Nina Gerber, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, Bobby McFerrin, Peter Ostroushko, Carl Paine, Jean Redpath, Butch Thompson, Kate Wolf,
In San Francisco ( Garrison Keillor ) Angels hovering round ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie , Kate Wolf ) Hopelessly Devoted to you ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie , Kate Wolf ) That's why I love you ( Garrison Keillor , Kate Wolf , Kate MacKenzie ) When the stars begin to fall ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie , Kate Wolf ) Amazing Grace ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie , Kate Wolf ) In my Father's house ( Garrison Keillor , Kate MacKenzie , Kate Wolf ) Love is just around the corner ( Butch Thompson ) It's been so long ( Butch Thompson ) I wish you were here ( Jean Redpath ) Land where we'll never grow old ( Jean Redpath ) Call the ewes ( Jean Redpath , Kate Wolf ) Will you go lassie go ( Jean Redpath , Kate Wolf ) Sweet smell of pine ( Kate Wolf , Nina Gerber , Peter Ostroushko ) Doobop ( Bobby McFerrin ) Golden rolling hills of California ( Kate Wolf , Butch Thompson ) Tell Me Why ( Jean Redpath , Garrison Keillor ) Powell-Hyde Street Cable Car Tour ( Carl Paine )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (GK - Lower back pain in cats / Accu-petting techniques) Chatterbox Cafe Minnesota Language Systems (GK and guests - Minnesota foods and restaurants) Powdermilk Biscuits (GK - This is no vacation - Hotel for shy persons - Prairie Home on the roof - Theme song with cable car bell) Raw Bits (cast - Tourists, Tom Keith - Sound Effects (Bobby McFerrin) ) Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. I don't know that for a fact. I haven't been there. now for days have not heard nor seen anyone there, but I assume it's been quiet. I know that there was a tremendous quiet, what you might call a deafening silence over our taking the show out to San Francisco from the folks back in Lake Wobegon. They only know about you what they read in the papers and from their own wonderful imaginations. But I tell you, I don't know if you're aware of this out here, but back in some parts of the country where I come from, San Francisco is still thought of as the home of topless bars and beatniks and hippies and guys who walk down the street together holding hands, which back where I come from is what we call loose. So when they heard that we were coming out to do the show here, they had no comment in a real definite sort of way that made you just rather not ask. My folks back there kind of tend to preserve America's rebels. long beyond the point where the rebels are rebellious. They tend to preserve rebellion until rebellion is middle-aged and making a real good income. Even Greenwich Village, still to my guys back there, a lot of them is synonymous with something pretty racy. You'd need a million dollars to buy a house in Greenwich Village. But my folks kind of preserve it, you see, as it was maybe 50 or 60 years ago. Hippies, too. Most of them, a lot of them, earning pretty good income, stockbrokers, that sort of thing, and don't have a single hair on their heads that is older than about seven months. But still, back home, if your hair creeps down over your collar a little bit, up to the sidetrack tap, up to the Chatterbox Cafe, they'll say, what do you think you are, some kind of hippie or something? It's really a charming thing about them. I think the Smithsonian ought to throw up a picket line of historians around Lake Wobegon and protect it from newspapers or magazines coming in, preserving some of America's wonderful old biases of decades past. So they were shocked we would come out here. I may disagree with them a little bit about which things are right and which things are wrong, but I wouldn't try and argue against their principles, even though I think they're missing a lot by not coming to see this city. It's an entertainment. Still, I wouldn't try and talk them out of their principles because even if they may be wrong about what they think is wrong, at least they still have a real definite sense of right and wrong, which I value and treasure. They do believe that there is such a thing as sin, which is reasonable, I think. that not everything that is wrong in the world is caused by misunderstanding or poor communication. But there is some badness that's there because it wants to be there. It firmly intends to be bad. I have always believed in right and wrong, even going back to the days when I believed that Lake Wobegon was utterly wrong and that I was right. I've always believed in things being definite. Right? Wrong. Some things one way, some things another. A lot of things in the middle, but a lot of things one way or the other. And people who try and hedge on this you know and say it's all right if it doesn't hurt anybody to me that's like a five-year-old's view of ethics you know I'm not hurting anybody what's the big problem I don't care if you're not hurting anybody don't do that you can't don't put crayons on your teeth don't stop it it's wrong I don't hold with that. I think that when you lose your sense of sin, that there being some things that are, that you lose some of your interest in life and you become kind of a spectator. Some things are definitely wrong. And I had a real strong sense of that the last time I came out here. The last time I came out here, I came out here to be on a TV show and to promote a book that I had out at the time, which I don't anymore, so don't worry about it. Not that you necessarily worried a lot about it at the time, but whatever amount of worry you did spend on that book, don't mind about it now. I came out here to be on one of those daytime shows where there's a coffee table on TV. There's always a coffee table and there's a couch. And there's a guy host and there's a girl host. And there's a woman who demonstrates stir fry cooking. And there's a woman who demonstrates some terrific aerobic exercises you can do while you're vacuuming. And I got a couple of other things in there. But in the middle there somewhere, they put the author of the book to talk about his or her work. For this show, they bussed in a small studio audience of senior citizens who were very depressed, I think, when they got there. This is one of the reasons why studio audiences in television react so big, laugh, clap real hard for just about anything that happens, is because they get these people out of day centers where they've done nothing all day but watch television. And so you sit them down in a studio and they're ripe for any kind of entertainment. Anyway, at the beginning of this TV show, and again before the first commercial, and again right before they introduced me, they introduced me as one of the funniest men in America three times before I even appeared. And so when I came out there to promote my book, I thought that just kind of as a joke, I would be real boring for a while. They didn't get it. It was a bad deal. Anyway, that's not what I was going to talk to you about. When you go on television, you get to travel first class on airlines. That's a rule. Anybody who's ever been on television, like in the last three months, they sit up in first class. I sat up on first class, and this is one of those new airlines that sprung up recently, the last few years in this country, a kind of a frills, no frills airline. I sat up in first class in the big wide seats with the big tray and the real napkin and the real glass that they put your beverage in. And they're hovering over you, just they can't do enough for you. And I heard sounds from back beyond the curtain, the red curtain behind us there in the first class section. And I heard a sound, it sounded like a . And I just peeked through the curtain and here were the passengers coming into the tourist section. They were driving them up the ramp, the rear ramp of the plane. And there were hundreds of men and women and little children and there were goats and sheep and some cattle, dogs and so on. There were no seats back there. There was just the floor and their seats were marked off in chalk on the floor. And the flight attendants herded them back in there with whips. And they got them all lined up and pressed in real tight together so they could get several hundred people in back there at the red curtain. The flight attendant leaned over and said, Would you like another scotch? I said, Sure. Look back there. And we took off, all these poor people hanging on to each other. kneeling rocking back and forth sobbing to themselves in some kind of strange foreign tongue singing women old women singing ancient folk songs about wanting looking forward to that moment when the earth would return to the bottoms of their feet and the moment that the captain turned off the no cooking sign They built fires back there and they were cooking beans and meat. I didn't know what it was. And singing all hunkered down back there. And I thought to myself, I thought, you know, I ought to go back there with those poor people and be a good person and take some of this real good stuff from first class back there and share it with people. And then I thought, nah. Why go back there with the poor? They're real crowded. And if I went back there, they'd just have to squeeze in all the more. You see, I believe in right and wrong. I don't believe that I necessarily do one or the other all the time. But I believe in right and wrong. And I believe that we're supposed to be here on earth in order to do something better than just ride in first class and ride up in the front of the plane. There's got to be more to it than that. I used to know a man whose name was Shorty who thought that. He said, I'm going to get mine while I'm warm because when you're cold, you're cold for a long time. He's just going to get his in this life, everything he could get. I say his name was Shorty because I don't believe that people necessarily keep their names after death. You might think that you would, you might hope to, or you might hope to have a better one when you go on. and go up there and you meet God and you introduce yourself to Him, you know, and you use your name. Maybe the people who are the Jim Bob's here on earth or the Goofy's, you know, the Buster's, they hope to become Winthrop's in heaven. But God decides this. God decides what name you'll be. You could put in for any name you want when you get up there and God just look at you and say, you want to bring me that book of life shorty? Thank you. That means you're shorty. Doesn't matter what you think. Right and wrong, right and wrong and a day when. Some things are decided. I believe in that. I think back to a young girl who was a guest on our show years ago, back when it used to be much more of a folk show than it is now. We used to have a lot of folk people, folks on, not just guitarists and banjo pickers, but old shopkeepers, you know, and shepherds and... you know old ball players and old train conductors and just a lot of old guys a lot of old women too old quilt makers and old seamstresses and old toothpickers and a lot of old whittlers and old god people from Iowa and you know old country lawyers and old doctors guys named Doc and guys with nicknames like Dusty We used to have a lot of more folk type people on our show and a lot of old Irish. Oh, we'd always have Irish people. Anytime we'd get an old Irish guy on our show, we'd have him on. And we'd have old Jewish guys on our show. And not little Jewish guys. I mean big Jewish guys. Like the guy who played Tevye in the movies. Big Jewish guys from Iowa. Old Jewish farmers who'd, you know, sing some unaccompanied blues now and then and they'd... whittle their authentic Hasidic bowls and stuff, you know, with knives and tell folk tales and this sort of stuff. Anyway, it used to be that kind of show. And we had a girl on there, a little girl. She's about that tall. For those of you at home, a little girl. Little Jenny was her name. And I don't know why we never had many kids on this show, but we had her on because she was real sick. This was one sick kid and we felt sorry for her and her family because one look at this kid, you could tell she didn't have long. So she came on as a guest on our show to play her auto harp and to sing, although she could barely make it out on stage. Poor little white pale thing with long stringy hair and sweat dripping off of her in her little white dress and her bare feet. Walking out on that stage, people just couldn't believe it. Well, I tell you, some of these folks who've been on our show in years past had told me about an old folk tradition down in the southern Appalachians, down there in those little mountain hollers, some of them no bigger than a refrigerator. People down there believe that when a child is real sick with a fever, that it has a God-given gift of spiritual wisdom. And so the minute a child gets terribly sick, people flock around for miles to come around the bedside and hear what it has to say. Poor little thing lying there in the summertime and 40, 50 people crammed into the bedroom with their ears down over it. Little kid lying there, sweat pouring down it, panting for breath and saying, get off me, get away from me. I can't breathe. And you smell bad, too. You know that? Just get away from me. I feel sick. People hover around over that bedside waiting for that child's next words. And then either through oxygen deprivation or whatever it is, the child says something kind of spiritual. You know, it says, 1 Corinthians 13, right? Or it says, um... We're all part of the one, and it's all one thing, and we're all part of it. And so people write that down, or if they're part of an oral tradition, they pass it along by word of mouth. They say, Roy and Esther's boy, Spud, says that everything is one, and we're all part of it, so pass it on. This is why we had little Ginny on our show, because I thought she'd make an interesting guest. Being a sick... as sick as she was. She stood out there with her little tiny auto harp. She could barely stand. She was so weak and so puny. People had told me she was a black child. And I'll tell you this, if she was a black child, she had been sick a long time. Cause she was white as a sheet. But she stood there with her little auto harp and she sang in her pure little trembly voice. She sang, ring those golden bells. Ring those golden bells. And then she went into the second part of her medley. She sang, I did it my way. And relatives in the wings were sobbing and falling apart. The audience was weeping, obviously, this poor sick child. When she was done, people stood up and gave her a standing ovation on our show. And she came over to where I was. Now at that time on our show, I sat on a sofa and it was a white 100% natural fiber sofa. And I sat behind a coffee table. It was a redwood decaffeinated coffee table and I sat over there. And now I thought that little Ginny was going to come over and sit by me there on the couch and she was going to tell me a folk tale about a chicken and her little chicks. But she didn't. While she was getting this standing O from the crowd, she come and she threw her arms around me and put her cheek right up to mine and she about scorched the skin off my face. The child was that sick with a fever. I don't know what you would have done under these circumstances. I hate to sound selfish, but she was so hot and so feverish and a drop, a bead of sweat fell off her brow and fell on the back of my hand and it left a burn on it. I thought to myself, hey, I don't need this. This child's possibly fatal illness, this, I could catch something here. And this would wipe out my career at a fairly early stage, I hope. And so, as gently as I could, not wanting to appear like a crude son of a gun to the people there, not wanting to look as if I was tossing her aside like a hot potato, I tried to ease little Ginny off my lap and get her to sit over at the other end of the sofa. She wouldn't go. She had her arms clasped around my neck as tight as I've ever been clasped before. and the standing ovation went on and on and on and as it went on she whispered in my ear she said, God wants you to cut out some of this stuff you're doing and straighten out a little bit and just cut out some of this garbage It was quite a way for a guest to talk to a host on a show. I said, what do you mean? She said, God wants you to cut out some of this stuff you're doing. I looked at the clock. I saw we had a little time left. The ovation was dying out. I didn't want to hold a conversation with her on the air, not the way she was talking. I said, what do you say, folks? We have little Ginny back again next week. And I gave her another standing ovation. And she hung on around my neck and she whispered in my ear, God is serious. God means it. I don't know what she meant by that. I don't know. I've thought about it and I'll keep on thinking about it for a long time to come, I know. In a sense I guess it's a story that hasn't ended yet. The other guest on my show that day was a blues singer named Blind Brian Peterson. And I was helping him out to his car to put his guitar in the trunk. And I noticed there in Blind Brian's trunk a bag of golf clubs. And I said, you play golf? He said, sure I do. Let's go play, I said. All right. We went off, we played. It was a beautiful day. You do radio shows and you forget how beautiful it is outside, you know. You forget the visual stuff. This was a stunning day. Greens and the blues and browns and... I tell you, I'd never played with a blind golfer who was as good as blind Brian Peterson. Blind people tend to top the ball a little bit off the tee. This guy socked it out there for 2,000 yards. It surprised me because on the show he'd been singing about bad whiskey and women who didn't understand him and talking about tuberculosis and cocaine and the federal government and a bunch of sad stuff. And here he was striding down the fairway. He said, I'll tell you, he said, Mr. Harrison, he said, if a man can't be happy on a day like today, he's not trying. I said, what's your secret of happiness, blind Brian? He said, well, sir, he said, it all depends. I was hoping for something better than it all depends, but... That's what he said and folks, when you got a situation like this where women are as strong as these women are and men are as good looking and where children are as above average as these and that's very above average, not just a little bit but way above average then i think we've got a fighting chance
Pacific coast sound effects. Gladys and Phil live on the top Prairie Home floor of their hotel in Nob Hill. A ride on the Hyde Street cable car with bell ringing.
1985.04.07 SF Examiner: broadcast show / rebroadcast on April 23, 1988 and April 29, 1989
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen