Garrison Keillor in real life is just as funny, deadpan, and "appropriate" as on radio. This past evening, I went to see Keillor's 90-min spiel about nothing and everything at Z-Hall. Fantastic evening.
Shooting the Breeze with the audience:
+ Experiencing a stroke around Labor Day
+ There was mention of heirloom tomatoes
+ Majoring in English Literature
+ Being in choir and singing like Pavarotti to Margaret, the tall beauty who read Albert Camus
+ Reciting "O Captain, My Captain" in a high school class
+ Having the stroke in a coop market, and driving to the emergency room, very carefully at 42.5 miles an hour
+ We imagined together what his 11 y.o. daughter would be like in her adolescence, after having broken free from the restraint of mid-western life: hidden away in her room with music blaring, and eyes, lips and nose pierced/punctured by glittering steel and metal like she had fallen "face first into the tackle box"
+ Wanting to write for the New Yorker about mid-west life
+ Being lucky that the stroke went into the "silent part of the brain" so that his stories, jokes, songs, and language are still intact
+ Being described by the attending at the emergency room as "awake, alert, appropriate, flat affect"
A few observations:
+ He talked non-stop; when he didn't talk, he sang; when he wasn't talking or singing, he was sipping water
+ He stood the entire time
+ The stage was set very starkly but artistically with one high-backed wooden chair, one mic on a mic stand, one small square table with a lilac-ish tablecloth topped by 1 single bottle of water and 1 small clear glass tumbler
HAT's self-conscious observations:
+ I was probably 1 out of 25 people under 35 sitting in the audience
+ I was the only person within 20 rows who attended alone
+ I laughed probably the loudest in my row
+ There was a bit of jealousy -- he can write, talk, sing, and capture an audience
+ I LOVED it. Why do I have to like it so much?!
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