Sandy Bradley, Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Red Maddock, Peter Ostroushko, Queen Ida, Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band. Sandy Bradley And The Small Wonder String Band, Becky Schlegel, Butch Thompson,
Cotton eyed joe ( Peter Ostroushko ) Clair de lune (Queen Ida ) Paree (Queen Ida ) On a Saturday night (Queen Ida ) Bayou polka (Queen Ida ) The Cat Came Back ( Garrison Keillor ) Just a song at twilight ( Garrison Keillor ) Take me to the land of jazz ( Sandy Bradley ) Old kitchen kettle ( Sandy Bradley ) Skeleton dance ( Sandy Bradley ) Run out of as ( Sandy Bradley ) Teacher said ( Sandy Bradley ) If you knew ( Butch Thompson ) Jitterbug waltz ( Butch Thompson ) Hey Negress (Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band ) Vaporsa (Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band )
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. It turned a little bit colder this week after it had been warm for a while, which was good for all of us, I think. Things were starting to melt, starting to drip. Now it turns cold and we get back on track back in the month of January. It makes me feel nervous when it gets warm in January. I think it has that effect on most people in Minnesota. If it can be warm in January, then maybe a lot of other things we assume are true are not. Maybe other things will start to come apart. The importance of hard work, maybe that's not true. Honesty, the best policy, maybe that's not true. Well, it would have to be true, wouldn't it, if honest... Well, no, it wouldn't. How does that work? Honesty is the best policy. I don't know about the value of hard work. Honesty is the best policy because if you lie, you have to keep track of what you've said. If you tell lies, you have to keep score in order to be consistent. But if you talk from the heart, then it will always be there, you see, and you don't need to worry about what you said a few weeks ago. Which is why I always talk on the show and give the news from Lake Wobegon without using notes. Because when it's in your heart, you don't need to have it written down in front of you. It has always been true in the past. People sometimes comment on this who come to the show, but I don't see that it's anything unusual. Every day in the city of St. Paul, all up and down Wabasha Street and other parts as well, I assume, every hour of every day, there are men and women who talk to each other without notes or without it being written down in front of them. Though people expect it of us, I guess, in the news business, what I'm in, because of people in TV news who, even when they look directly at you, You know, everybody over the age of six knows that when people do the news on television, they're reading it off a glass screen in front of the camera, off a teleprompter, words that they did not write themselves and which may be true or may not be true. They do this because even when there is no news, they still have to give you news. You've noticed that yourselves. Whereas in doing the news from Lake Wobegon, when there is no news, I tell you it. And that seems to be the case today. I am kind of talking here until I think of something to say, which is an ability that I picked up through regular attendance in church. But frankly, it's been a real quiet week in Lake Wobegon and I was hoping there would be more than evidently there is. Senator K. Torvaldsen left town this last week to go down to Florida for the winter. His back is hurting him, something awful so that he was able to predict that it was about to turn colder. And he is at an age now when most of the weather, particularly at this time of year, he is not so interested in as he used to be. His back has been hurting him, so he got in his car and headed down to Tampa, Florida. And there's a wonderful story there someplace about him and his lady love whom he met at the Methodist Church supper down in Tampa last winter time and corresponded with her and talked to her on the phone and she came out for Thanksgiving out from her home in the state of Maine and just when people thought they were going to announce their intentions why she turned around and went back to the state of Maine and I'm sure there is a wonderful story there somewhere. But some people might make up a story and tell it to you. But I'm not going to do that. I might have done it in the past, but I'm not going to do it anymore. Some people are able to make up stories and to tell lies. And some of us just have never been able to tell anything but the plain, unvarnished truth. And so while it makes me uncomfortable here to admit it, I don't know the story in his case. And I'm going to have to just wait until I have the facts. Or at least enough of them to have a start. So it's been an awfully quiet week in Lake Wobblog. And I am still here. He's gone to Florida. And I'm still here. And I've got kind of a sore back too. But I'll be staying in Minnesota this winter because somebody has to. I got my sore back back years ago when I was playing softball, which I used to do before I started to have back problems. I used to play for a team that played for fun every Saturday. And then one summer we started to feel like we might be a pretty good softball team. Somebody made a few running catches out in center field, you know, over-the-shoulder catches, and one time our shortstop came charging in on a ground ball, and he short-hopped it and threw a guy out coming into home. And then we turned to double play one game, and we started to think, well, maybe we're pretty good. So we played a good team from Minneapolis. This was Rick Olson's Irish Lounge, their team over on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis. Kind of a strange bar over there where people sit around in the dark and listen to IRA songs and lose a little memory capacity. are about half Irish on their backside, as we say. We played these people on a Sunday afternoon. And not to mince words, they were a bunch of jerks, which made it all that more painful to lose to them. And we lost badly to them on a Sunday afternoon in bright sunlight, in full view of whoever was there. The score was about 26 to 4. And we sent in Phyllis, our third baseman. And I moved from right field over to left field, losing to these jerks from this bar team in Minneapolis. And the biggest jerk came up to bat. They'd been holding him out, but they let him in the game. A kind of a flabby guy came in to bat. And he hit one right through her. It went right through her legs and out to me in left field. And he come around first base and he come around second base. And I threw into third base. She never would have ever caught that throw. Phyllis never would have. But he kept on going like a runaway truck and instead of sliding into third base he just ran right over her. He just ran right up her leg and she went down and he ran over her and came chugging into home plate as all of his fellow jerks applauded for him and patted him on the back. It was a time when a person is supposed to be enraged to see the way he creamed her. But somehow we didn't run in fast enough, those of us in the outfield. We kind of walked in slowly saying, hey, you don't have to play like that. And in the meantime, he had circled back and helped her up and he said, you okay? And she, thinking you're supposed to say this, said, yeah, I'm okay. And the moment was passed. The correct psychological moment was passed when you were supposed to run up to the jerk and rip his arm out of its socket and beat him over the head with it. And all we could do was stand around and say a few limp words of protest and say, hey, that's kind of rough, isn't it? I mean, this is just a friendly game, right? Hey? And he said, well, you want me to go back to third? I'll go back to third. And there it was. And I didn't start to get as mad as I should have until I had taken her to the hospital. And she was x-rayed and she had a broken collarbone. And her arm had to be put in a sling. And I started to get more and more angry. And I drove the long drive home, having dropped her off, my poor weeping teammate. And I started to imagine what I should have done racing in from left field and pounding him down into the dirt as other jerks came in to pull me away. And I would... Use karate chops I never had known that I could do before. And guys coming at me and me going pow, bam, as comic book words appear in the air overhead. Bam, oof, pow, arg. Beating these jerks into the ground, I thought about this all the way home, realizing that I had somehow failed her. I thought about him, I thought about him all Sunday evening, imagined what I should have done to him. And I thought about him in the morning when I got on the bus to go to work, imagined him getting on the bus and him seeing me and saying, hey, Good game. And me grabbing him by his shirt and pulling his face to within an inch of mine and saying things that I'm not even going to tell you. Hissing at him, throwing him down, stepping on him. I imagined all the things that I should have done to him. I thought about him all day Monday and I thought, something's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me. Something has gone flat up in the anger circuits, up in the brain, where I don't become as outraged by outrageous things as I ought to. And I decided my problem was that I hadn't hit anybody in too long a time. Not since I was a little kid. It was time to do it. The world is full of jerks, and every so often you got to pound on one, and then the word gets around to the others, and they quiet down for a while. It's the old jerk deterrence theory. So Tuesday morning when I went to work, I decided that would be the day. I was going to look for somebody who had it coming, and I was going to pop them. I practiced in the bathroom in the morning, looking at myself in the mirror. Ah! Gotcha. The bus driver was kind of surly to me, and I thought about maybe getting him in a headlock and getting him down, but I don't know, he's been like that for years to everybody, so I thought I'd wait for a while. got off the bus, crossed the street to go to work, and a kid came racing around the corner in his car and almost knocked me, I was right in the pedestrian walkway, in the lane, and he almost knocked me down, and I started to run after him, but he had the green light farther down the block, and He was gone. I thought about this all day, just listening for things, listening for, I don't know, sexist jokes or something, I don't know. Some reason, some reason. And didn't hear anything. And thought, well, what I ought to do is go over to Olson's Irish Lounge and find that guy. He's the guy I want to deal with. And so I did. I got over there about 5 o'clock, and I sat around waiting for him. And finally, he came in, and he sat down at the end of the bar. And I just watched him, trying to inspire myself and work up something. And just about the time I did... He disappeared around the corner and went down the hall. And I followed him down a dark hallway. And he turned the corner at the end. And I was getting closer to him. And I was going to leap on his back. No, I wasn't going to leap on his back. I was going to grab him by the left shoulder and spin him around and look him in the eye and say, remember me. I followed him and I turned the corner and he'd gone into the men's room. I opened the door and walked in. I remembered a scene in Rockford in which James Garner followed a guy into a men's room and he pounded him around a little bit and then he pulled out his belt and he tied the guy's ankles with his belt and hung him up on a hook. I thought that might work. I loosened my belt just a couple notches and I eased in the door, kind of like Rockford had, and I saw his feet under the partition. I was pretty angry at him, but still... I wouldn't do that to a guy in that situation. It's a delicate moment. Even if a guy is a jerk, you want to be by yourself at a time like that. So I walked into the booth next to him, and I sat there to wait. After a while, I heard the jerk clear his throat and sniff a couple times. And he said, do you mind if we talk? I said, I don't know. He said, I've got to talk to somebody. He said, I don't know what's going on with me. I've been such a jerk. I've been just rotten here. And he handed some pictures underneath the partition to me. Look at these, mister, he said. That's my wife and my kids. I took the picture from him. Nobody had ever done this to me before. Didn't know what to do. I looked at the picture. There was his wife and kids. They looked fine. He said, I've been such a jerk. I don't know. They're such great kids. She's the most wonderful person in the world, my wife. They deserve something better than me. How'd they come to have a husband and a dad like me? I ask you, he said. I ask you. I tell you, it was a confusing moment for me. I wanted to be honest with the guy, but I also wanted to go in there and just kind of pound the cookies out of him for a while. I had put up a sign up in my dining room to remind me what I was out to do. It was a sign I put up high on the wall. It said, go get him. Go get him. And now here he was. And I didn't know what to do. I stood up and I put my hand on the door to his little room. And I thought about going in there. And then, I don't know, something happened. I thought, I don't really want to be part of his life. That's what happens when you're angry. When you're angry at people, you make them a part of your life in a way that you just don't need. It's like the story about the tar baby. You know, when you go to kick the tar baby, you get involved with them in a whole lot of ways you hadn't counted on. And that's what happens when you get angry at people. I said, I just don't need it. I just don't need it right now. So I just walked out and walked away. and went home. And I climbed up on my dining room table and I took down that sign that said, go get them. You can go get them, but what do you do once you have them? I climbed up and I took that sign down. Where I hurt my back was that I hadn't noticed that it was a drop-leaf table. So I got up and I took down the go get them sign and just about the time I put my hand on it I dropped like a leaf and I landed funny and it bothers me sometimes but not so much. When I get angry it hurts a little bit and when it turns colder I get a little twinge in my back as well. But I feel pretty good now and I'm forecasting, based on my back, I'm forecasting an early spring and a wonderful spring, not only here but also in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.
The hazard of icicles and bear traps.
1986.01.19 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, musicbrainz