The Magendanz Lights

Once again the Magendanzes have outdone themselves with the biggest display of Christmas lights in town – a little Las Vegas – with Santa, Tiny Tim, and Ebenezer Scrooge all standing around the manger; with six wise men, not three, and Frosty, and Rudolph, and the Grinch.

- Garrison Keillor, Now it is Christmas Again

Downtown St. Paul

Hey kid, let's do a show
I know a place where we can go
It's in hustlin', bustlin' downtown St. Paul
And the World Theater is the name of the hall
There's no sweeter little theater that you ever saw
It's on the corner of Exchange and Wabasha
So dust off the seats and scrape off the gum
Cause World Theater here we come!

-Garrison Keillor

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin pie is nothing but mediocrity. The best one you ever ate wasn't that much better than the worst. It's just an excuse to eat nutmeg.

-Garrison Keillor

Sneezes

Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like "onomatopoeia!" On the accented syllable I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married, 163-164.

Providence

…When I dropped the window off that falling ladder back in 1971, I didn’t know that my son had come around the corner of the house and was standing at the foot of the ladder watching me. The window hit the ground and burst, the ladder hit the ground and bounced, and his father landed face first in the crysanthemums; all three missed him by a few feet. Quite a spectacle for a little boy to see up close, and he laughed out loud and clapped his hands. I moved my arms to make sure they weren’t broken into little pieces, and I clapped, too. Hurray for God! So many fiction writers nowadays would have sent the window down on that boy’s head as if it were on a pulley and the rope were around his neck, but God let three heavy objects fall at his feet and not so much as scratch him. He laughed to see me and I laughed to see him. He was all right and I wasn’t so bad myself.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married

Television vs Radio

Television has no patience and little curiosity, and so the picture jumps constantly. A guitarist can sit and pick the most stunning simple version of "Wildwood Flower" and achieve a moment of transcendent grace but television is deaf, it can't sit still, it circles the guitarist, shoots his hands, his face, jumps in back of him, crouches, circles, until the viewer is completely separated from the performance. You don't need this if you want Leo Kottke, whose appeal is through his music. What you want television for is a celebrity guitarist who is more interesting for who he is than for what he sounds like. For example, if a Doberman pinscher played "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" on the guitar, you wouldn't be satisfied to listen to him on the radio and hear the announcer say, "That was Rex playing. Good job, Rex." You'd want to see it for yourself.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married