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PODCAST

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Funny, poignant, sentimental, and sometimes controversial thoughts of the day.garrisonkeillor.substack.com

comedy improv

All Episodes

7:22

A lovely lunch last week in New Haven

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/12/02

At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I will be gone from the world and unconcerned about the weaponization of falsehoods. But I want to leave

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7:43

A few minutes on a hilltop in Concord

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/11/25

Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has

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7:53

A private word from me to Joe

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/11/18

Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in a dense forested area in chaps and boots, a leather vest, a bright red cap, a faithful dog at your side, a shotgun on your

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7:36

Canada is burning but we're doing okay

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/11/11

I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly

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7:31

Why I love the Shenandoah Valley

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/11/04

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and

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8:01

The art of leaving home

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/10/28

The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig

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7:04

Enough about them, this is about me

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/10/25

When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people

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23:15

News from Oct 27, 1984

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/10/22

10.27.84Carl Krebsbach’s brother, Lyle, bought a new car this week from a St. Cloud dealer. The little red foreign car was not available in Lake Wobegon. Lyle saw a picture of this car in a magazine and he just had to have it. On Tuesday, the car wouldn’t start because someone put a potato up the tailpipe. Lyle has lived in town for twelve years so he’s still seen as an outsider. He needs some friendship.The host was at the Sidetrack Tap a while back playing the baseball pinball machine and doing

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7:08

The beauty of a bitterly cold Sunday, 8 a.m.

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/10/14

What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and she slowed down when she saw “Shittim” and got traction and very carefully pronounced it “shi-team.” I was the only one in the sanctuary immature enough to enjoy this moment. There were no 13-year-old boys there, just me. I could tell from her voice that the reader had been

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6:37

Marriage is a game and two can play it

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/10/07

She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.The guy majored in

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7:36

Manhattan man living in the past

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/09/30

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching

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6:39

Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/09/23

Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health

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6:26

Thinking about that woman in Kentucky

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/09/16

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and

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7:10

So this guy in New York walks into a grocery store

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/09/09

There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.I find authenticity in

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7:48

The daily pursuit of happiness

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/09/02

Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express happiness for fear it might be bragging but I love to think of them writing about the “lovely day” they spent walking around Springfield.The box needs to be discarded but I love my mother’s penmanship. I will recognize it even when I’m deep into

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6:42

A week in Kansas and Missouri

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/08/26

Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I, and keep my distance from anguish, at least until next summer when I may exercise my right to be

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6:54

We get around correctness by means of comedy

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/08/19

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

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7:25

The author disembarks almost

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/08/12

I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His people directly, but when I look at light that is billions of years old coming from an infinite number of galaxies, it shocks the imagination into gratitude for existence itself, nothing more, nothing less. It also makes my political registration less than interesting.I feel this in church on Sunday

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6:23

I missed out on the big storm regretfully

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/08/05

In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight and seem to prefer this life to their former working life, which calls into question the very meaning of our free-enterprise culture. I mean, if Methodists preferred to be mollusks, then why bother going to Bible Study?Senator Scott of Florida had a good point when he

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6:53

There's money in dystopia but so what?

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2023/07/29

One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using the word “Christmas,” we understand. Children walk past, cursing like truckers. We ignore it. In places where Christians form a powerful majority, they can bully and persecute with great enthusiasm, even though our Savior instructed us in kindness and charity.I speak as an old man. Righteous

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108 results

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