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Bringing the prairie to Cullowhee
Cullowhee is not nearly so flat as the area surrounding tiny Lake Wobegon, Minn., but Garrison Keillor’s dry wit still kept a capacity crowd in stitches Monday during an almost two-hour one-man show at Western Carolina University’s Fine and Performing Arts Center.
While he lacked his usual prairie companions, Keillor made himself at home during Monday’s show, beginning with a song and then weaving stories together for the rest of the night.
Writer/humorist Keillor, who brought a talented cast to the mountains six years ago when his Rhubarb Tour played Asheville, peppered his monologues with references to the cold winters in his native state and his bleak childhood. In contrast to that music-packed 2004 show, this week’s Cullowhee event showcased Keillor’s storytelling ability. His weekly radio broadcast runs for exactly two hours and is filled with music and skits. On Saturday nights, Keillor’s monologues are around 15 minutes long, but he proved Monday he has the ability to keep audiences entranced for almost eight times as long.
While the 2004 show gave me a chance to finally see the faces that go with the performers the radio brings into my living room each Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. – guitarist Pat Donohue, music director and pianist Rich Dworsky and sound effects wizard Fred Newman – I found I didn’t miss them Monday night. Having Keillor in Cullowhee was more than enough.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Keillor or his radio variety show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” he’s a bookish, tall guy from Minnesota who derives much of his humor from the cold weather and Lutherans indigenous to his home state.
Though he was born and raised in Anoka, Minn., Keillor has grown famous through the years for his stories of Lake Wobegon, his fictional hometown on the edge of the prairie. Each week’s show brings new stories of the joys and sorrows of small-town life as illustrated by his friends and neighbors in Lake Wobegon.
Describing himself as the host of the only live radio variety show in America, Keillor’s opening song paid homage to the radio greats he heard as a child in the days before televisions were common.
“It’s so good to be here in Western North Carolina,” Keillor said, adding that back in Minnesota, people are still “laboring under winter.” Despite the harshness of the climate there, Keillor credited the season with helping to form the character of its people.
“Winter’s what makes us who we are,” he said. He continued to ponder the dreariness of northern winters, speculating as to why anyone would want to live there, before delivering his punch line: “Somebody needs to live up there to defend our borders against the rapacious Canadians.”
The flatness of his home state’s prairie was also addressed.
“It’s flat as far as you can see,” he said. “As far as you can see, there’s nobody coming. And why would they? You’re not that interesting.”
While many of the elements Keillor combined to produce Monday’s show were familiar, he managed to add enough new twists to the stories to keep even longtime fans enthralled. Even though we know his stories are fictional, they’re told with such detail and evoke such a sense of small-town America that it seems like they must have really happened.
Riding home, remembering the warmth and the laughter, it occurred to me that one reason I count myself among Keillor’s fans is that each weekly show presents its listeners with the gift of a well-turned phrase or haunting melody that lingers all week.
My all-time favorite Prairie Home moment is a wonderful song titled “Sweet is the Melody” written by Iris DeMent and performed by The Hopeful Gospel Quartet (Keillor, Mollie O’Brien and Robin and Linda Williams) that I had never heard until a June 2002 program.
Saturday nights with the Prairie Home gang are like being back on my grand-mother’s screen porch on soft Georgia summer nights. Keillor’s characters, though fictional, seem as warm and comfortable as the great-aunts and uncles I listened to so many years ago.
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