Mollie Atwood, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey, Garrison Keillor, John Koerner, Lake Wobegon Community Choir. George Mushamp, Peter Ostroushko,
Hunker down ( Garrison Keillor ) Mila (Butch Thompson Trio ) Song de la negra (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) Paloma (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) Cascabel (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) Malaguena (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) Celito linda (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) The burro (El Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey ) Old smoky ( John Koerner ) Sail Away Ladies ( John Koerner ) Shenandoah ( John Koerner ) St James infirmary ( John Koerner ) Streets of my old neighborhood ( Peter Ostroushko ) America the Beautiful (Lake Wobegon Community Choir )
American Artistic Association Americans for Slower Coverage of Major Elections Bertha's Kitty Boutique Bigger Hammer Enterprises Butch Thompson Music Corporation Chatterbox Cafe Powdermilk Biscuits Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime Tolerude, Eric US Neighborhood Association
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, as I say. Pig fell in the mud on Wednesday. It rained a lot. It was one of Eric Tollerood's pigs. He has two of them. He's raising for a 4-H project named Wesley and Bubbles. And I believe it was Wesley who fell in the mud. And Eric saw him when he went out in the afternoon. And it looked kind of odd. He was lying there. And the mud didn't think much of it until he came back the other way, about an hour later, and Wesley sneezed. And Eric kind of pushed at him. And he said, get out of the mud, crazy pig. Don't lie, there it's cold. And when he pushed Wesley, Wesley went under the mud. And Eric had to hoist him up and tie a rope around Wesley's waist. And pull him out of there. It turned out he wasn't lying in the mud. He had fallen in the mud. And he was standing in the mud, trying to keep his chin above water. Kind of cold and miserable. And I imagine discouraged by then that pig was. But Eric had put in a lot of time on that pig. He wasn't about to lose him. And so he brought him inside. And he brought him down to the basement. And he wrapped a blanket around him. And he stayed up with him about half the night until the fever broke. And Wesley's temperature returned to normal. And his congestion was better by the next afternoon. And he went back to the barn to be with bubbles. And that's what happened in Lake Wobegon. Last week, evidently, I called up there on Thursday. And I said, what's new? And they said nothing really, nothing at all. I said, nothing. Nothing happened. They said, well, Eric's pig fell in the mud, but he's better now. I said, is that it? Is that all? Nothing else? No, nothing else. That was it. So it was kind of an awkward moment, isn't it? When you practice this kind of news reporting at a distance, sometimes your sources just dry up. And unless a man would be tempted to make up stuff. Tell you a bunch of lies. But I'm not going to do that. Although I could do that. I could do that very easily. I've done that ever since I was a little child. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things that I was often sent up to my room for. They'd say, you go up to your room. You stay up there until you're ready to tell the truth. Well, I was always ready to try to tell the truth. But the truth is complicated, as I knew back then. It was true that I hit her first. But it was also true that she had started it because she had dared me to hit her. And also, she seemed to be just about ready to hit me. And so I hit her. And yet she did start it. It's a complicated thing. Parents don't always understand these distinctions. And as for the Chinese figurine, I did not break it. I bumped it, but I did not break it. It was the floor that broke it. But they sent me upstairs. Or I sat up in my room, and I scared myself. As much as I could. I sit on my bed, and I take two index fingers, and I put them together, right in front of my eyes like this. And then I would slowly move them apart until a little sausage of flesh appeared in front of my eyes. And as I moved my fingers farther apart, the little sausage got smaller. And almost disappeared, but I couldn't let it disappear. Because when that little sausage disappeared, I was sure that was when something terrible would happen. I couldn't let it disappear. That's when the planet would come through the roof. That's when my breath would stop. I used to lie on my bed, on my back, and hang my head over the edge, looking up at an angle at the ceiling until after you lie there for a while. It looks as if the ceiling is the floor of a very strange house in which the lights are put beneath underfoot. And the furniture is attached to the ceiling. And the doors have very high door cells that it