Barrett Sisters, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Dale Warland Singers, Jim Dapogny, James Depogny, Garrison Keillor, Leroy Larson, Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble, Howard Mohr, Peter Ostroushko. Charles Pikes, Butch Thompson, Susan Voss,
Poem for Syttende mai ( Garrison Keillor ) Norwegian Dance Tune ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) How Can I Forget Old Norway ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Happy Birthday Norway ( Greg Brown ) Paul and His Chickens (Dale Warland Singers ) I Laid Me Down to Rest (Dale Warland Singers ) Cross Hands Piano Song ( Butch Thompson , James Depogny ) Fishing Open Song (Till There Was You) ( Garrison Keillor ) The Old Woman on a Cane ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Farmer's Waltz ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Lucky day ( James Depogny , Butch Thompson ) Turtle Twist ( James Depogny , Butch Thompson ) What a Friend We Have in Jesus (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) The Storm is Passing Over (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) A Wonder Woman (Dale Warland Singers ) Norweigian National Anthem (Dale Warland Singers ) For No Reason At All ( James Depogny , Butch Thompson ) Gonna Sit Down by the Banks of the River ( Greg Brown , Charles Pikes ) I'll Rise Again (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) I've Got A New Home Over in Glory (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) Sweet Home in Glory (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) In The Sweet By and By (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes ) The Lord He Rescued Me (Barrett Sisters , Charles Pikes )
Bunsen, Clint Powdermilk Biscuits (Garrison says not to confuse shyness with niceness! Shy Persons: Shy persons like to be on the edge of a group.) Rough House Cosmetics (Men's makeup provides scars, warts, bruises, scrapes and cuts. Also, deodorant that smells like diesel fuel and dead fish.) Susan The Fun Person Spot (What to do when the Prairie Home Companion show gets boring.) Travel Budget Travel (GK - Helps get that leftover travel budget money spent)
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The Norwegian national anthem, what a beautiful song, sung by the Dale Warland family singers. And that's for all the Norwegians, including the bachelor farmers back home in Lake Wobegon, where it has been a quiet week. Though, of course, there are still things worth talking about. Otherwise, I would not be here. Well, the great gardening campaign, for one thing, is going hot and heavy, and particularly the great tomato sweepstakes up on Lake Wobegon. Clarence Bunsen, I believe, was the first one to get his tomato plants out of the milk cartons and into the ground, which he did last week, and was proud of being first until just the other night when it was kind of cold. And the poor little things in the morning were all stretched out on the ground, face down in the dirt. His neighbors pointed that out to him. He said, they're not dead. It wasn't a frost. They're only sleeping. And he propped each of those tomato plants up with a stick and made it stand upright, even if it didn't feel like it. But that same night, after dark, he drove 45 miles to a nursery that is open until 10 o'clock, and he bought himself a second and third team of tomatoes. And that day after that, he started sending in replacements. And that is how serious tomato growing is in Lake Wobegon. It is not for the faint-hearted. We'll see how he does as it gets on into June. Harold Diener got himself a new garden tiller to try and keep up in the race. The old one, kind of not very reliable at all. But the new one, he was on a waiting list for it. It was some new type of garden tiller and only arrived here this last week. He had to make up for lost time. He got that garden tiller out back and was cultivating and Harold had gotten only about halfway back to the raspberries when his garden tiller started to dig itself down into the ground. It was the kind of garden tiller that doesn't have the rubber wheels, it just has the axle with the sharp spokes on it that does the tilling. And it was going straight down. Usually with a garden tiller, if you lift up on the handles the thing will climb out of whatever hole it is digging for itself but when Harold lifted up on the handles it did a nosedive and went even farther and faster down straight down into the ground until it was up to its manifold he shut the thing off so he could study the situation and because it was daylight and because he has neighbors in no time there was a little advisory committee that was gathered around him doing what committees usually do and that is providing commentary on the situation and saying gosh that's deep boy I never saw a garden tiller do that before usually you know if you lift up on the handles they climb right out of there he said I did that Maybe you didn't lift him up high enough. So he started it up again and tried lifting the handles higher. And between that and some of the other suggestions that the committee had, he went from where it was buried up to its manifold to where it was just two handles sticking out of a hole in the ground. It went way down in the dirt. And finally Carl had to go down to the garage, get the wrecker, back it up into Harold's garden. put the winch on it and winch this thing out of the dirt, the garden tiller. And it bent the frame a little bit doing it. But strangely enough, bending the frame seemed to cure it of the problem. Evidently, the garden tiller was not properly centered or focused or whatever a tiller is supposed to do. in order to get the job done. Gardening was slowed down a little bit more this week by the fact that it rained about every day except Friday. And on one day they got a tremendous amount of rain. Was it, I believe it was Tuesday or Wednesday, Tuesday night I believe, early Wednesday morning. One of those sudden dramatic storms where the sky turns black and clouds boiling up in the sky and the wind comes up and it lays everything half flat and you start to feel as if you were back in the book of Genesis and the rain comes down by the bucket load and then all of a sudden it's over and the sky is bright But it's a real Old Testament storm while it lasts, and it does get people's attention. It does not seem like a period of grace when a storm like that comes in. When the wind came up on Tuesday night, it took the Quaker State oil sign off of the pure oil standard down at Krebsbach Chevrolet. It took this thing off the bracket and It threw that Quaker State Oil sign, just hurled it down the length of Main Street. It went down there, whirring down the street, straight down. Lucky it didn't hit somebody. It would have cut them in half. But it went right down the middle of Main Street, and it landed in the grass right in front of the statue of the unknown Norwegian and buried itself in the ground. This Quaker State oil sign did, except for one little corner, so that when Bud went to mow the grass on Friday... It took a blade off the mower and almost took his ankle off, too. Mr. Lundberg saw it on Tuesday night. He saw that Quaker State Oil sign go by. He heard it go by, I should say. He was in the sidetrack tap and he was just going out the door to make sure that he had his windows rolled up and he heard this humming sound coming down the street like it was a UFO. and didn't see anything but just a blur as it went by. It was going fast enough that it could have cut a person right in half if it had hit them. Even him, Mr. Lundberg, who is a pretty hefty guy, so that half of him would be more than all of just about anybody whom you could think of. But it would have cut him in half if he hadn't heard it and jumped back into the sidetrack tap. It went by so fast. It was a bad week for him anyway before that even came along, a terrible, rotten week for Mr. Lundberg. So that, I mean, then to go through a rotten week and get cut in half by a Quaker State Oil sign would make it a week that you wouldn't care to live through twice. Both he and Betty had been having a hard time sleeping for over a week. both of them. And when they have a hard time getting good sleep at night, it worries them both so that they go to bed with their jaws set and lie on their backs in the dark and think, now I'm going to get some sleep tonight. If I don't get my sleep tonight, I'm going to get sick, which isn't a good way to start. And then he has the additional problem that if he goes into sleep too deep, Mr. Lundberg, he is apt to get up and walk, outdoors even. He woke up in the morning with grass stains on his pajamas. And so he tries to ease himself down into sleep gently. And just as a precaution, he puts his right hand down into the mattress handle there on the side so that if he does go to sleep, but then if he tosses in his sleep, it wakes him up anyway. So it's not an easy situation for the Lundbergs. And here on Wednesday night, they'd no sooner gotten to sleep early in the morning but what they woke right up again with a crash there in the bedroom as about half of their bedroom ceiling fell on the dresser and on the end of the bed and they turned on the light and there was a whole big patch of just laugh up there and plaster all over the floor it was a piece of plaster that has been slowly coming off the ceiling for about a year and a half now and that Mrs. Lundberg has been able to pretty plainly make out by a crack around the circumference of it and in recent months by the shadow where the plaster was pulling away from the lath so that twenty or twenty-five times in the last few months She has pointed this out to him and said, I believe that plaster is coming off that ceiling. And he has said, yes, I've got to do something about that. And she has said, I wish that you would. And he has said, I will. So when it came off on Wednesday night, it was hard for her to go back to sleep right away without pointing out to him some of the history of that piece of plaster. And they lay there in the dark. She said, I've told you 20 times to fix that. He knew better than to say anything. You never listen to me. He lay there in the dark, smelling all of the perfumes from the bottles on the dresser that had been broken by that chunk of plaster. All of those horrible perfumes that he had bought for her over the years for birthdays and anniversaries. Cheap perfumes. Next time, maybe you'll listen to me, she said. You could see it was coming off. He remembered the events that they had attended when she was wearing some of those cheap perfumes, like the Sons of Canute Syttende mai Dance a few years back, where he went in his suit that was three sizes too small, too proud to have it let out, so that he couldn't dance, he couldn't sit, he could barely walk. He had to stand there and watch the other canoes dance. And then, when he dropped his billfold on the floor, he had to kick it along the floor and into a broom closet. And shut the door and go in in the dark and ease himself down so he could lie on his side and reach and pick up that billfold and put it in his pocket and then ease himself up. And he split his pants anyway. So he had to walk around with his hands clasped behind his back. She said, why don't you ever listen to me? Sometimes I think I'm just talking to the wall. He thought of all those cheap perfumes and felt like a terrible husband and a terrible person. And the last words she said before she fell asleep were, well, you can clean it up. So he did. He got up in the morning and he went downstairs. He hadn't slept much, but he could still find his way. And he made coffee and toast and brought them up to her just to surprise her, to amaze her actually, to confuse her really. and picked up the big chunks of plaster off the floor and off the bed and the dresser and the broken bottles of perfume and put them in the wastebasket and got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the floor as she sat up in bed drinking coffee and watching him in amazement. And he put on the hand attachment to get underneath the radiators and get all of the plaster dust and the little bits of plaster. And he vacuumed off the bedspread. And then he vacuumed up on the dresser. But this was a new vacuum, a new Japanese vacuum that they had. And it had powerful suction. He had not used this before, although they bought it almost a year ago. It was a powerful thing so that it sucked four quarters off the top of the dresser, which clanked around inside the canister for a while. And it almost ate a photograph of Donnie Lundberg off the top. He grabbed it from the maw of the vacuum cleaner. And it was while he was putting the photograph in his little glass case of Donnie Lundberg back on the back of the bureau that the vacuum cleaner ate a little plastic bottle of super glue and ate it and it clanked around inside the canister and then it popped and then he felt something wet on his foot and he lifted his foot and And he wiped it off with his hand. And then he realized what that stuff was. And he said, oh, for dumb. And he put his hand up to his forehead. He clapped his hand to his forehead. And that was the position that he was still in when Betty drove him to the hospital in St. Cloud. He had his hand clapped to his forehead. He looked like Rodin's statue of the thinker. She drove him into the hospital where he sat with his forehead in his hand and thought for a couple of hours until the nurse had called the manufacturer and found the correct solvent and got it from a hardware store and it was delivered to the hospital. And the nurse sat with a solvent and a Q-tip and slowly pried his hand off of his forehead and also pried the bedspread off of his foot where, after clapping his hand to his forehead in anger, he had kicked the bed. And she performed... this forehead ectomy and bedspread removal very professionally and very seriously and didn't smile and didn't comment on it but did it like it was an open heart operation and even though Betty driving him back home made reference to nothing except the weather made no reference to his hand being stuck to his forehead. Nonetheless, he had to go back to work that day with an angry red mark on his forehead. And people asked him what he had done. And he had to say, I hit myself with my fist. Hit yourself pretty hard? They said, yeah. I guess I don't know my own strength." So that it was a week when he was just as glad, I guess, that the Quaker state oil sign hadn't cut him in half. Because you wouldn't want to die at that point and have your children remember you for a thing like what he'd just done. You'd like another chance, which now he has. I don't know, I could tell you more about him, but I don't think I will. I probably have told you too much already. I don't know if you are the sort of people who can be trusted with more details about a person. I used to think about it, I remember, when I was a kid. Would people still love me if they knew a lot more about me? is to wonder about that. You'd like to think that they would love you more if they knew more about you, that their love for you is not based on ignorance of the facts, but you want to be careful about it and you want to feed out the facts about yourself kind of slowly and see how people are taking them, you know, so they don't think less of you for knowing more about you. I think of that because tonight is prom night, junior-senior prom night up in Lake Wobegon. And even as I speak to you now at about 6:35 Central Daylight Time, there are a lot of clean teenage persons up in Lake Wobegon, clean teenage persons in clean underwear who just about now are removing the plastic bag from their prom clothes for tonight dazzling white clothes radiant white clothes and about to put them on and in another hour or so they'll be promenading two by two up the steps and up the walk to the high school and people drive by I suppose and look at these young people in dazzling white clothes and think who do they think they are? Who do they think they are? But I'll tell you, those dazzling white clothes, whether in fact or in your own imagination, are part of the truth about you. Your parents know that. Those dazzling, radiant garments are part of the simple truth about you If only there were a way for Mr. Lundberg to wear clothes like that and for Betty to wear one of those perfumes. 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.
Susan the Fun Person tells what to do when A Prairie Home Companion gets boring!
Courier May 16 1985
1985.05.12 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen