The cap does not look good on you, it’s a duffer’s cap, and when you come to the microphone, you look like the warm-up guy, the guy who announces the license number of the car left in the parking lot, doors locked, lights on, motor running. The brim shadows your face, which gives a sinister look, as if you’d come to town to announce the closing of the pulp factory. Your eyes look dead and your scowl does not suggest American greatness so much as American indigestion. Your hair is the wrong color: People don’t want a president to be that shade of blond. You know that now.
.. And The New York Times treats you like the village idiot. This is painful for a Queens boy trying to win respect in Manhattan where the Times is the Supreme Liberal Jewish Anglican Arbiter of Who Has The Smarts and What Goes Where. When you came to Manhattan 40 years ago, you discovered that in entertainment, the press, politics, finance, everywhere you went, you ran into Jews, and they are not like you: Jews didn’t go in for big yachts and a fleet of aircraft — they showed off by way of philanthropy or by raising brilliant offspring. They sympathized with the civil rights movement. In Queens, blacks were a threat to property values — they belonged in the Bronx, not down the street. To the Times, Queens is Cleveland. Bush league. You are Queens. The casinos were totally Queens, the gold faucets in your triplex, the bragging, the insults, but you wanted to be liked by Those People. You wanted Mike Bloomberg to invite you to dinner at his townhouse. You wanted the Times to run a three-part story about you, that you meditate and are a passionate kayaker and collect 14th-century Islamic mosaics. You wish you were that person but you didn’t have the time.
The Garrison Keillor You Never Knew
“It was never about self expression, never,” Mr. Keillor said.
.. But the man spinning the plates at the center of it all managed to stay a mystery, even to people who know him well.
.. “Garrison in person is quite different,” said his longtime friend, the writer Mark Singer. “Garrison does not express emotion in interpersonal conversations the way the rest of us do.”
.. “His gaze is often floating and takes you in from a strange distance,” said the writer and editor Roger Angell, who in 1970 edited Mr. Keillor’s first piece for The New Yorker. “He is certainly the strangest person I know.”
.. His weekly radio audience peaked 10 years ago, at 4.1 million, and has since dropped to 3.2 million.
.. The problem of ‘Prairie Home Companion’ is it’s part of public radio’s past, not their future,
.. “‘Prairie Home Companion’ came on the scene just as public radio was trying to figure out what its identity was,” said Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life.” “The fact that here was such a visibly weird, funny, idiosyncratic show opened up the space of other weird, idiosyncratic shows, like ‘Car Talk,’ and our show.”
.. Mr. Keillor’s New Yorker colleagues were astonished, wondering how this painfully shy man could possibly host a radio show, let alone divert his energies from a burgeoning literary career. But Mr. Keillor adored the socializing, the camaraderie and the musicians’ gregariousness and generosity.
.. Mr. Keillor’s handpicked successor, the folk musician Chris Thile, 35, who first performed on the show as a teenager, cheerfully admitted in an interview that it could all go down the drain if audiences reject him after he begins hosting on Oct. 15
.. For all his radio fame, Mr. Keillor has always seen himself first as a writer
.. which he writes almost entirely by himself
.. His family was Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect that forbade dancing and going to the movies.
.. In junior high, rather than signing poems with his given name, Gary, he began using the more regal sounding Garrison.
.. Margaret Moos Pick, Mr. Keillor’s early producer and former longtime girlfriend, said his Lake Wobegon monologues put him into something like a state of hypnosis.
.. Mr. Singer, a friend from The New Yorker, said the show appealed to baby boomers and felt like a counterweight to the Reagan era, when images of American life suddenly felt scripted and controlled. “It was an antidote to all that,”
.. Mr. Keillor said of Lake Wobegonians, i.e., his relatives, “I am frustrated by them in real life.” They were too controlled by good manners, he said, and “have a very hard time breaking through.”
Garrison Keiller: Local Family Keeps Son Happy
Brief story about Mr. & Mrs. Robert Shepard & their sixteen year old son, Robbie. Mr. & Mrs. Shepard obtain the parole of a twenty-four year old prostitute who becomes a live-in companion for their son. Mrs. Shepard says that her son “has matured greatly” since the young woman came to live with them. In addition to her other duties, she also cooks breakfast & a recipe is given for one of her specialties, fancy eggs.
Keillor: The punk who would be president
he is proud as can be of his great feat, the first punk candidate to get this close to the White House. He says that the country is run by a bunch of clowns and that he is going to make things great again and beat up on the outsiders who are coming into our neighborhood. His followers don’t necessarily believe that — what they love about him is what kids loved about Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, the fact that he horrifies the powers that be and when you are pro-duck you are giving the finger to Congress, the press, clergy, lawyers, teachers, cake-eaters, big muckety-mucks, VIPs, all those people who think they’re better than you — you have the power to scare the pants off them, and that’s what this candidate does better than anybody else.
.. How, in a few weeks, should Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell teach him basic humanity? The bigot and braggart they see today is the same man that New Yorkers have been observing for 40 years. A man obsessed with marble walls and gold-plated doorknobs, who has the sensibility of a giant sea tortoise.
.. If Mitt Romney or John McCain had been elected president, you might be disappointed but you wouldn’t fear for the fate of the Republic. This time, the Republican Party is nominating a man who resides in the dark depths. He is a thug and he doesn’t bother to hide it.
.. So the country is put to a historic test. If the man is not defeated, then we are not the country we imagine we are. All of the trillions spent on education was a waste. The churches should close up shop. The nation that elects this man president is not a civilized society. The gentleman is not airing out his fingernail polish, he is not showing off his wedding ring; he is making an obscene gesture. Ignore it at your peril.