Eminentoes/Garrison Keillor's Faux Peas

...It's interesting to read Ellie's story after the one about the ferris wheel, where you can learn, in a somewhat different vein, to thank God for this good life...

...it's such abeautiful and loving sight it just makes you ache all over...

...Eloise and Carl were married for three years—an amount of time Carl found to be pushing the outer limits of what any man would want...

...Paul, Minnesota, a place they had probably never been to in their lives and might not even be able to find in an atlas without looking in the index...

...So Keillor and his wife are living in New York City...

...The only thing is, they couldn't go back to St...

...also, that life is good, friends...

...Keillor doesn't hold back from us the incident in which Dr...

...Lo and behold (they were informed on the most elegant stationery they had ever seen in their life), the Tollefsons were no less than Scottish nobility—even if trapped in the bodies of lower-middle class Norwegians living in Minnesota...

...Walter W. Ingersoll of St...

...So we shouldn't be surprised that Keillor is fearful that people might not like his new book as much as the old one.' Although it's hard to imagine, since he's included all his favorite monologues from the radio show "Prairie 'The new book is Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, Viking, $18.95...

...It's a quality—you can't quite put your finger on it—that even the people in St...

...Keillor probably wouldn't even have bothered to write about it unless it really stood out...

...But it happened: in chic cities on the East and West coasts people would be setting their dining tables —putting out the salad forks and shrimp forks and sugar tongs and folding the napkins into swan shapes—while listening to a radio show broadcast from St...

...Paul, where Keillor lived when he was writing these stories, don't have...

...For the time being, anyway...

...Things like that don't happen too often in Lake Wobegon...

...when they take a deep long draw on an icy cold Wendy's, he feels as refreshed as if he were holding that brew in his very own hands...

...Luke's Biomedical Laboratory got a speeding ticket...

...There's the one about the time he was a little boy (before he changed his name from Gary to Garrison) and learned to kill his first chicken...

...She was very understanding and she agreed that it was intolerable remaining in Denmark...

...you could go past her house and see her and her mother silhouetted in the window, dancing to the tune of "Blue Skirt Waltz...

...Like the Tollefsons...

...EMINENTOES GARRISON KEILLOR'S FAUX PEAS ou know how it is: people find out you're shy, and next thing you know they want to interview you, have you sponsor their products, and put you on talk shows...

...But things didn't work out so well in Denmark, even though the temperature wasn't all that different from Minnesota and he had lots more time to write short stories, now that he didn't have a radio show to prepare for...

...M aybe it's the harsh weather in Lake Wobegon that makes the inhabitants so resilient...

...That's probably why when a bunch of men in Armani suits came to Keillor's door and insisted that he broadcast his radio show nationally, write a book for Viking, and travel around the country performing in huge concert halls and signing autographs in book stores, he said okay, even though he suspected it would make him miserable, because he's really a very shy and private person who likes nothing better of an evening than to sit down with a big bowl of creamed corn or a generous helping of pot roast smothered in thick, brown gravy...

...That was fine, but she could happily talk up a storm, whereas he could only stammer a few things here and there, which is probably a difficult situation for a former monologist to be in, and sometimes after they left the party he would cry...

...There's one about a young woman named Corinne, who has to borrow money from her father, and it's really embarrassing...

...It's a good thing Ulla is a trained social worker...

...But then evening would fall, and Ulla would want to go to cocktail parties...

...Keillor has publicly admitted it: life is complicated and not for the timid...

...A humble man who got a lot of satisfaction hosting a down-home radio show in St...

...Why, they will say, food isn't just something you put in your stomach—that's what the stuff you get in restaurants is for—it's something that binds people together, infuses them with love, brings peace to their troubled lives...

...He began packing his bags, which led to a really big fight...

...Seems he didn't bring the blade down quite right, and the thing took off, headless, and sped through the town, with him and his father chasing madly after it...

...Then there's the one about the ferris wheel: up there, you could just smell the corn dogs and cotton candy and look down at all the little kids holding their fathers' hands...

...Keillor tried to distract himself by working on a screenplay for a film version of Lake Wobegon Days, and writing ads for International Paper Company about all the different ways that it's hard to be shy and why writing lots of letters (instead of making phone calls) can really help...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988...

...Because, the fact is, things almost always turn out pretty well there...

...I is funny that, no matter how fa- 1 mous a man gets, and how much other people say they like, really do like (and even without his asking) what he's done, he still feels some lingering doubts deep within his breast...

...just about everywhere you turned people were speaking Danish instead of English, and you couldn't even call a cucumber by its own name but had to say agurker instead...

...Keillor would have to have been born with a heart of stone not to care about these creations of his: when they dig into their peas and onions, he can taste the goodness...

...it makes men weak...

...Why, even those who have never been west of Saks Fifth Avenue know that Lake Wobegon is the kind of place where folks have real integrity, even if they tend to do a lot of petty and stupid things...

...She held up well...

...That's what happened to Garrison Keillor...

...By the time the divorce was through, Ellie was living in a stucco house collecting welfare...

...other people—especially people outside of Minnesota—could get so interested in what was happening in Lake Wobegon...

...You know this from reading "Life is Good," where Keillor tells us that life is good...

...And there are troubled lives in Lake Wobegon...

...People there get sick, too...

...It's a funny thing about love: when you're in it, everything feels so permanent...

...But then they have lunch together—meat loaf, whipped potatoes, string beans, bread, tapioca pudding—and know that everything's going to be all right...

...The town is full of characters like Darleen, Grace, Cindy, Kenny, Gene: solid people, with solid names to match...

...and, most important, that basically life is good...

...But you can't make time stand still, even if you'd like to...

...Even the neighbors out in their yards couldn't help hearing what was going on, especially when they turned off their lawn mowers and decided this was the time to do that precision weeding they'd been meaning to do...

...Harold and Marlys (and even their dog) got the worst flu they'd ever had in their lives: they just lay there, side by side, trying hard not to throw up, and losing track of time...

...Worse still, the time the town stared tragedy in the face when the Agnes B tipped over, sending twenty-four Lutheran ministers into the water...

...People there take foodmuch too seriously for that...

...The old one is Lake Wobegon Days (1985...

...Or the time Daryl realized he had mistakenly dumped the mincemeat filling down the garbage disposal and he had by Elizabeth Kristol to go to all lengths—and sneakily, too —to make a new batch before Marilyn found out...

...When Keillor left Margaret to go off to Copenhagen with his new bride, it probably felt as if he'd be living in Denmark the rest of his life...

...For instance, when he was working on Lake Wobegon Days, which accidentally ended up selling 3.25 million copies, he wrote a really sweet dedication to his girlfriend Margaret, forgetting that all the stories in the book were still about his ex-wife...

...He learned the hard way that was a risky thing to do, so when he put together Leaving Home, even though he had just married a woman named Ulla, he made sure to dedicate it to his parents...

...You'd never find a shrimp fork in Lake Wobegon...

...And Keillor knewthere was still a lot he had to learn about the ways of the world...

...Things are much cushier in the city...

...Paul because the newspapers there hadn't the tiniest shred of a notion of dignity, and thought that if a man is a best-selling author and radio and print personality they have the God-given right to run articles about him whenever they feel like it...

...It probably never entered his mind that it might not be safe to write an introduction called "A Letter from Copenhagen" that made it sound like he'd settled there for good...

...Keillor probably never dreamed that Elizabeth Kristol is a senior editor at Insight magazine...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 31 Home Companion...

...There's even one where things don't really turn out right at all, at least as far as Ellie's concerned...

...Life was really difficult there...

...They make you earn a lot of money, and force you to move to really big cities, like New York...

...That could have been a real disaster, if it weren't for the fact that it had been such a dry summer and the lake was only five feet deep...

...Paul, he liked nothing more than getting up before a small, cozy audience and doing a little verbal whittling—lazily carving out details of a fictitious small town by the name of Lake Wobegon...

...they're no exception...

...it's no paradise such as other, shallower, writers might write about...

...A little gullible —but what nice people aren't?—they fell lock, stock, and barrel for a scheme promising them that, for fifteen dollars, meticulous genealogical research would be undertaken to determine whether they might really, in fact, be descended from the distinguished royal clan of Campbells...