Alaska & the Iditerod from 1996

Tanglewood Bound — Tickets on sale March 6th

The Popular Artist Series opens in the shed with A Prairie Home Companion starring Garrison Keillor (June 21, 7 p.m.). A Prairie Home Companion included Tanglewood on its itinerary as each broadcast season wrapped up, broadcasting a total of 17 times from the beautiful venue. This is the spot where the audience sing-along took to life as many times, after the LIVE broadcast, the audience sang songs led by Garrison and cast sometimes for hours. Join in the fun this June for another memorable EVENT. More information can be found here.

Listen to the classic show

This week, we venture back to March 2, 1996, for one of the earliest shows in the online archive — a program originally performed from Anchorage, Alaska, on the day that the Iditarod Sled Dog Race began. Guests: past Iditarod champion Libby Riddles, the Alaska Chamber Singers, and the Northern Lights Inuit Dancers.

Highlights include talk of Alaska and the Iditarod plus the singing of the Alaska State Song, a new take on “California Girls,” Dusty and Lefty tackling the Iditarod, plus Cherubic Man and Fish Head Stew, Alaska Cats, and other hijinks. Cool off a bit by listening to tonight’s show.

More About Our Guest Performers:

The Alaska Chamber Singers were established in 1986 by Elvera Voth, who headed up the group through the 1993-94 season. The chorus is now under the leadership of Artistic Director David Hagen. They have performed choral masterworks such as Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Theresienmesse, Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes, Purcell’s Fairy Queen, Bach’s Magnificat, Verdi’s Te Deum, and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Their contemporary repertoire includes works by Charles Ives, Benjamin Britten, and Arthur Honegger. In 1992, the chorus represented the Mayor’s Commission on a cultural exchange to Magadan, Russia. The Alaska Chamber Singers is made up of approximately 40 Anchorage-area singers, 27 of whom perform on this show.

In 1985, at age 28, Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the 1,049-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race. Riddles became an instant celebrity after crossing the Norton Sound in a complete whiteout, with the dangerous Bering Sea wind gusting at 70 miles per hour. She had moved to Alaska from Minnesota at the age of 16 and homesteaded in western Alaska several years before she ran her first race in 1978. It was a six-mile, five-dog race and she took first place. After that initial success, she devoted more and more time to the sport — she sewed her own gear, ran races, and bred dogs. Three years later, she moved north to Shaktoolik to prepare for the Iditarod by learning the Arctic lifestyle. She ran the race two times before winning in 1985. She has written an Iditarod school curriculum and several books: Race Across Alaska, a chronicle of her winning race; Storm Run, and Danger the Dog Yard Cat.

Since its formation in 1979, the Northern Lights Dancers, a traditional Inuit dance group based in Kotzebue, has helped to rejuvenate Inuit dance in Northern Alaska. These Iñupiaq dancers have traveled to Greenland, England, Hawaii, and many other places around the globe. Begun as an after-school activity for students, the Northern Lights Dancers grew as the group was encouraged to perform for tourists and at festivals across Alaska.

Last week’s classic show drew some pretty wonderful listeners, including one of our guest performers. Here is what Mark O’Connor shared about how his performance of “America the Beautiful” on the show came to be:

“I remember when Garrison wanted me to play it on air. During rehearsal, I told him that I had just played it at the memorial in NYC for one of the astronauts who lost their life in the NASA space mission coming back to earth. They had me play this piece at the memorial, the only music there. He wanted me to play it for him backstage. When I was finished, he said that it should go on the program that day, just like I played it for him. Years later, he allowed me to use the audio of that for one of my albums, American Classics.” Listen to last week’s featured show here.

A Year in Lake Wobegon

The newest collection of “above average” Lake Wobegon stories! Our staff and volunteers worked on this collection for about a year, picking the very best newer stories to represent each month of the calendar year. Despite what Keillor often says about it’s being a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, a lot happens in “the little town that time forgot and decades could not improve.”

Material includes more than 3 hours of monologues culled from live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion that aired between 2014 and 2016. Also included: a poem by Garrison for each month of the calendar year, plus music by Peter Ostroushko, a consummate musician who was with APHC from the earliest days. Here is the poem for March:

It’s March in St. Paul. Eight a.m. A pale
Frozen mist in the air. The snow is gritty gray
Around the stone statue of Nathan Hale.
Scott Fitzgerald walks here almost every day
Hand in hand with Bessie Smith, or Maria Callas,
And Franz Kafka and Judy Garland stroll in the snow
And Princess Diana escapes from Kensington Palace
To meet Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
They all look calm and very elegant indeed,
Despite all the grief they’ve been through.
To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,
So said Emily Dickinson. (She’s here too.)
Life is tragic. Oh God, the miseries we bear
But it’s always good to get out in the fresh air.

A full description of each story and the contents of the CD set can be found in our blog post below.

Read the blog post >>>
Get the CD set >>>

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