would be hard to get over. And you are there suspended at the ceiling, looking down at this strange room, suspended from the ceiling by magnetic force, the force of gravity. And so if the force of gravity is holding you up at the ceiling, this can't be America. This would be Australia. You are in Australia. And this strange room that you are in is a room in an Australian prison. And you will spend the rest of your life suspended from the ceiling, unable to get down to the floor. I still believe that. I still believe that. I believe I'll go to prison. I'm used to it. It's not a hard idea, you know, when you've been thinking about it for 30 years, you get used to it. The prospect isn't the hard part. It's the long wait, you know. 30 years I've been under my cousin Ralph's sentence that I'd spend the rest of my life in prison and rot there. And I'm just kind of waiting. Hard to make long-term goals, you know, with a thing like that over your head. It's just kind of week to week for me. She says to me, she says, let's go to Scotland next June. I say, well, fine, if I'm not in prison. She says, well, what would you be going to prison for? I say, I have no idea. I'll have to go to find out. But it'll happen. I believe that it will happen. Just as I believe that one of these winters, if not this winter, then next winter, I will be outside walking around and I will go and I will put my tongue on a pump handle. Put my tongue on a frozen pump handle, the nightmare of all Minnesota children. Ah, so many have moved south to get away from the dread of frozen pipe pump handles. But I know I'm going to do it. I've been telling myself not to do it for 30 some years, warning myself not to do it. Knowing the consequences, put your tongue on a frozen pump handle and it sticks there. And they have to put a tent up over you and you have to stand there until spring in a hunched over position. That's the better thing that can happen. The worst thing I don't even want to talk about. All over Minnesota pumps being removed and pump handles from backyards. You see many fewer of them now than you did when I was a kid. There is a program to get these dangerous things out of our lives. And yet I know I'm going to see one one day, I'm going to walk right up, I'm going to bend over, I'm going to put my tongue right on it. I've thought of moving to Florida to get away from that sort of temptation. But then I think down in Florida they probably have some different laws that they don't have in Minnesota. Laws that probably a lot of people in Florida don't know about because they don't have to enforce them. But I'd go down there, I'd cross the border and right away I wouldn't be in Florida but ten minutes. And they'd look at me and they'd say, he did it. Right out in the open, look at him. And they'd come get me, they'd haul me off to present. Wouldn't even be much of a trial, they'd say, do you want to plead guilty? I'd say, yes. I've been waiting all my life to plead guilty. That's Calvinism, folks. I used to think... I used to think when I was a kid, Calvinism was named after Calvin Coolidge. She made sense to me, Silent Cal, he was called. People probably said to him, cat got your tongue, Cal? No, he keeping his mouth closed, pump handles. That was his problem. He seldom see a photograph of him standing outdoors in the wintertime with his mouth open. Now, have you ever? No, you haven't. That's Calvinism. Well children, don't frighten yourselves. Planets are not falling. They're all out there moving around the sun in their perfect order. Stars are all out there too, you go out and have a look at them. They're all out there suspended in space. And you'll be able to draw your next breath. Don't frighten yourself by other prospects. I'll go out and look up at the stars, billions of stars. Some named, some with only numbers, some we don't know what they are. But they're all out there as they've been out there for billions of years. We are sort of imprisoned on Earth, but it's a lovely prison. And our imaginations are still free and can go off to other places. And we are also free not to be afraid. So don't be afraid, as my mother used to tell me, at night, sitting on my bed where I had been lying and listening to the bears in my closet. Moving around in there. I'd hear a little bear breath ever so often. They were trying hard to be quiet in there, those bears were. But they're large, ungainly creatures. And ever so often, one of them would kind of lurch a little bit. And I would hear a little creak of the floorboards as a bear lost its balance. And I would hear a little bit of a bear like to me. But they were always gone in the morning. Always gone in the morning. So don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Voting next week is a moment of pure equality.
1984.10.28 Star Tribune / rebroadcast on November 12, 1988.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl