The noted humorist and storyteller visits Malibu.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
It calls for a confident man to take the stage in front of more than 500 people, armed with nothing more than a hard wooden stool, a mic stand and a lifetime of stories to tell.
Garrison Keillor, author, humorist, radio personality and creator of National Public Radio’s long-running program, “A Prairie Home Companion,” is such a man. He stepped on stage at Pepperdine University’s sold-out Smothers Theatre last week and filled every second of the next 100 minutes with his particular brand of wry, homespun philosophy that pokes as much fun at his dour Lutheran roots as he celebrates them.
Clad in his trademark jeans, red tie and matching Nikes (offset with bright pink socks), Keillor launched the evening with a cappella renditions of “sonnets” that described life, love and marriage-familiar territory for Keillor-riffing on lessons from Dostoevsky to a story about an 81-year-old lady traveling to Denver to bury her dead sister, sell off the condo and figure out what to do with her mentally challenged niece.
That Keillor elevates the lives and everyday tragedies of the average American with such gentle humor and grace is part of his genius, and is the driving element behind his 34-year-long success with “A Prairie Home Companion” and his weekly update of the travails of the citizens of Lake Woebegone.
“I come from country people up in Minnesota,” Keillor mournfully intoned. “They were not a joyful people and believed that those whom the Lord loved, he chastened. The Lord loved us a lot.”
The signature meteorological characteristic of such northern climes, apparently, is snow and Keillor’s early years were defined by just how the community hid from it.
“In winter, you wouldn’t bathe,” he said. “You just accepted you were a mammal. And school was never cancelled. I mean, if you start canceling school in Minnesota because of snow, where do you stop?”
Such circumscribed communal existence meant, by necessity, that you seized entertainment where you found it and Minnesotans relied heavily on hymns and daily Biblical devotions, such as those “in the Old Testament, where God got good and lathered up.”
But instead of stifling Keillor’s childhood creativity, these financial and climatic constraints developed in him a love for poetry and storytelling, and delight in Biblical lessons.
“We all knew Moses and the Prodigal Son intimately,” he said. “This kind of upbringing celebrates classic American values of dignity, respect and kindness. Nowadays, when people sell their Microsoft stock at the right time, they move into gated communities and acquire a lot of stuff. But my people were poor, so language and poetry meant a lot.”
And he showed it with a heartfelt recitation from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.”
At age 66, Keillor’s essays on the fictional Lake Woebegone often focus wistfully on the simpler days of his youth, “of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.” But memories of summer as a metaphor for the brevity of life are tinged with rueful reality.
“The horseflies there left a mark you carried to your grave,” he said. “When I learned that there were no mosquitoes along the coast of California, all I could think was ‘How unfair!’
“And then there was March,” he remembered. “The month God invented to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.”
Keillor’s early restless energy prompted him to quit college and hitchhike out West and he recounted a hilarious tale of winning a ’57 Chevy in a poker game in El Paso before meeting “Francine,” the fleshly embodiment of all that was promised in the newlydiscovered rock ‘n’ roll.
“I remember when rock ‘n’ roll came in,” Keillor said. “It gave you an idea of adult things that were not hinted at in Sunday sermons.”
When matters didn’t work out with Francine, Keillor’s epiphany was telling.
“I realized this was a story I wasn’t going to write to my satisfaction,” he said. “I learned about the blues-when you want something so bad and you can’t have it, which makes you want it more, making it less likely you’ll get it.”
Keillor’s legendary capacity for story telling has found rapt audiences for decades, from articles in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly to his bestselling book, “Lake Wobegone Days” (the recorded version of which earned him a Grammy) to the 34-year run of “A Prairie Home Companion,” an old-style radio program recorded before live audiences that features the All Star Shoe Band of bluegrass musicians, fictionalized “sponsors” like the Catchup Advisory Board and Keillor’s inimitable fiction style.
His last story of the evening purported to tell about his Aunt Evelyn, “a little, Lutheran grandma” who had a secret, late-life romance with “Raul,” only discovered after she departed the earthly life and left strict instructions of where her ashes were to be buried, packed in a bowling ball purchased by Raul “during their week in Reno.”
There followed a 40-minute riff on a hippie wedding scheduled concurrently with a seminar designed to re-educate off-message Lutheran ministers, 18-foot long floating duck decoys with rose petals “coming out their butts,” naked men flying paragliders out of control, dead fish, Andy Williams’ “Moon River” and a local observation that “it could have been a lot worse.”
As Sarah Silverstein, a visiting anthropology student, said while meandering out of the theater, “I haven’t laughed so hard since my grandfather used to tell us bedtime stories ab out his bagel factory in Brooklyn.”