We get around correctness by means of comedy

The Column: 02.17.23

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I am an American and the bacon cheeseburger with onion rings is my source of sustenance, just as I prefer baseball to soccer or a republic to a monarchy. My sweetie serves me locally sourced non-GMO tofu with artisanal farro, which I regard as cattle feed but I eat it knowing that she is right and it is good for me.

Wives tend to be right about 87 percent of the time and this high incidence of correctness can be hard to get used to; a man may start to feel that marriage is a correctional institution. I put on a suit the other morning and she said, “You can’t wear that, people will wonder how can his wife let him go around looking like that.” She said the pants were not the same shade of black as the jacket. I couldn’t see it. I guess I’m so occupied with the environment and economic justice that I don’t have time to worry about matching colors, but I put on a different suit. I don’t want to be a public spectacle unless people are buying tickets to see it.

I love this woman and will do anything to make her happy. Anything. I was making my breakfast a couple days ago and she looked at me and said, “Your jeans are falling down.” I was cracking eggs into a saucepan. She said it again. I had an inspiration and ignored her and scrambled the eggs as my pants descended. “What are you doing?” she said as my pants slipped down to my ankles. She laughed so hard, she almost fell over. I never did slapstick before but this was a wonderful Buster Keaton moment and I pass it on to other men as a useful maneuver. She was highly amused and this is a woman who loves Tchaikovsky and opera and books about European history.

If you want to endear yourself to your spouse, drop your pants. It works.

I write this as I sit in a hotel room in Wichita, on a weeklong tour of doing shows. We miss each other but we also enjoy being apart. She can get together with her musician pals and reminisce about Tanglewood and who was the guy who played the viola solo in “Don Carlo” and wasn’t he married to that pianist who played that Philip Glass sonata at Aspen and bats flew out of the rafters and attacked her, the one who became a veterinary aromatherapist in Oklahoma?

Meanwhile I’m on the road, eating greasy food, keeping a diary, a diary, as it turns out, of diarrhea. And every night I stand in front of a mirror, practicing dropping my trousers. There’s an art to doing it, slowly, naturally, no-handed, and the facial expression of inept solemnity and profound unawareness. I’ll never do this in public; it’s only for her. I love making her happy. Once she accused me of poor aim while urinating and I told her that Minnesota is the center of North America and this gives us the right of continence, to pee where we like. She laughed. Not hard but convincingly.

I believe I am a necessity in her life. You can’t walk up to a stranger on the street and ask him to scratch your back up between your shoulder blades. You can’t ask a man at the bus stop how he feels about your hairstyle. You tell a stranger on the street that his pants and jacket don’t match, he may post an unflattering photo of you on Instagram.

For her I am willing to leave Minnesota and live in New York where I don’t know anybody. But after thirty years together, I know when she’s happy. She comes back exhilarated from a hike around Central Park; she is delighted as the chandeliers rise to the ceiling at the Met and the lights dim, the orchestra tunes, the maestro enters the pit, bows, baton raised, and a gorgeous familiar story is about to begin.

I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”

If you haven’t already purchased the hardcover version of THAT TIME OF YEAR: A MINNESOTA LIFE, you can pre-order a softcover edition now.

Garrison writes, “I sat down and looked at my memoir THAT TIME OF YEAR when it came out and was put off by the sadness, the opening chapter about how much I missed doing “A Prairie Home Companion,” so I sat down to fix it. That’s why a writer shouldn’t read his own work. But I did and so I sat down to cheer it up a little and wrote a new first paragraph.” Available March 7, preorder now. CLICK HERE

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