids just walked around their boy looked at him like he was a department store dummy. There, he was a big star right there in their own home, there in person, standing under the dining room lamp. And then Hazel noticed one little blight on him, one little mark just right above his left eyebrow, and she thought, Oh no, it couldn't be that. Oh, I hope it's not that.
Wayne been eating bread and water for two weeks, avoiding, trying to avoid that. Wayne been thinking nothing but pure thoughts for two weeks, and the hopes that just that sort of thing above his left eyebrow wouldn't occur. Hazel took out her hanky without thinking, and she went into it, and she reached up and she rubbed it, and she wiped it off with mother spit. It was one of those, but it went completely away with mother spit. It's the world's most powerful cleaning agent, Mother spit. Dad's spit doesn't do a whole lot, and a lot of dads, their spit will leave a dark stain on you, but mother spit goes down deep to bring dirt and impurities right out, and it creates an invisible shield that protects your entire body, that makes you impervious to fear and embarrassment or anything bad that might happen. That boy went off to that prom. He was so cool. He was so cool the whole evening. Nothing bothered him whatsoever.
Going to the junior senior prom, where I would have died 1000 deaths. I would have suffered the whole evening, so elegant, so beautiful dancing, beautiful women, handsome young men in white outfits, the powder blue, the red sash, the black shoes. What am I doing here? How come I'm here? I hope they don't notice me. If I just go off and sit in a corner and don't even move for two hours, maybe they won't see that I'm here. But he was so cool. He reminded me of those authors who say I don't read the reviews of my books. Sometimes my friends tell me about them, but I'm not interested in what people write about me. That's how he was cool the whole evening. So cool, fear and embarrassment keep coming back to it.
I used to think it would go away when I got older, and I'm still waiting, still waiting for it to pass. I played golf on Monday this last week, which I very seldom do, which makes it even more embarrassing, and playing it so seldom, and there were about 100 people standing around the First Tee. They were waiting for something. I don't know what. I had to walk up in front of them, bend over, put my ball down, trying to remember how to stand. I knew where the ball was going to go. I shouldn't even have hit it. I could have, I could have just picked it up and thrown it right over there. Wasn't that long a throw right over there into the parking lot. So. Thing that becomes funny, only about five days later, I grew up envying Catholics for their cool, where confidence, they just seemed to have it in groups. I mean, I don't know about as individuals. We weren't encouraged to know them personally. I but as a group, they had real magnificence to them that we Protestants did not have. They were really made an impressive army altogether, the Catholics of Lake Wobegon and Our Lady of Perpetual responsibility was spectacular.
They'd come outdoors en masse for the feast day of St Francis, the blessing of the animals. They'd come out for rogation days, for the blessing of the fields, and they would come out for Memorial Day. They will come out again in another week and a half or so, all standing out in front of Our Lady church. All of them, we Protestants, had our own parade. There was a Catholic parade, the Protestant parade. Both of them went up to the top of the hill, up to Rock Hill Cemetery, which was divided into two sections, the Catholic and the Protestant two separate gates, a low iron fence between the two with sharp spikes on top of we'd have to walk past our Lady church to get over to Lake Wobegon Lutheran to join up with The Protestants, which we marched with our family because, well, we weren't Lutheran. We were sanctified brethren, but there weren't enough of us for a march. If we had a Memorial Day Parade, it would have looked like a bunch of people going out to lunch, which, in ways, I always thought that we were but we walked in front of Our Lady church. And there they all were. The Catholic boy scouts were all in uniform, and the Damiens, the boys group and the Society of St Maria Goretti and their white blouses and their navy blue pleated skirts and the navy blue long stockings and the black shoes, and all of them carrying flags, dozens of flags, a lot of American flags, but then all the rest of them were Catholic flags, big, green, white, gold, purple flags flying in the breeze there in front of the church. And father emo in his black cassock and his white surplus and someone holding a gigantic crucifix and the flu to phone bands led by sister Irvin from the fourth and the fifth grade, with their white blouses and their red capes and playing immaculate mother on their little flutaphones.
And the Knights of Columbus, the most splendid of all, in their black suits and their shiny black satin capes, elbow length down their backs and the sashes across the front with the metal silver, gold and rosettes and the sash around their waist and swords, silver swords and their scabbards and black tricorn hats with immense white plumes of exotic birds that didn't grow around Lake Wobegon coming out of the top of them, men who were carpenters and farmers and truck drivers and mechanics dressed up like admirals of the English fleet as we poor Protestants slouched on by and went up to the Lutheran church, and there we met our bunch all leaning around in front and started our parade off down McKinley Street and over to Maine, led by the cruiser with Gary and Leroy in it, with the bubble light turning, and Harold Olson, who played Taps on the bugle, walking behind them, and the sons of Canute honor guard all 12 of them.
Not much honor to it, and I wouldn't care to be guarded by them either, and then the rest of us all kind of walking some way, not really in lines or anything kind of sludging and trudging and slouching along. There was something that was unleashed by the Reformation that made it impossible for Protestants to march in order the way you'd like to be able to do somehow they felt it was unChristian. I remember saying to my Uncle Al that I kind of wished we could have some costumes like. Catholics did? He said, Christians true. Christians, my boy, do not go in for show. Said they do not go in for extravagance. He said, Christ commanded us to be humble. And looking around at us, I could see that was a commandment we had in our hip pockets. We were humble to the point of humiliation.
We'd get a little ways up Main Street, and then the Catholics would swing into order, and the Catholic boys, Drum and Bugle Corps would come first, followed by the Damiens and the st Maria Goretti society and the flu to phone band and the Knights of Columbus Honor Guard, and the flags were flying and the drums were playing and the bugles playing, and all marching to a one beat, bam, bam, bam. And as they came around the corner, and without turning around, I could sense them back there, behind us. I knew that if it ever came to this, that they could take us without a fight. The Catholics could take us as they took the early Christians in Fox's Book of Martyrs, which we read around our home, and tie us to telephone poles and pile brush underneath our feet, and I'll tell you, if they told me to renounce my faith, I'd do it in a minute.
On Up the hill. We trudged and on up the hill, they marched and we swung in our gate and they went, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, on past our gate and in their gate, and then they did some kind of mysterious ceremony, and we did ours. This was a memorial day when I was in the fifth grade, and I was a part of it. We went to stand in front of the memorial put up by the Grand Army of the Republic in 1892 to the brave men who died to save the Union cause in the Civil War, in front of that obelisk. And we put on a ceremony there that those brave men. Had they been present to see it, would surely have gotten a big kick out of to your right as you face the obelisk was the ladies sextet, all six of them in white dresses. And standing in front of the obelisk was then Mayor yarn infest, and next to him was the late pastor, tamadal. And then right here where I'm standing, there are six of us, three boys and three girls from the fifth and the sixth grades, and Miss les is standing behind us. The first time I've seen her in slacks, but it is Wendy.
Six of us have been chosen for the student Memorial Day committee, chosen on the basis of good citizenship, and we have, each of us memorized, three selections, the Gettysburg Address, the poem in Flanders Field and the 23rd Psalm. And we do not, as yet know which of us will be called on to recite which of these three. So that as we stand there and as our relatives settle down into the grass, and we hear the kill deers calling their names, and the Meadowlarks are warbling, and Harold Olson is climbing into a red oak tree about 50 yards away, where he'll sit on a low branch and play taps for us. Perhaps, when this is all done, we are, all of us trying to think of the first selection on the program, Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent.
What we stand going over and over this all six of us standing in a straight line, knowing that when the moment comes, Miss les will pick one of us, tap us on the shoulder, we will take one step forward and die. When everyone is settled, we hear over the crest of the hill the grand Oya give this give the command to the sons of Canute Honor Guard, who've been waiting down there smoking cigarettes until everyone is ready.
He gives the command, and they all March. They march in step until they hit that curve to their right on the road which throws them out of step, and then the. Slight incline of the road up the Cemetery Hill throws them off farther, so that by the time they come even with us. In front of us, they are dancing to keep up in step, and they're breathing heavily, as he says, and they stop, and they turn and they face us. And I look at them, and I hope that I never grow up to become a connote old men breathing heavily, wearing whatever remnants of their service uniform still fit them, most of them with just a campaign hat and a couple badges for good behavior, probably none for marksmanship. I think it would be better to die young in battle and to grow up and become a Canute. They are not the men I would choose to fire rifles in front of a crowd, but that is what they are going to do, he says, And they slap their rifles down at parade rest, and stand and face us, and it does not give us a feeling of confidence to look at the invocation comes first, and Pastor Tom reddahl gives a long one, and we try To think once again, Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a no nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. I think I've got it.
But then when it comes time, Miss les taps, Karen Nelson, and she takes a step forward and recites it perfectly. Now it's time to think of in Flanders Fields, the lady's sextet steps up to sing the selection, abide with me. Fast falls the even tide, the shadows deep and Lord with me. Abide using hymnals. They got hymnals. Adults get to use hymnals. Read it off the page in front of it's unfair, and I just wish, as I listened to him saying that they'd hit a note. So bad. Everybody laugh out loud, and then they do, but it's me who laughs, but I try to hold it inside so it comes out the wrong way.
And Miss les puts her hand on my shoulder, and I think it's time for in Flanders Field. And I step forward, and I say, in Flanders Field, the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row. And she grabs me and yanks me back. And it's John Bodine who recites in Flanders Fields. But this has thrown him off a step, so that he comes to between the crosses, row on row, and he can't go any farther. And she hisses at him, that mark our place. And he says, mark our place. And she gives him the next line about the larks, but he can't remember it. Even when she says it, he can't remember it, because suddenly he's starting to remember everything else. He's starting to remember breeze there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself, had said, and in the lilies of the valley, Christ was born across the sea with a glory in his bosom. And double your pleasure, double your fun, everything's coming out at once. He doesn't dare open his mouth. He doesn't know what he might say.
And then he turns around and he walks back, and we see why he cannot face the audience anymore. It's a very dark stain. And the Tollefson boy, Leonard has to go up and finish in Flanders Field. And then it's time for the long talk from the armor ink fist about the men of the First Minnesota regiment who saved the union cause there at Gettysburg on that hot July afternoon, July 1, 1863 and I'm thinking, The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, which is exactly what I would like to do right now. Up, and Mayor inkevsk finishes out, and I think that I would like to turn, and I do turn and look at Miss les so I can shake my head, no, I can't do this, but she does. Look at us, she looks way off into the trees, and when it comes time, she taps me on the shoulder, and I take a step forward, and I hear the 23rd Psalm coming out of my mouth. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
And he led me through that poem too, through the Surely goodness and the mercy in the valley of death, and right up to I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever, which I thought maybe at that point I would just fall down dead and go to heaven. And I took my step back, looking down at the ground where I'd expected to fall, and the grand Oya said, and we heard the slap of the hands against the rifle breeches as they put them up to their shoulders and the clink as they put the cartridges too, and they fired not 20 feet away from us. We felt the heat against our faces and heard the bullets rip through the trees, including the one where Harold Olson was sitting with his bugle waiting to play taps. He fell out of the tree, hit the ground running, ran about 50 yards, remembered he was supposed to play and put the bugle to his lips, but having been fired at, he was in no mood to make music.
And he made a few blats, and he stopped, and the Grand Ole said, dismissed. And the boys dove in to pick up the empty shelves. And Memorial Day was over, and my Aunt Flo came up and put her hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the top of my head and said that she had never heard the 23rd Psalm recited quite so well, as she had heard it that day, it meant a lot to her. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children above average.
Dogs in Minnesota History. The Save the World Committee. The upcoming LW Whippets season. Dept. of Folk Songs: Dough, Bye bye football, Wode song, Sweet the evening,
Star Tribune May 18 1984 St Cloud Times May 21 1984
1984.05.18 Star Tribune / "This will be the last live broadcast until August except for the 10th Anniversary Broadcast on the first Saturday in July. "
Archival contributors: Frank Berto