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Sunday, May 04, 2008
Wobegon Brings Its Wit West
By David Steinberg
Journal Staff Writer
Garrison Keillor figures he'll have a chance to really open up when he comes to Albuquerque this week.
One reason is that when he's home he suffers from a regional reticence.
“I come from reserved people, very polite people. When I'm with my own people in Minnesota I don't say much,” Keillor said in a phone interview from his other, less frequented home in New York City.
“We don't have freedom of speech in the Midwest. We are not allowed to express profound enthusiasm or profound displeasure. We are expected to hew to the median.”
Hence the opportunity for expression in the Land of Enchantment. “I would never go to New Mexico without reserving the right to speak,” he said.
Even so, Keillor expects to bring his trademark droll humor and stories for a Wednesday, May 7, performance with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra at Popejoy Hall.
He issued a caveat: Those living in the northern tier of Midwestern states have mixed feelings about the Southwest.
“So if people are expecting to come and hear me wax poetic about the beauties of the desert and the mountains, they best be warned about this. I'm not coming to show slides of my trip to Taos,” he said.
Keillor is the founder and host of the long-running weekly radio program “A Prairie Home Companion” and he is the author of popular novels set in the small, fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon. The most recent in the series was last year's “Pontoon.”
Keillor finds comforts in his life in New York City because in some respects it allows for a lifestyle he knew growing up in small-town Anoka, Minn.
“New York offers a kind of simple village life,” he said. “I grew up thinking I would get to enjoy (that life) when I was an adult. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul … you find yourself driving around in a car to find things.”
In the town of his youth, he recalled, you could walk down the street and run into people, or you'd stand on a corner and talk to people.
Main street had a row of shops — a drugstore, a shoe store, a jewelry store and a cafe. Inside the cafe you could talk to people and look out the front window and watch people pass by.
“This is a life you have come to find in New York that you can't find in most other cities anymore. We have automobile cities: When you're done in the cafe you get into a car and drive 10, 15 miles to a drugstore, and get back into a car and drive to a bookstore,” Keillor observed.
From his home in New York City, he walks out the door and down the street where he said he finds a drugstore, and a bit farther down the street there's a grocery store and short walking distances beyond cafes are everywhere.
“If I walk a mile downtown, I pass every store I would ever need,” Keillor said.
“I see people and we nod to each other. Sometimes we stop and speak.”
Another amenity for him is the arts. He is 65, and at that age performance — theater, music, opera, movies — is the one pleasure in life that only increases as he gets older.
By contrast, Keillor said, “The pleasure of food diminishes severely past a certain age. Your metabolism gets to the point where you really don't need more than two pieces of toast, a salad and a bowl of soup a day, and maybe three grapes, to get along. Any more is excess.”
Though not especially known for his vocals, Keillor said he might sing a song or two with the NMSO.
One number on the official program that he mentioned he'd sing is “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose,” which is based on the Robert Burns poem “A Red, Red Rose.”
Keillor said another tune he would sing, which is also on the program, is an Antonin Dvorak hymn to a Lake Wobegon farmyard.
Among other works the NMSO is scheduled to play, presumably without Keillor's basso profundo, are Franz Joseph Haydn's “Surprise” Symphony, the “Habanera” from Georges Bizet's opera “Carmen,” the overture to Gioachino Rossini's opera “William Tell” and MacDowell's “Woodland Sketches.”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 7
WHERE: Popejoy Hall, Center for the Arts, UNM campus
HOW MUCH: Tickets are in seven price categories from $25 to $100 and are available in advance at the NMSO box office, 4407 Menaul NE, online at www.nmso.org, by calling 881-8999 or at the door
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