July 5, 2008
This week on A Prairie Home Companion we'll bring our broadcast season to a close at the
Ravinia Festival
in Highland Park, Illinois. With special guests, Sam Bush, Suzy Bogguss, Howard Levy, and Jearlyn Steele. Also with us, the backbone of our show, The Royal Academy of Radio
Actors: Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Fred Newman, The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band with Richard Dworsky, and The News
from Lake Wobegon. Thank you to everyone who tuned in this season and offered support to their local Public Radio station, we couldn't do it without you. See you soon at the State Fair!
 The Rhubarb Tour is the soul of A Prairie Home Companion — stories from Lake Wobegon, passionate duets, the
philosophy of Guy Noir, wild radio dramas starring sound-effects genius Fred Newman, and the incredible Guy's All Star Shoe Band... and it's happening all around the country this August.
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Post to the Host:
The English Majors must cringe when you make up lyrics containing phrases such
as "between you and I" for the sake of a rhyme with "die." Grammar should not be
sacrificed so easily.
Clarice K.
Seattle
You mean we ought to sing "It Doesn't Mean A Thing If It Doesn't Have That Swing"? "It Isn't Necessarily So"? The lyric of "Let Them Talk" wasn't written by me, however—it was written by Little
Willie John, an R&B singer from Detroit who had a lot more to worry about than getting his pronouns straight. He was the guy who wrote "Fever" which Peggy Lee made into a huge hit and he was a crazy drunk who went to prison and died there at a young age, and when an old English major like me
sings "Let Them Talk" it's sort of a thrill, frankly, when I come to the "between you and I"—I love it, love it, love it. I wouldn't write the song that way but I'm so glad that he did. It's a great song and there is no way around those lines: "Let them whisper for they know not/What lies
between you and I./I'm going to go on loving you/Until the day I die." To change it to "between you and me...for all eternity"—makes it something less.
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Our July 5 performance at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois, is the last show of the regular season. Want more? Want more? A Prairie Home Companion's Rhubarb Tour kicks off on August
10th for a 16-city run that will take Keillor and company from coast to coast.
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The Texas Pacifist Union: "Why can't we just all get a long little doggie?"
This joke was sent in by Scott H. of Federal Way, WA. Thanks Scott!
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Listen to The News from Lake Wobegon wherever and whenever you want. We're pleased to announce GK's signature monologue is now available as a free podcast, updated every Monday.
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June 30, 2008
Listened to the show Saturday and it was not bad. Got me all nostalgic about summer when I was a kid, and how things were different then, and simpler, and how my brothers and I often wish for one summer day, just one, to be kids again, together...
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June 24, 2008
I was at a playground with my daughter the other day, reading "The Two Kinds of Decay" by Sarah Manguso (good book) and watching my girl as she stood at the perimeter of children playing and studied them, exactly as I did when I was a kid, working up the nerve to plunge into the fray. She is braver
than I—she plunges. I tended to retreat and have been backpedaling ever since...
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Listener-submitted short stories or poems about their homes or lives or whatever they fancy. Here are the latest:
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Program Sponsors
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Pretty Good Jokes |
 Relive all the glory of past joke shows with our selection of pretty
good merchandise. A selection of joke books and CDs containing every morsel of comedy from most of our (in)famous Joke Shows. Hundreds of snickers, howlers, one-liners, and groaners, audience-tested and certified Pretty Good.
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English Majors |
 Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the
secret society of men and women who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.) Selections include "The Six-Minute Hamlet," a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting "Professional Organization of English Majors" drama, and
guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr., and Calvin Trillin.
Order now! >> |
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Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon |
 In Lake Wobegon lives a good Lutheran lady who is quite prepared
to die and wishes to be cremated and her ashes placed inside a bowling ball and dropped into the lake, no prayers, no hymns, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the Detmer girl returns from California where she has made a killing in veterinary aromatherapy to marry her boyfriend Brent aboard Wally's
pontoon boat, presided over by her minister, Misty Naylor of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit. Brent arrives on Thursday. On Saturday, a delegation of renegade Lutheran pastors from Denmark come to town on their tour of America, their punishment for having denied the divinity of Jesus. And
Barbara Peterson, whose mother, Evelyn, left the startling note about cremation and the bowling ball, is in love with a lovely fat man who slips around town in the dim light and reconnoiters with her at the Romeo Motel.
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