Listen now (7 mins) | Podcast 110 - When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful...
͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­
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A trip to Rochester for exami…
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A trip to Rochester for examination

Podcast 110 - When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful...

Garrison Keillor
Jul 12
 
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I’ve been rather lucky. I’ve known what I wanted to do with my life since eighth grade when I got a copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris and read it in an evening and decided I wanted to be a writer. I still do. I went to college so I’d have a good answer for when people asked me, “What are you doing?” I majored in English to become a writer, which is like majoring in physics so you can sail a boat. One cold winter, looking for indoor work, I got a job announcing on a classical music radio station, and I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, a great benefit. You can’t hang a degree around your neck but you can learn to sound smart.

Grandma heard me read the noontime news once and said, “It doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like an older man.” Aunt Jo said, “That’s how they talk on the radio.” Grandma listened closely. She heard me introduce a suite with a French name by Maurice Ravel and was impressed by my pronunciation. She would’ve preferred I’d gone into teaching, like her, but at least I had a job.

Through pure serendipity, it led to “A Prairie Home Companion,” which you know all about, and now I’m an old stand-up comic who walks around in the crowd and does a 90-minute set:

God tells us to be righteous but still He

Tells us to lighten our hearts and be silly.

Live in the moment, this moment, here with you, right now,

And let cruelty and stupidity disappear somehow.

It is spring, there is a turn in the weather,

And as George Frideric Handel wrote, let us sing together.


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