A Prairie Home Companion

KPBX 91.1, Saturday, 3pm-5pm
Repeats KPBX 91.1, Sunday, 6pm-8pm

Variety show live from St. Paul, featuring stories and
“News from Lake Wobegon,” skits, and musical guests.

This week's program:
July 12, 2008
This week on A Prairie Home Companion, a summertime mix of three shows from Ohio. Sam Bush and Buddy Emmons sit in with Rich Dworsky and The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, tenor Mark Thomsen sings "La donna e mobile," and Dusty and Lefty get stuck roping shopping carts at a strip mall opening. Plus, "the drifter" is back in Lake Wobegon. Join The Royal Academy of Radio Actors—Tim Russell, Sue Scott, Tom Keith and Fred Newman—for a whirlwind review of performances from the Buckeye State.

Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion

Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, MN, in 1942 as Gary Edward Keillor. In high school, he used the name Garrison to submit poetry to magazines. During that time, friends recall, he was a very quiet person. "The entertaining part has come out of the blue. That is not something he did when he was younger," says former classmate Bill Pederson.

Keillor began his radio career as a freshman at the University
of Minnesota, where he graduated as a journalism major in 1966. He wanted to write, but in 1969 he applied for a job as
a classical music announcer at Minnesota Public Radio to make ends meet. Keillor says he thought radio was "a fallback, something anybody could do and get paid for." Bill Kling, president of MPR, remembers Keillor was hired because "he had a good voice and he knew how to pronounce the names of
the classical composers. And he wasn't asking for any
specific salary."

When the New Yorker magazine began accepting Keillor's articles, he was able to earn the living he wanted strictly from writing. A year after giving up radio, the New Yorker assigned him to write about the Grand Ole Opry. That inspired him to put together his own show and the first A Prairie Home Companion was broadcast in 1974.

While the first broadcasts were heard on Minnesota Public Radio, the show quickly became a national phenomenon. During the first 13 years the show was aired, it received the George Foster Peabody award, the Edward R. Murrow award, and a medal from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

In 1980, Minnesota Public Radio began to distribute the show nationally. Since then it has had some changes of name and format but is essentially the same mixture of songs, sketches, poems, and guest musicians.

Keillor still writes most of the show, producing 40 pages of script in a few days each week. And the highlight is still
The News from Lake Wobegon, an extemporized 20-minute monologue based loosely on people and experiences from
his youth.

There are no plans to end the show in the near future. Keillor says APHC is still a work in progress. "I think it's got life left in it," he says. "I keep feeling that it's ready to turn a corner and develop in some new way. I don't have a clear vision of this yet, but I don't feel that I've done the show that I really want to do. I think I'm still kind of searching for it."

He adds that he wants to take his daughter Maia on tour to experience life on the road. "I can't do that until she's 11, so that gives the show four more years."