Lake Wobegon in Woodinville: How Garrison Keillor brings 'Prairie Home Companion' to life on the road
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"It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." With those words, Garrison Keillor spun another gently meandering yarn for 3 million listeners.
A couple thousand were there with Keillor, arrayed on camp chairs and blankets, as he performed onstage Saturday at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery. It was a gloriously sunny and green afternoon in Woodinville, half a continent and light years from Lake Wobegon, Minn., a mythical place Keillor has chronicled for his public-radio fans since the 1970s.
Yet most people who heard last weekend's live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" don't know what goes into the making of this popular, variety-style weekly series - whether it emanates from Keillor's home base, the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, or the Chateau Ste. Michelle lawn.
They don't know that Keillor, a lanky, glowery man of 59, with a thatch of dark hair and a soothing voice, writes every scripted word of each two-hour broadcast - every parody song lyric and skit, every joke-ad for Powder Milk Biscuits ("Heavens, they're tasty").
Nor do they realize that the script isn't finished until moments before the show hits the air.
Yet despite his iconic status as "PHC" honcho and star, Keillor is no one-man band. He relies on a discreet, close-knit staff, who keeps the show on track. And who stays out of Keillor's way if he gets grumpy - as he famously tends to, close to airtime.
"The hard part is the writing, and everything leading up to the show," Keillor noted by phone last week from St. Paul. "The performing is the easy and fun part."
According to those in the know, Keillor was in unusually mellow form at the Woodinville gig - his show's first broadcast from this area since 1997. Here's how it went, step by step:
Setting up
Tickets to the winery show, co-sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio and Seattle public-radio station KUOW-FM, sold out weeks ago. And Christine Tschida, Keillor's producer, said a call for Seattle lore and jokes on the "PHC" Web site drew a flood of response.
Keillor agrees the series has a special connection with its Seattle fans. "I don't know why," he mused, in his pleasantly vague manner. "It couldn't be a more different place than Minnesota." Is it the mutual Norwegian influence? "Maybe, but have you been to Norway?" asked Keillor, an Anoka, Minn., native of Scottish descent. "It's so beautiful with the mountains and the water, more like Seattle than St. Paul. When the first Norwegian immigrants got to the Midwest, they thought they'd made a terrible mistake."
If Keillor was glad to return to this area, he didn't get out and about much during his quick stay.
On Friday, after a crew installed the "PHC" front-porch set on the Woodinville stage, and staffers laid out an arsenal of laptop computers (for research and script editing) and video cams (for the show's live Webcast), Keillor rehearsed with trusted music director Rich Dworsky and the band.
That evening, the company repaired to a hotel in Kirkland to read aloud Saturday's script - which Keillor then reworked.
Rehearsal
Next, regular "PHC" actors Tim Russell and Sue Scott and sound-effects wizard Tom Keith rehearsed comedy bits with Keillor. There were funny gags about our high per capita use of Prozac, our seafood and coffee fetishes, and friendly jabs at Microsoft.
This blend of literate sophistication, topical satire and folksy low humor is Keillor's own style (by way of the great Mark Twain). But despite his success with it on-air, and in the dozen popular books he's authored, Keillor wouldn't mind a radio co-writer.
"It's hard to find. Most people enjoy writing comedy sometimes," he says. "Doing it every week is a grind. A nice grind, but a grind."
As the 3 p.m. show time neared in Woodinville, Keillor was quietly but totally in charge. He slashed lines of dialogue, issued firm instructions. He was polite but didn't smile. Though when the locally based Skandia Folkdance Society Fiddlers rehearsed some bouncy dance tunes, Keillor did a little sideways jig.
At 1:30 p.m., as ticket-holders streamed onto the grounds to get seated, Keillor's cohorts and his third wife, Jenny, and 3-year-old daughter, Maia, lunched indoors. But Keillor was holed up with his monologue. He'd mulled over ideas all week, but now had to finish and swiftly memorize it.
On with the show
At 2:30, Dworsky and the band launched into some upbeat tunes. Then Keillor emerged to warm applause, wearing a tux. Smiling now, he was almost ebullient as he animatedly crooned '50s pop tunes.
Was this the Midwestern writer prone to melancholy? The shy guy who can be a major curmudgeon? You wouldn't guess it, as he rocked out to "Great Balls of Fire."
At 3 p.m. sharp, the show began working its magic across the national airwaves. There were no disasters, no major fumbles.
The musical numbers went smoothly, the skits drew enough laughs. As usual, Keillor read greetings from audience members to friends and family. And he felt loose enough to joke around a bit with O'Brien and the crowd.
Then came the monologue, that weekly high-wire feat evoking a lost era of campfire-style radio communion. It was about Miss Lewis, a Lake Wobegon high-school teacher, along with the Sons of Knut lodge and Irene Bunson's tomatoes.
Some write off Keillor as a hokey nostalgia merchant. They aren't listening well: This yarn was about death, envy, Shakespearean sonnets. The guy is a master of his bardic form. And he's created, populated and kept alive a whole town, by sheer force of imagination.
At 4:59 p.m., the show closed with a Skandia Fiddlers encore. Keillor grabbed O'Brien for a jolly waltz among the mikes and cables, the crowd clapping along.
What next?
After two more live shows on the road, "PHC" goes on hiatus until October. But will Keillor keep up the radio grind much longer? He quit once, in 1987, moving with his second wife to Denmark. In 1989, they split, and he moved to New York to front a new radio series.
But by 1993 Keillor was contentedly back in St. Paul. And he now has no plans to unplug the revived "PHC" anytime soon.
"I want to keep doing it until my young daughter is old enough to really appreciate it," he confided. "And if I didn't do this, what else would I do? Probably nothing."
Misha Berson can be reached at 206-464-2383 or at mberson@seattletimes.com.