A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion is a live weekly radio variety show created and hosted by Garrison Keillor. The show runs two hours on public radio stations coast to coast on Saturday afternoon from 6 to 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and usually originates from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. The show has a long history, existing in a similar form as far back as 1974. The program was named after the Prairie Home Cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Each week Garrison leans over a microphone and murmures, “It has been a quite week in Lake Wobegon, my home town.” The radio show is filled with warmth and humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems. Mr. Keillor’s monologues include stories of people and places in imaginary Lake Wobegon and include Dorothy of the Chatterbox Café, Ralph of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, and a Norwegian couple, The Lundbergs. The monologues end with Garrison repeating, “Where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
In 2006 a movie version of Garrison Keillor’s radio show came to Youngstown. The movie story centers around the radio show ending as a new owner has bought the Fitzgerald Theater and is going to tear it down. Keillor plays the lead character, coincidentally called GK. Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep play the singing Johnson Sisters, while Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly play the slightly off-color singing cowboy duo, Dusty & Lefty. One of their songs was titled “Bad Jokes” with one verse going like this:
“I turned sixty the other day and everyone was there,
And I was dressed up in a suit sitting in my wheelchair,
When a beautiful young naked woman stood up in front of the group,
She offered me some super sex and I said, “I’ll take the soup.”